Oh, hey Philip, what are you doing here? Hey, well, I'm about to go into a meeting with some state legislators. Uh, well, so I got Stanley to cover those meetings for you, because I have another job for you to do. Okay. Uh, you might want to change your clothes. Hello. Hi. I'm Matt. Hey, I'm Philip. How old? I'm Daniel, my new hire. For now? I guess so. All right. Well, are you ready to get to work? Yes, sir. Well, let's go. All right. Man, these are some big cows. You want to stay between your back legs. Okay. And keep your fingers off these pipes. Okay. When she kicks her hawk right here, you can see it from that pipe. So if you want it to stay away from that, you really can hurt her. You know, she might touch it, but she's not going to hurt you. Okay. To melt these cows, this is our free dip. We're going to spray this on to clean the cow, and we'll dry it off and put the milk in and get it on. All right. So you spray it and knock her down, and then you move to the next cow. Okay. You want to try this one? Sure. When you don't have to touch the cow, I just spray it through this. Nothing else, you can't put paint on it. You'll get kicked, and she'll hit you right here. Okay. So you never put paint on her. Sorry, just go ahead and spray it. Yeah, spray it through this. Oh. You get sprout ones. There you go, now move to the next cow. It's on down the line. When I first heard that the government affairs worker was coming out to be my employee for the day, I was very skeptical. I'll have to admit, I'm giving him high scores on his dress. He looked the part, he's a little too clean. Did you use some paper towels? Now we're just going to dry her off. They're cleaner in the process of drying her off. You get about two towels.  You're going to get clean like that. Go ahead and reach in there, you're okay. Oh.  You might dance a little, you won't kick. Okay. That's pretty good. You're going to get a little dryer than that. I was hoping to learn a lot about what our dairy farmers do in Arkansas. And I've learned a lot about that.  Those are my expectations and I got them dirty. A couple of reasons to dry them off. One is to disinfect the udder. To have a clean location to pull the milk from. And two is to, for cow health, you want the udder dry. Okay. While the machine is on her. I'll just put this cow in the pocket. Activate the machine. And push it on the button. And get into this job. So how many gallons would you get? What do you usually get from each cow? About eight gallons per cow per day. How many cows do you all do in a day? About 180. That's why it's a day. You get half your milk in the morning and half in the afternoon. Get your left hand and dry her as you leave it. How's that? Yeah, you got that one pretty good. Nice. All right. Throw your dials in the bucket. And you push the button to release. Just catch it. So I just, I've got to turn around. I hold that cap. Hold that one. Oh.  Oh yeah. Let me get this changed. So I will say milk in the cow was more automated than I thought it would be.  Just making sure I put everything in the right places and don't get kicked by the cow or don't have anything drop on you. So once I understood that process, it seemed very straightforward. Oh yeah. She left you a present. She what? She left a present for you. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Now the trick is to dodge it.  Thing I found my new job guys. So I Stanley, I think this is the business for me. I have to increase her feed or we won't get milk twice a day. When's the first time y'all do it in the day? We started four in the morning. I changed my mind. I like my job now. Oh. And then there's that thing. This is a particular reason why y'all do it at those times of the day. It's actually about three hours of milk. So you want to get done in the afternoon at a reasonable time. So you have to start early enough to get finished. Do you take naps in between? At night. You know. So when y'all get all this milk, where does it go? We've got a refrigerated storage tank in the other room. As it's coming out of the cow, it's going into the small tank. And as it fills it automatically pumps through the storage tank. And the storage tank's refrigerated. And then do you have somebody come pick it up? Yes. The marketing comes after two to three days to pick the milk up. And haul it to the market. But see, it's coming out of the cow at her body temperature. Oh, okay. One and a half degrees for a cow. In two hours after it comes out of the cow, we'll have it down to 36 degrees. Okay. The milk comes through a stainless steel pipeline. And goes into the refrigerated tank. Here the tank's running right now. And it's already cooled the milk down to 38 degrees. Okay. Okay, you can go up and inspect the milk that you've pulled out. That's good to me. Maybe take a milk bath. Anybody ever fallen in? No, from time to time you do have to go in it and clean it. Is that what you have your sons for? Well, unfortunately I get to do that. Feed the stalls. Hence the barn gets its name, Free Stalls. The stalls don't have gates on them. The cows are free to come and go. They've got water on the outside and the center. They can have access to it all times. And they've got feed in front of them all the time. So the cows that you just milk came back down here in their living environment. After we got started with the milking process, I showed him what we expected and how to perform the task. After monitoring the task for the day, on a scale of one to ten, I'd have to give him about a six.  These guys know what they're doing. But me, on the other hand, I'm happy to go back to the Capitol and advocate for these guys, make sure they can stay in business and so that their children can keep doing it. It is important to keep our dairy farms here in Arkansas. Matt, thanks for having me out here. I was really excited to learn about what you all were doing. Everything you told me went in one ear and out the other. Anyway, sorry. Such a bad joke. You have to cut one.


Hello everyone I'm engineer from Intel my name is Liu Changpeng this is my colleague Liu Xiaodong so we have achieved spdkv host views target I'm going to present the slides before we do these things we want to tell you why do we want to create and we host views target if I listen to the morning session or if you have to use the container or VM for 9pfs maybe you will be more familiar actually in the beginning if want to use the user state we're using 9p we're also discussing about the disadvantages of 9p we have also talked about whatever FS so then we shift to views we have already do something and we have also done a simple compatibility with views target that's why I want to demonstrate that to you about what we have achieved before we start with this topic I want to tell you what is spdk actually is a set of libraries at the bottom is the QEMU and then these are the blocks and the storage layers and I want to highlight about what we are doing is up to two million process a call so we already reached and tens of millions calls levels on our web page we have described about what are the things we have done and we also have a comparison with the new technology this is the architecture of spdk from the bottom layer we have NME driven and also we have quick data copy engine and based on that we have storage services and we have block device drive larger volume can also be used for block management we also have decrypto we also have cat OCF cache and this is the open channel FTIL this is compression engine above that we have in storage protocols and NME target in the previous topic we have already talked about that in the V host we have V host dynamic V host host and today we're talking about V host to fuse target and this is a user state implementation and we also have block store which is a block management distributor this one is about unified as PDK V host user target we can look at this we support the host user block we support what house gossip and similarly we support the host VME so we can use VMV protocol to decipher and this is about the the host fuse target so so we can build on common V host to use a library if we don't know about the host actually what how is defining spec the host is a time limit basically there are two experiments kernel and in kernel and also we host use for the V host target the biggest advantage of the host is that eliminates MMI all access for submission with polling mechanism and the way to achieve that is to use the polling mechanism if we're sharing a file from guest to host or existing protocol is 9pfs there are also two ways to achieve that I have listed here the first one is this what about 9pfs if you use keymult process all processing will be within the queue meal so this is what how 9p and there is also V host 9p I didn't add user here because this is a kernel solution for the kernel solution there is also upstream minimal strong so this is the V host in 9p kernel now let's look at the back end for the front end it's the same we have 9p kernel we have 9p driver for the back end we use what house 9p to send request and then we use the standard port to call that to the standard system from front end to back end we're talking about what's I've used it's actually file system in user space it can assist of two parts one is fuse driver we FS what your file system is a common layer in Linux and the fuse driver is a kernel space and another one is Libre fuse the user just use Libre use and they will be able to achieve a customized fuse demo if we're going to use a fuse in virtualized environment how can we use that in the virtual environment what kind of changes do we need to make this is about what IO FS is the major drive of redhead I see in the community there are some Chinese colleagues that are already submitting patches this is the shared file system that lets virtual machine access a directory tree on the host actually it is designed to offer local file system semantics to replace 9p because 9p is still a network file system right now what IO FS we started and is being developed it's not finalized yes what how has been submitted to the community if you have any opinions you need to raise about your request for new features or new solutions or any other request that need to be added actually it includes four parts the first one is Linux so you need to add what IO transfer layer above Linux and the second one is Kimu and then a fuse and Kata container in 1.7 the modification has already been added in this back it has added a shared bar to be allowed to present a assistant memory so it will have the bypass package this page is about the projects we have mentioned they have already realized the open source and for tower capacity it is in the community data there is such a process so a few to evaluate actually it's already working and pass through why we call it pass through even if it has received the a few requests it didn't have any implementation it will just pass through to the existing file system We have the, we host a user library so that will mean that for the very host of the target we can go get the refused very host request and then we will hold the block past API and then there is a block driver to be put into the physical board so you can see that the part is kind of empty and that's part so far we do not think there is any proposal which can bypass the air and about the director access for cells it is where the bar memory ready to provide the 4G cache to provide the kernel space by parse cache so about the SPDK block s and block store for the SPDK block s and block store the current implementation is very simple it is mainly for large bells for small bells it is not good enough at this moment and for application it is interacts with trunks of data which is called a blob so one blob can be consistent consisting of different trunks and then the APPs can do not consume block just as the block SDB and then designed for faster media that is a more friendly optimization and what is more important is the following points the first is the synchroners there is no blocking, no queuing and no waiting it is fully parallel, no locks in IEPOs so this is about the blob store but for the blob APPs there will be locks then the underlying layer for logic volumes we have the snapshot and the thin provisioning functions so this is the layer of the blob store we can see that it is different kind of pages for NB, so here you are from BA0 to LBAN so the space is cluster and cluster 7, 8 is a larger one so this blob store you can regard it as an array of the pages and this is the blob store it is stored in pages in the reserved regions of the disk where we call it met data well quickly go through this because this all vary details so this is about the tables actually for views it is a different kind of request and for blob FS it is different kinds of APIs so you can correspond them together for example for lookup if you are going to lookup a file we have an iteration we can see that it is from the first file to the next file and then that got tribute the open release create, delete, read, write, rename, flash so these are the common APIs we have the asynchronous APIs provided for the new compared to FSD it is totally asynchronous but the synchronousness have some limitations means for the underlines you do not need to log but for the files itself you need to have the log and these are also some details which is about the views corresponding we can see that it has been embedded in WinRing so for the general a few requests it will also put in WinRing so this is about the open and close operations in views and ASPDK for example if on the top it is open then there will be two requests one is lookup, the other is open and for lookup we will have the sbfs to iterate to the file and then open it so that is kind of preparing resources for close it is just the opposite like open it has two one is release, the other is forget so that area is related to the sbapi so this is some of the implementation details with read and write as well as how you embed the data so we can see that on the bottom it is posix-read and then it has been converted into views-read and then to put it into the views in header and views-reading and then for the views in header and views-reading to embed the data into a layer and then for the view-host target we can see that if it is different there will be a new request then it will get the views-request and then it will call the file-read aid to process the request so we can see that this is the views-read and then data buffer and etc to summarize as I have already mentioned the Blob FS currently can only support limited file APIs and another big limitation is that we can only support append-write and another thing which is not available is DAX is very useful but if you enable DAX or disable DAX if you do some evaluation measurements the performance would be quite different so that is why for MAP we didn't quite realize and then friendly for write the second point the workload is very friendly and we also need to think about some using scenarios for example if to use it in containers whether it is to write is friendly or to read the read cache feature is very simple and the third one is the big files it is not friendly to small files and the next step plan we actually because for file system it is very complex there are some limited scenarios originally we wanted to use the ROX DB but now user scenarios has been changed so that means we are not limited to the ROX DB so that is why if we are going to expand to a few we have a lot of work to do including the existing models for block storm the underlying layer is totally asynchronous and there is no lock but if it is related to the file systems for example if you have different request to process or to control the different files at this time you need to add the lock if it is different kind of files you can put it into parallel benchmark for the Vota FS itself it was just realized recently so our next step plan is we will make it more mature either to wait until the community is mature until the block FS is mature then we will do some benchmark test then on the bottom there are some useful links because for Vota FS you can see that from the second link you can get it and for the SPDK related support it is on the number one and number three links so what you need to do is to prepare the KMU Linux and the benefit of this is that we only need to pay attention to the timing of the block FS for KMU kernel and views we just give it to Red Hat or community to do it so that means we don't need to pay too much to the upstream and next about our SPDK community currently we've got a different kind of we have the class lack which you can find us and then can track some tasks and then GitHub, Jenkins and the weekly calls so anyway it is an open source program you are welcome to join any questions? Hello, about DX I still have some confusion because based on our understanding for the NV address and block address needs to have a mapping and then the mapping will be saved to the page table and then you can access the NVD physical address but on this chart I don't see how does it function how do you do the mapping? I don't understand it fully actually when you look at what IO it has done for our space it doesn't mean that you need to have a physical device for how do you simulate MDM you can use memory so I can inform my guests this part of the memory is persistent and then it will be bypassed in the memory suppose I have 2G sorry I can't find it suppose I have 2G data here I know it if I have 2G data on the host because if we have requested DAE and then send it to the guest so we have a persistent memory with the 2G data and it's a device and then on the what tile it will be on the hosted memory actually when you have the address it will bypass that so it is bypassing this data cache if you map that if you have a 2G file space actually you can see it on the host okay I got it I have another question about PMDK I think it's also included in SPDK PMDK and SPDK are two different things but normally when we have summit it's together I think for the SPDK in the roadmap it's included our roadmap is saying that we're supporting PMDK we can call the API but they're still running their own community okay thank you I'm still asking about the DAX because you haven't set up about the mapping and I'm mapping as VPI can the block do this? yes we still do not support random write random write it's not a random write for the 2G bar memory because you need to map the FD in the chemo for your Vhost user Dima I understand block FS can only be accessed by Dimo instead of QM for Vhost solutions actually Qimo is registering the whole memory on the host because Qimo is an independent thread and Vhost and target is also a thread actually they can have memory sharing that's why we require huge TBFS that DAX is only the guest memory DAX is in the additional host and Qimo needs to change that it doesn't need to change it also needs to register on the host I don't remember that we have such a thing you can take this part of the memory Qimo is reserved by Qimo for 2G space it will be started together with Qimo that includes 2G memory that means for the Vhost you are going to operate this yes we can do that but the key is that what is the reason for you to use pretty cache so maybe you want to flush after writing the memory but our backend does not support random write even when we support the block FS can only do the flush when we support that because someone has written on the map ready so it is read-only cache we can only have read-only cache we can have anyone to update and write directly and update that to require if we can achieve that the DAX can be achieved if you are doing that will that be on the Vhost daemon because the memory belongs to Qimo I still want to ask about DAX I don't know in the DAX kernel if you use the FX what is the purpose for that? is it a must? it's optional and we have also a market that is unstable if we don't have these back anything we will have them in DIN card which is for persistent memory if you don't have that card when we have a map to the DRAM it can be lost actually it will go directly to pdcache if you are going to write back and flush actually the things in the memory will be flushed to the disk if you have 2G disk space which is corresponding to the LB space so which side is maintaining the table if you don't have that it will go to pdcache if you have DAX the backend block device is persistent that means it will go directly to the block but if it's a virtual it's another story it will just tell the DAX kernel that it is persistent it will bypass the guest so ultimately it will still result in that part of the memory but actually for the cached data or cached metadata maybe you are connecting that with MIT there's no memory block so the cache will lose are you doing that for performance? the purpose is to reduce the pdcache footprint for this solution it's also a host memory and for the guest it's also a host memory I don't have physical persistent device so the performance should be the same but when you have pdcache you can have some cache so you don't need to go to vertical normally if you don't have a DAX device if you're going to write SSD actually it's in pdcache when you have this device it's no longer necessary I think the reading performance will be worse because I can ask some memory but now we are accessing the disk when you are accessing it's not as faster as pdcache when you have a physical disk compared with DRAM of course the performance will be worse because I've seen some tests for Apache desktop and non-Dex access sometimes the performance will be worse yes, thank you


Well, well, well, it looks like Gabby Hannah is the latest YouTube influencer to get called out for photoshopping her pictures. And that's something that we definitely need to talk about. What is up, everybody? This is Chris from the Rewired Soul, where we talk about the problem, but focus on the solution. And if you're new to my channel, what I like to do is take a look at what's going on in the YouTube community, try to see what lessons we can learn from them. Because what good is seeing all this stuff happen if we're not trying to see what we can learn and apply it to our everyday lives. So if you're into that, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell. And while you're at it, make sure you're following me over on Instagram and Twitter at the Rewired Soul. All right. So yeah, let's talk about Gabby Hannah. I've been getting messages and DMs and stuff like that about this new Gabby Hannah situation. And let's talk about it because it has a lot to do with body positivity, self confidence, all sorts of stuff. All right. So anyways, I'm going to go back a few weeks ago. I think it was a few weeks ago, maybe a month ago, to H3H3 Productions talking about Instagram versus reality. I think that we're still in the momentum of that.  He also threw in Justin Bieber. That might have been the only male that he put on there. But anyways, that whole thing blew up. Trisha Payness got pretty upset with H3H3. And yeah, but I think we're still in that momentum because one of the things that H3H3 was trying to get across is like, this is not what you look like. All right. But I think he was coming from a good place, even though he had some harsh words comparing people to sea creatures and things like that. That is not you. The one on the left is on the beach. The one on the right just washed up on the beach. Sorry. Again, I'm not trying to shame anybody. I'm just saying, come on, people. Let's let's get a grip here. But what he was trying to say was like, listen, like, don't base, you know, your body image on what you're seeing over here, because this is fake. So anyways, Gabby Hanna promoting her new album recently.  And yeah, a lot of people started calling her out. A lot of people were like asking questions and everything. And she finally came out. She's like, yeah, okay, I edited the picture. I edited the picture that she went on to do like a side by side comparison. And she even put a list up on her story of everything that she did. So she had on their defocus background, spine straightened, right hips slightly pushed out for symmetry. Back muscles detailed, cropped, obviously bottom half painted to match tan to upper contrast up brightness down a five filter on VSCO. Here's the thing. I honestly don't know what 90% of that stuff means. When I put stuff up on Instagram, it's just like, I select a filter and boop, there we go. All right.   But also there are some men who watch as well, but she promotes body positivity. But then she's going and doing stuff like this and editing her photos. Now, somebody else tagged me in something, which I'll put up on the screen right here. And they were saying that Gabby Hanna was lying because on her list, she didn't talk about how she changed her arms as well. So right here, you can see, you can see that there's a difference between the arms. So the first thing I'll just mention, as far as that, like, again, like try to implement Hamlin's razor into your life. All right. Hamlin's razor is do not attribute to malice, which could easily be attributed to ignorance or stupidity. All right. Like, is it possible? Is it possible that Gabby Hanna just forgot to add the arm thing to her list of all the other things that she did? Is it possible? Maybe. I'm not going to go and accuse this woman of lying and if she might have just forgotten to add the arms onto the list. But anyways, this is nothing new. This is not new at all. This has been going on forever. It's been going on in magazines and everything. And like, when this came up again, I couldn't help but think about this clip. A lot of you young folks might not remember the stand up or you may have never seen it. But I remember this bit that Chris Rock did from his bigger and blacker standup special on. I think it was like HBO, like back in the 90s. Who's the biggest lies? Women are biggest lies. Biggest lie. Look at you. All of you. You're lying.   You got on heels. You ain't that tall. You got on makeup.  You got a weave. Your hair ain't that long. You got a Wonder Braun.  Like what he's talking about right there, like this is just something that people do. Like now you're seeing more men in the beauty guru industry and everything like that. Like this is a thing that's been going on. And now we're just seeing it in the digital age. All right. Like people have been wearing high heels and putting in extensions and wearing makeup. Like that is not the natural tone of your skin. All right. That is not where your eyelashes are like, you know what I'm saying? Like your eyelids don't magically look like pink and yellow and orange and all these other things. Like this is something people have been doing forever. And now that we're in the digital age, there are all sorts of tools to tweak and fix and, you know, do whatever. All right. Like this is not going to end. This is not going to stop. All right. Now I do love how there are some people out there who are like, oh, like body positivity and they don't edit anything. So I can understand why people are upset with Gabby Hanna for doing this when she promotes body positivity. And like she posts a lot about like going to the gym and working out and trying to eat right and all these other things. But she's still kind of editing her photos a bit. All right. But I don't think it's that huge of a deal. All right. I just really don't. Here's the thing, because since we're not going to be able to change the rest of the world, we're not going to, we're never going to stop. We're never going to stop influencers from using Facetune or Photoshop. We're never going to stop magazines from, you know, airbrushing models and everything like that. That is never going to stop. My goal is to help you understand perception versus reality. Okay. That's all I want to get through to your head because listen, I remember just in the darkest times of my depression or just even being in a funk and in a bad mood one day, right? It is so easy to look at Instagram or to look at Facebook and see people posting their perfect bodies or perfect lives. And we're constantly comparing our insights to their outsides. Just remember everything that you're seeing on social media is not necessarily real. Like there are plenty commentary channels out there who make fun of people who like rent a fancy car and then pose next to it. Like they bought the car when they did it. Do you know what I mean? Everybody is trying to make themselves look better on social media. This is something that happens. So you as the viewer, as the person scrolling through Instagram, all I ask of you is to just recognize it. Okay. Do not beat yourself up looking at that. People do not post their worst moments on social media. They're posting their best moments. Like I'll bring this up until the day I die when these types of conversations come up. I will never forget. I had a very good friend who I used to work with and every single day she would come in and just tell me about the terrible toxic relationship she was in with her boyfriend. It was just awful. She was leaving him every other week and just so, so, so bad.  We have the most beautiful relationship. I'm sitting there. I'm like, people are looking at this thinking that you have an amazing relationship. Meanwhile, they're single and you're miserable in this relationship. You know what I mean? So just check in with yourself when you're seeing these pictures that are showing all this stuff. Now the last thing I want to touch on for this video is I was sitting back and thinking. I was like, what would age three think about this? Or what do I even think about this? Like, why, why did I make my last video, you know, and talked about certain things and why is it different this time saying, oh, listen, cut Gabby Hannah some slack. But like, here's the thing. The problem that I have, the only problem I still have is promoting things like flat tummy tea, right? Like those unhealthy weight loss products. That is what I have an issue with. Promoting those unhealthy weight loss products and then saying, like, look, you can have a body like mine, even though it's edited or the person had plastic surgery or whatever it is. Like that is what I have an issue with. Like I, I feel that like, well, first off, those products are just clearly unhealthy, but it would be better if it was more well known. Like, you know, this person had work done. You see what I mean? Like that's the thing. People who have a lot of money, they're going to go and get cosmetic surgeries and everything like that. But I just think it's grimy when people promote these unhealthy products, especially, especially when so many people around the world are struggling with some type of eating disorder. That is what I think is an issue. All right. But as far as like face tuning and tweaking and Photoshop, do thing, baby girl, do yo thing. Look as glamorous as you want. All right. But as you're scrolling through stuff and looking at it, just realize what you're seeing is it's always reality. All right. But anyways, let me know your thoughts on this subject down in the comments below. Let's have a nice, calm, healthy discussion. All right. But anyways, that's all I got for this video. If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up. If you're new, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell because I make a ton of videos. And don't forget to follow me over on Instagram and Twitter at the Rewired Soul and a huge, huge thank you to everybody supporting the channel over on Patreon. You're all amazing. If you'd like to become a patron, support what I'm doing here and get some other perks and benefits, click the tap right there. All right. Thanks again so, so much for watching. I'll see you next time.


All right, so who am I? My name is Grant Blakeman. I'm a designer, developer, product guy. I live here in town, independent. And I've got a background. I started in branding. I've done a lot of different things. Eventually ended up, I work almost primarily in web applications and software design these days. And I want to talk to you guys a little bit about design. But before we get into that, I kind of want to talk about what this talk is not. I can say this because I'm in the company of developers and not designers. As much as I love what I do, as much as my income depends on choosing fonts and colors and worrying about pixels and things like that, I find a lot of those discussions really boring. They're at a very low level in comparison to what I think the potential of design really is. I think they're short-sighted and they just kind of miss the point. And a lot of that stems from how we define design. You see, it is on some level some of those things. There is color choice in fonts and worrying about line heights and all of that. But those things really should be outcomes. They should be responses to the problem or the task at hand. And yet we often end up talking about them as if they are the problems we're solving or the solutions. And they really just shouldn't be an end in and of itself.  I just want to give you some vision for what design thinking is and how you can be a little more aware of it and how that might benefit you in other things that you do. So I feel like design is about intention. It's really a succession of choices, a culmination of choices toward a desired outcome. To put it more simply, it's supposed to help us solve problems. And yes, there's a visual component depending on the type of design you're doing. But there's also a process component. There's a logic component. There's a bunch of different facets of design. And as designers, we try to train ourselves to work through these problems and find solutions that address these different components. And we often do it in a very second nature type way. And it looks like all we're doing is saying, oh, I think the color blue is really, really nice. And we should use that. But those choices really are bigger than that. And a really good design thinking takes advantage of some recognizable techniques and themes and processes. And really good designers often don't even call themselves designers. They may not even be aware that they're designers. And they certainly might not even be guys that wear black rimmed glasses and worry about typefaces.  I don't know. Those of you that are not from Colorado, you might not know that we kind of have an obsession with this beverage. My favorite pub is right down the street. It's a place called Mountain Sun. Exactly. And every February, they have this thing called Stout Month. And over the course of the month, they can sample 30 to 40 different stouts brewed by themselves and their friends. They just rotate taps throughout the month. It's really amazing. And they've got stouts. You'll taste a stout that has a mint taste to it or a stout that has a coconut in it. There's just all these amazing flavors that are niches within what is already a niche of beer itself. And one of the things as you do this, if you ever get one of their samplers and you go through this process, is you very quickly realize that what makes a good micro brewer, what makes a good beer really in general, is balance. It's just something where a little too much coconut or not nearly enough coffee might actually ruin the whole thing. And the order in which you add the ingredients as you're making it is really, really important. And these are decisions about balance. And they can affect not only just the entire beer, but they might even affect something as well as the way the flavors work in the aftertaste. And one of my dad's friends is a former engineer, turned designer, or I mean beer brewer, sorry. And he's as meticulous about brewing his beer as you might think an engineer would be. But when you get him to talk about the flavor and how he creates those flavors, he lights up. And he's no longer an engineer. He's now an artist. And he's taking these delicate balance of ingredients and combinations, he's experimenting. But he's always working within this very rigid process, which is how do you make beer? And he's creating something new and spectacular. But he's juggling all of these different pieces to do that. And any time any one little thing falls out of balance, he knows it can ruin an entire batch. And all of that works for nothing. So for me, as a designer, balance is one of my favorite tools. I tend to think of it actually as more of like an indicator than a thing you take action on. It's something, a lot of times you can look at a process you're designing and you can exactly see that something's out of whack or something's out of balance and compensate for it. But a lot of times you just have this kind of gut feeling.  And you have to back up. And you have to figure out where you went wrong along that way. And that's not something that, as designers, we hold the corner on. We've just worked really hard at recognizing it and getting good at working through that process. You're probably already using balance as an indicator in your teams, in your projects, in your life itself. And you know when something's off and it needs to be addressed. But the problem is when we ignore those indicators and we just power through to get something finished. Because balance is harder to correct the longer you wait. I was out in Moab, Utah a couple years ago at a place called Gemini Bridges, which is pretty popular if you've ever been to Moab. And I was watching some guys tightrope.  And they had ropes strung across between them. And they were roped in themselves for safety, but they were literally tightroping across the canyon, you know, a couple hundred feet above the canyon. And it was fascinating to watch. And they made it look really, really easy. But if you watched closely, what they were doing is they were constantly adjusting themselves. They were constantly making these tiny little course corrections. And without those, you know, when you would watch them as they're practicing, if they waited too long to make an adjustment, it would eventually compound itself and they would fall. And that's one of the things that is important about balance is, you know, when you're managing a product or build, or managing a project or building a product or even designing processes, you have to be constantly assessing the balance along the way. And if you don't, it'll just get out of whack way too fast. So let's switch gears and talk a little bit about style. That's another thing we talk a lot about with design. From an aesthetic sense, you know, there's all sorts of styles. There's grunge, there's postmodern, there's gothic. And one of my favorites is minimalism. And the thing with style is they all, all of these styles usually come from a guiding philosophy. And those philosophies are bigger than just the visual representation of that style. And the philosophies tend to be applicable outside of just how do you arrange things on a page or on a website. With minimalism, it's the idea of taking things and stripping them down and removing unnecessary clutter and streamlining a process. One of my favorite design gurus, Dieter Rams, calls it less is better. Obviously you can take it to an extreme, but one of my favorite tenets of minimalism is this thing called white space or negative space. And the idea is that as a designer, you allow things room to breathe and interact with each other. And the way I extrapolate that out of design and I apply it to my actual life is if you've ever thought of solving code problems in the shower or you have a great idea while you're mowing the lawn, those are your brain taking advantage of negative space. For me, I do a lot of trail running living here. So that's my negative space. That's what allows me to take a few precious moments, clear my head and respond to whatever kind of comes into that empty space. So I think that's really important. That's just a personal level thing. I think you guys should all figure out what your negative space is for you and make that important, actively protect it, put it into your calendar or your daily routine because there's just something magical about leaving yourself a buffer to process life with. Speaking of trail running, Boulder is really famous for its beautiful open space parks. It's one of the reasons that a lot of us live here but there's a bigger story behind it. Citizens themselves started purchasing land for preservation in the 1800s and the cities kind of continued that tradition. And if you actually start mapping it out, it's not perfect but what essentially happens is we've built a donut around our city and you can't develop in it. And this land is preserved and it effectively creates this constraint. It's artificial but it shapes the way Boulder is today. It's one of the reasons we have higher density housing downtown and we have things like cycling corridors and public transportation. We've used this artificial constraint and responded to it and it's really shaped the way the city is. And if we didn't have it, I really don't think we would be much more interesting than any of the other forgettable Denver suburbs. So constraint is another one of my favorite tools as a designer. I'd go surprise to say it's one of the most necessary aspects of good design. Any project, you guys know this, have natural constraints, time, budget, things like that. But one of the things you can actually do is use constraint and build in additional constraints because solutions as designers that we propose, they're all responses to constraint. And so we can use constraints to move projects forward. Without them, projects don't get finished, things can be unfocused, not executed well. And a lot of people wanna talk about like, oh designers, we wanna think outside the box, that old cliche. But what a designer who says that really means is they wanna trade one box of constraints for a different box with different constraints that they think might fit the project goals better. So you can never eliminate constraints, you can just find different ones to play with and respond to them differently. So those are just a few different things that I think about through my design process and how do I pull them all together? What makes it possible within a task or project to make good decisions or balance things well or take good advantage of negative space or implement constraints? A big part of it is simply observation. The key is we going into anything, life projects, teams, whatever, we don't know what we don't know. And the sooner we can kinda just face up to that, the better. And the best way to figure out what questions to ask and what new things to solve is to observe. And observing can come in a lot of different ways. There's testing, there's market research, there's all of those formal types of processes. But there's also just simply watching and actively trying not to have an agenda and trying to see what catches your eye. And when you do that, observation like that, I mean it can be as simple as walking a new way home or it could be talking less and listening better.  And you just sit on a bench and watch people and you'll start to notice patterns of behavior when you pay attention. You'll start to find things that you think are really interesting and things that confuse the hell out of you, because humans are just funny like that. But the main idea is you're actually now aware of what's going on around you. You've taken a moment to pull yourself back a little bit and not just push forward with your daily life. And design thinking really is all about awareness and that awareness comes from observation. So I've lived in Colorado for most of my life now and it's a beautiful state. I've seen rattlesnakes, I've seen bald eagles, I've seen bears, I've seen all of these elusive creatures but I've never actually seen a mountain lion. And sometimes when I'm out trail running at night, at dusk, I don't go directly at night. I get that feeling that something's watching you. I don't know if you guys have ever gotten that.  And I've had it a couple of times that was so powerful that I actually had to stop running and look around. And of course I've never seen anything but I know they're out there. And mountain lions, they never really attack humans. I mean they do but it's very, very rare.  And obviously that's incredibly overly dramatic but problems are a lot like that. And using this kind of awareness of design thinking, just being able to observe and be intentional about your choices and the decisions you make will give you a better framework to process issues. And it's not foolproof but it'll help you anticipate problems. It'll help you keep projects, teams, life itself moving in the right direction. So that's some of my thoughts on design thinking. And I try to take those things and actually apply them outside of just where I put pixels on a webpage or in print. But if you guys have any questions or other thoughts I'd love to hear them. But thanks for your time. The question is how do you convince yourself to do this when you're really busy?  But that's part of, for me the negative space thing is becoming much more intentional in the last few years I've done better at this to become much more intentional about finding space. And that can be as small as like 20 minutes in a day. But recognizing that when I'm pounding my head against the wall about a problem I'm often not making any progress. And I'm not allowing whatever that secondary process is that happens in our heads when we give ourselves a little time or space to happen. So building it into your schedule and just being a little more intentional about leaving space for that is huge. Anything else? Cool. We'll have a good lunch, guys.


Welcome to everyone. This is called The Vermonter's View of Cuba. It's an exhibition that's part of the Cafe Exchange project, and it's a parallel show to the four Cuban photographers, which is a show at the Darkroom Gallery in Essex. This particular one of Vermonter's Views of Cuba is here in the Pickering Room at the Fletcher Free Library. What we had started to do was invite four Cuban photographers to Vermont as part of an exchange, and when it became apparent that they weren't getting their visas, we created this parallel show of Vermonter's who've gone to Cuba and come back with images of Cuba. We have ten different folks here in this show, and you can come visit them at the library any day of the week. You can look on the library hours to see what day is to get here, and the show is open whenever the library is open, seven days a week, except for holidays. We're going to interview some of the photographers, and the other thing that we have, we have a book that is a catalog of the Cuban photographers, and it's phenomenal. It was put together by Dan Higgins, and then the other thing that we have that's for a donation is this poster that we created of the four Cuban works, and so we welcome you to see that as well as this show of the Vermonters. It's extraordinary because so many of us have been there and taken amazing photographs of the place, both urban as well as rural photos, and we're just trying to engage all of us in the story behind Cuba and create more relationships between us as people to people in this cultural exchange. Thank you. Thank you all for being here. This is great to see, and folks use this room all the time at the library for meetings, for school groups, and so that was part of the excitement of using this room at the library, was that it would be seen by lots of different people, not just those of us that come to our reception, so that was sort of exciting. Hi, I'm Barbara Chattera. I'm a librarian here at the Fletcher Free Library, and one of the things that I do here is I oversee our art exhibits, and this art exhibit that we have of Vermonters' views of Cuba came to us from Diane Geyer. She had sent us an email and inquiring if we wanted to have a show of the works of these photographers, and of course we would love to have them here, but when the exhibit was installed in the pickering room I was just completely bowled over. It is such an amazing exhibit and such a window into the world in Cuba, and that is just the kind of thing that we like to do here at the library. We like to be able to give people a kind of a window into other worlds and to also showcase the kind of work that Vermonters do in our own community, the artists in our own community. I'm delighted to think that there'll be all these meetings in this room, and people will be able to see it throughout the community. Yeah, I'm just delighted to have it here. Hi, I'm Louise Andrews, and I've traveled to Cuba twice, once in 2019 and once in 2020. Both trips were through the Cuban American Friendship Society, and I was an organizer for both of those trips. Memory is a little fuzzy as to which trip these pictures are from. It's either 2019 or 2020. This first photograph is a picture of just a neighborhood cafe. We arrived in Cuba, and this little place was just down the street from where we stayed. I thought it was so charming and tiny, and I loved all the flags, and we had a lovely little first dinner in Cuba there, so I have very warm memories of this particular place. The next picture is an artist. I was just walking down the street with some other people in our tour group, and just peeked into these openings that are often arched down all of these little streets in these very, very old buildings. He was just so receptive and friendly, and I loved his studio. I thought it was so fantastic the way the staircase comes up, and the photographs, I mean, the paintings that he's working on just spoke to me.  Finally, this other picture was on the right is the tour guide from both of our trips, and her name is Lorena, and we were at this area where they had all kinds of stalls with people's artwork in them, so it was pretty much a fabulous, wonderful place to go and look in all these little studios where people had their artwork, and they were standing in front of this mural, and the fellow on the left was dressed to the nines. I loved it, and he was speaking about the African influence on the art of Cuba, and that's Malcolm X, I think, on his t-shirt there, and it was a very moving and wonderful experience both times. I would go back any time. I wish our country would be a little more open to traveling back and forth from Cuba. I'm David Garten, I'm a photographer. I'd like to thank you for putting me on the spot and making me uncomfortable here, because I'm not happy doing public speaking at the same time. I'm really grateful for this opportunity, and it's really a tremendous opportunity to display these photos in public and have people have the opportunity to see them and appreciate them and learn from them, so here we go. To my left, your right, is a sequence of photos of my dear, dear friend, Sixta Justina Beiranes Leyes, who was born in 1915 and died in 2009 at the age of 93. This covers a 10-year span of her life from 1994 to 2004. Sixta was one of the most important people in my life. I met her on, I think it was my third or maybe my second trip to Cuba in 1994. She was very aggressive in confronting me and saying, You have to learn how to speak Spanish because English is not smooth. And I was totally in agreement with her, but a little taken aback by her severity. However, within a very short period of time, I came to regard her as an incredible resource, and within a short period after that, she was on a glide path to becoming one of the most important people in my life. I dearly loved her and I carry her here forever. This was her birthday on March 28, 1999, her 84th birthday, which was the day that the Baltimore Orioles had an exhibition game with the Havana Industriales baseball teams. And instead of going to the game, I went to seek this house to give her those sunflowers because that was what was important to me. And then this is her 89th birthday five years later. And for those of you Vermont residents and Vermonters watching this, I don't know whether you will recognize former Governor Madeline Cunan, who I brought to see Seeksta while Madeline was on a tour organized by the Flynn Theater. This is Sey Sardin playing percussion at Cajon de Hamel, which is an alley which presents a rumba performance every Sunday at noon. The audience is maybe 65 or 75 percent Cuban and 25 or 35 percent tourists. It's a very authentic and energetic performance. I've been attending it for many, many years. On this particular day, December 13, 2015, it was the first time I had ever seen Sey Sardin play percussion.  And I really loved his approach to percussion. He had tremendous energy, incredible tone, really forward-leaning sense of time and driving musicianship. And I thought he was fantastic. When I downloaded the photos of him later that day, since I didn't know him, I couldn't read whether this was a good photo or not. You often catch musicians making grimaces while they're performing, contorting their faces. And it's just hard to know if you don't know someone, whether that's flattering or not. But a few nights later, I was walking down the street around 1 a.m. And I came across Sey Sardin, approaching me from the other direction on the sidewalk with a couple of other Cuban young men. And when we got closer together, I said, oh, you're that guy who was playing in Cuyahoma Animal. I love you. I love the way you were playing. And we got into a fantastic conversation, at which point now I got an opportunity to know him a little bit better and realize that it is a good photo. Moving right along, this photo is of my dear friend Andrea. Andrea is about 15 years younger than Sexta would be if she were still alive. And she's certainly not a substitute for Sexta, but she's another dear, dear friend of mine, very special relationship. Andrea came into my life and I came into her life shortly after her son was murdered. And I returned to Cuba and learned that someone who I had photographed was no longer with us. So one of the other young men in the neighborhood asked me if I wanted to bring the photo to his mother. And I said, of course. So I went into the house where I was staying down a dark hallway where no one was home, to the closet where the photo was stored. And my heart was beating really fast. And I thought, this is not the dream I expected to wake up to. But in this moment, I have an opportunity and a responsibility. So I brought the photo to Andrea's house and I entered and she was standing in her living room rooted to the floor like a boulder in her grief. And I told her that I had known her son and that I really liked him and that I was so sorry. And we hugged and then we went into the next room and sat down. And I held her for about 15 minutes. And people were walking in and out of the room going like, who's that guy? But I could see that they felt, well, I don't know who he is, but he's helping Andrea. So he's cool. And from there forward, we became very close friends with, as you can probably appreciate, a very special relationship. And we love each other. And she is the matriarch of her family and everyone loves Andrea. On this day, we were hanging out in her living room. I was taking a pause resting, not preparing to take any photos when she asked me to take a picture of her with her saints. So if Andrea wanted me to do something, now I was no longer on a pause. We went back into this room and all I said to her was stand over there. And she just went into the zone, giving me this incredible gift of an image showing her and her splendor in her environment. And this is a photo of the Capitol Building taken from the roof of the Hotel Saratoga, which exploded about two years ago. So this vantage point currently does not exist, although one can assume that it will be recreated when the hotel is rebuilt. Incredible viewpoint. I'd photographed from there over a number of years. On this particular day, I was photographing in the abandoned, ruined theater Campo Amor, which is located one, two blocks behind the Capitol Building and behind the National Ballet Theater, where a friend of mine squatted for about 30 years. And I've spent countless hours photographing inside that environment, which is just utterly surrealistic with trees growing from the third floor exterior balconies whose two inch in diameter roots have found their way three stories down to the floor of the interior of the theater. So on this day, I was working there for an extended period of time and I got dehydrated. And I said to Ray, I gotta go get something to drink. So I walked out the door, one block this way, another block this way, made a right onto this road over here, walked over to the Hotel Saratoga, never once looking up when I got to the roof of the Saratoga and turned to take this photo, which I've taken numerous times previously. It was the first time that I saw the sky. Then I was just floored.  And parenthetically, I was in Cuba two weeks ago, and this street was completely deserted, no cars, no pedestrians, a reflection of the post pandemic ongoing economic crisis taking place in Cuba as we speak. So that's a short rundown of the photos that I've got in this exhibition here today. Thank you for listening. I'm Jordan Douglas, and I had the opportunity to go to Cuba in January of 2015 on a trip with Burlington College. Peter Curtis was leading that trip a course on street photography, and I was able to bring several of my students from Saint Michael's College and also from Champlain College. The course, which I was assistant teaching, was about digital photography for the main, for mainly for the students, but I brought a whole bunch of black and white film, the thing that I like to do. I'm an analog photographer mainly, and so I, whenever I could, kind of made time to wander around and find photographs and explore the city and capture what I could. For the most part, what I did was I kind of went away from what I felt was touristy, the obvious things, the attractions, and moved a little more toward the inner city and the parts of Cuba that seemed really expressively in flux. The old history deteriorating and was really interested in how the people were kind of fitting into that, their family lives and the way the city continued to function despite all the erosion and deterioration of the infrastructure. So as I slowly kind of moved through the city in the heat of the tropical sun, I really tried to investigate what made Cuba, what made Havana distinct. As I meandered, I learned to move more slowly and that attracted less attention. It just kind of saunter and sits still for a while, and I was able to observe a little more peacefully without people approaching me and asking questions. This church, which is the Iglesia del Carmen, has a very tall statue, which you can see from most parts of the city. It's always kind of looming somewhere in the distance, and quite a beautiful little monument to some of the history there, and you can see the clouds. I was shooting on black and white film and this process of printing, which affects the color, is called lith printing, L-I-T-H. It's an alternative darkroom technique that moves the black and white toward a warmer tone. These aren't sepia toned. That effect happens in the printing. It also explodes the grain a little bit so the images can get really grainy, and I think that effect works really nicely for this kind of urban and antiquated imagery. This is an example of a little courtyard inside of an apartment complex. Most of the apartment buildings have these little inner sanctums where you can do your washing and hang laundry and probably hang out, have a cigarette or whatever. Just a peaceful little moment. One of the things I'm always interested in photography is how you can see the signs of evolution and change. Like I said earlier, what remains of the past and how that is affecting the present. The last picture over here was one where I finally got a little more creative. As I was walking through the city and photographing over two weeks, I kept asking myself, what am I actually doing here? Sure, there's these beautiful moments all around me. Interesting things to photograph, but what's going to make it special? What about this city? What about this time can I try to capture? It was I think one of the last nights that I was there and the twilight was happening, the light was fading, and I had 3200 speed film, very high speed film, so I loaded my camera with a 3200 speed film and I got alongside this wall which surrounds Havana called the Malicon. This is the wall that symbolically separates the Cubans from America, 90 miles to the north are the Florida Keys, and so this wall not only contains the waves which crash over that retaining wall and splash way into the street, but also it contains Cubans. They're not, they can't go to America, at least at that time, and hopefully that will change. And of course all these antique cars from the 40s and 50s are a big part of the city, and so I took a few of these photographs with a slower speed as the light was shifting, and I feel like I finally got to something that seemed a little more unique and expressive, and so that that expressed green it has to do with the high speed film, and of course the lights and the old car, it starts to feel like it's a little bit out of time. What you can't really see here is the height of that wall, it's actually probably about chest high, and in the evening young Cubanos come and they hang out there, it's like a party scene for a lot of families, they live in close quarters with several generations in a small apartment, and so for young people their opportunity to go out and hang out together and dance and party a little bit is often here along the Malicone, so it's a very colorful place. Here it seems a little quiet, it was about to rain, but also again a very signature part of the city. So I haven't been back since 2015, but I was hoping that the changes that Obama had announced would take root, but obviously that hasn't happened. Cuba is still very isolated from Americans, but I'd like to go back again. Hi there, my name is Jamie Hansen, I live in Montpelier, Vermont. There's six pieces here that I took in 2019. I did a solo trip there, spent three weeks traveling and mostly spent my time in Havana, so a lot of these photographs here I believe are in Havana. I was surprised that I was going to be so taken by the beauty. I wasn't planning on doing much photography on this trip, but I was just blown away and couldn't resist and just feel so grateful to have witnessed all that I witnessed and I wanted to bring back small snippets of this of the magic that I got to experience there. Most all of the photographs, actually all the photographs were taken with my phone and this was nice because I could take the photos without anyone really noticing, so I was able to quietly capture what was just happening in front of me. So it was mostly just catching the essence, the light, the movement, the energy of what was happening around me and I was definitely drawn to the people. I pretty much always had people in the photographs and there's one photograph here that this young couple, they sold flowers and there was something about them that I just felt drawn to asking if I could take their photo and they hopped up on this ledge and the whole thing took about 10 seconds and this was actually the only photograph that I asked someone to pose. You'll notice that all the other photographs are just me catching people doing their daily routine. My name is Barbara Young. I have traveled in many many places around the world photographing and one of the most interesting places I think that I've ever had a chance to visit has been Cuba and the images that I have here on display tonight reflect part of my vision of what I saw when I was lucky enough to spend a few weeks there. This image that's closest to me right now is in the Teatro Nacional and it is a supremely gorgeous building which just is to me so elegant in terms of bringing forth the contrast that exists in Havana today between the very very beautiful and the very very ancient and dilapidated and these two people were sitting admiring the view there was no show on at the time there was not a ballet or a concert but I just sort of saw them looking up and tried to capture their awe of the beauty that was around them and of course when you travel outside of Havana into the tobacco region you see a completely different view of the world and this is a little small humble cottage of a tobacco farmer and what I liked about this image was the was the clothes on the line and the hat on the chair and the hut in the back where the tobacco is dried it just kind of represented the old days in Cuba and the last image that I have is a Fidel in an old abandoned building which contains a beautiful rooftop restaurant it's a little south of the central area in Havana and it just again it's the contrast between the elegance and the decay and you see it over and over again and to me it was fascinating to see how warm and loving the Cubans were and to photograph there was just an awesome privilege so I wanted to remind everyone that these two shows the one at the darkroom gallery in Essex is open for the rest of the month on Fridays and Saturdays and the one at the Pickering Room in the Fletcher Free Library in Burlington is open the hours of the library during the week and also till the end of the month till the beginning of July so July one in one case and July six in the other case so please visit the shows on your own and if you're interested in one of the catalogs you can still order one by contacting me and they're $20 and it's a collection of the photographs from the Cuban photographers and it's absolutely spectacular thank you all for your interest in Cuba and we hope to continue our friendship exchange with the people of Cuba thank you


Hi everyone, Joe for jaspyscasebrakes.com with a Broncos Ravens Vikings number block randomizer for picker team 14. That's how it works right there. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you numbers. Let's roll it, randomize it. Six the hard way, three and three, five, six. After six times we've got Hans, Hans down to George. And then hard six for the numbers, zero down to eight. So zero gets any and all redemptions for those three teams down there, Hans. As you know, there are those blockchain redemptions, that's a possibility, including one of ones as it says in the description. Scott you'll get a live one of ones for those three teams, Chad with six, George with three, Hans with two and five, Tyler with nine, Ed with seven, Phillip with four, George with eight. All right, so let's order those by number. And in a separate video will be the break itself. We'll see you for that jaspyscasebrakes.com.


Hey folks, it's 2024 and this is the second take because I just screwed up the opening by forgetting to unmute the microphone It's on the checklist and I missed it again. Anyway, I was talking about 2024 being the year of Democratic Society if we can keep it and I'm worried about that and I want to talk about that on the year going forward, but right now it's T Tuesday and Let's Make it happen here. Oh Okay the goals for this time was The single-loop interface running and the Breitenberg car running the I did pretty well with the single-loop interface talk about it the Breitenberg car is It's funny the hard part of the Breitenberg car seems to be the wheels And the second part is the light sensor, but step-by-step. I'll talk about it and then we'll go from there Um, okay the serial loop hardware the serial it's off where that's what I want to talk about and then the simulator This is the big picture the original first the t2 matrix stuff that we were doing for the Artificial life digital replicator all that stuff was completely internal to the t2 matrix The idea here is to have some kind of connection So that a chunk of matrix no longer necessarily you're even intended to be Indefinitely scalable in other words, I mean the matrix a finite chunk of the matrix. It's always been finite, of course Is going to connect to something out in the world and have sensors and motor actions and so forth. That's the goal The connection went through a couple of things and this is just straight engineering tasks given the t2 particular given their slowness This is not meant to be a biological model This is not meant to be an artificial life model none of that This is just straight engineering given how much bandwidth we have and how much time we need How much time we have and how much bandwidth we need To this idea of making a loop that here this laptop is the simulated world Goes through a usb to serial port and when it wants to send a packet to say this one It sends it to the first one that has to recognize that it's supposed to forward it Which ends to the second one it would send it to the third one which has to recognize it's for it And it does whatever it is and then the response comes back around the loop. That's the goal We had a terrible little prototype A couple of them that I hand put together Here's what we have now Sent a board off. So that's it. So here they are these are The first generation serial tabs and the idea is Instead of you know, I'm trying to figure out these are male and female Connectors and so we can just stick them together in the correct direction Assuming I can get the correct There it is And then they they click together and you know the idea is I can just kind of spin them While I'm connecting them so it'll make kind of a twisted pair And they disconnect and so forth.  That's what this thing is for But we also need to connect to the f tdi cable the usb thing that goes off to the laptop And uh in order to do that I figured well, you know, I'll just use a male to male connector here a gender changer So that I can plug one of these into that thing and then that'll look like an extra node on the loop and everything will be fine And so I hooked that up from a usb cable to the key master to another tile and then back to the f tdi cable and uh, you know, so here was a picture of it, you know, here's the there you can see the gender changer over there And then it comes out and it goes into one of these and then from one it goes to the other one The other one it goes on back like that beautiful and I hooked it all up And you know, so the this part is the part that's close to the world, right? Because that's going off to the usb connection and these parts here these tiles here are like a brain stem That's where the information from the spine hits The brain the matrix the cortex. This is going to be a lot simpler than that Um, there's going to be like a whole lot more tiles around it So only certain tiles will be connected to the spine and and the rest of the matrix that's involved We'll have to figure out how to route stuff to and from that. So that's the picture And and and we'll see how it's coming the the first attempt that I did It didn't work and uh, why didn't it work because When you use a gender changer, you're actually changing something important, which is Each of these cables has to take the transmit signal and turn it over And so that it plugs into the receive signal of the downstream thing and then it's Transmit or its tx goes into rx of the next one and when you put in a gender changer You don't do that. It ends up being tx going to tx rx going to rx. It doesn't work So I took one of them and you know, so the black wires are ground the red wires are the data I cut them I soldered them I heat shrunk them and that's what this actually is here. You can see there's the heat shrink I also use sharpies to color in the board just to make it clear that this is a crossover cable And then and then it worked So uh, uh, that was pretty cool Uh, I wanted to show you I've got it running right here. I wanted to show you the demo, but my overhead camera is Currently screwing up. I've got to deal with that Um, so I just took that picture instead, but uh, we can look at it here. So, uh In the top window, that's the uh talking directly to the workstation that we're at The one in the middle is talking to the key master by ssh One of the bottom is talking together. We can start t2 sir loop runner And this is all just debug stuff. It's you know, so they're just sending little messages to test what's going on We could start whoops. We can start the next guy And he's doing the same thing now when we start the world the one that's doing the simulation That's kind of in charge of everything. That's the host in this case again Because this is not meant to be indefinitely scalable. This is just meant to get the job done So we'll start this up and it will sort of take over and start doing things And that's the key right there loop length is two So it enumerated the loop by sending a special packet around that Get each of the The tiles that forwards it decrements a counter and then come back and you could tell from how many times it was Decremented how big the loop is and you know, uh, and again, this is all just silly debug stuff But you know one thing that is quite interesting is, you know, the last two characters of each of these packets cube omm kjf all that stuff those in fact is are A checksum two bytes that summarize the rest of the packet and they have to be consistent Based on a discussion on the discord with tim tiggs who was saying, you know, if you're going to feed this data through all of these Uh tiles, you know, how do you know it won't get corrupted and I said, you know, I'll put in a checksum I wasn't really thinking that it was going to be a problem But it turns out it really is why not actually because of like cosmic rays Although that could certainly happen. But what does happen for sure Is you know a tile in the loop might reboot or might be rebooted or whatever And as it turns out the serial port on the t2 tiles when the linux kernel is booting it gets used for debug messages And there's really, you know, nothing you can do to control that without getting extremely low level And if you do get low level then you you lose information that you may well need But the messages that the kernel have they have a 1 in 65 thousand chance of getting the right checksum So they don't and they all get rejected by the down the downstream guy He just tosses them all out and then whenever the one I mean the loop doesn't work while the thing is is in the middle But once it comes back up and the the t2 ser loop starts running, then it just picks right up again So that was pretty nice. Uh, uh, okay, so that's that And that's the serial loop software Well, so it first didn't work because we need to have to have to have the crossover cable But what was actually true in the demo that we just looked at I didn't take the time to show it to you exactly The packets run backwards, you know, like there it's you really can't see it But one of them is labeled One side of the thing is labeled loop out meaning the data is supposed to come out there The other side is labeled loop in and the data is going the other way. It's like I can't believe how I can screw up these things so reliably. I mean, you know Sergey has put in a pull request because I managed to screw up the inverse Symmetries in the MFMS simulator and I haven't dealt with it because I haven't gotten back to ulam yet But I will once we get this stuff set up and it's time to actually start running the signals through the matrix I'll have to go fix that, you know Terrible, uh, okay So what did I do about the fact the signals while I'm running it backward? I did another order to ash park the Printed circuit board manufacturer. I didn't use rush service on them. So they haven't come back yet They might actually ship today. We'll see what happens So that's the story on the hardware and the software for the spine in the fact now on the simulator The goal was to use this thing Mujoko I don't remember joint coordinates or something motion Whatever it is It was the newer more advanced thing and I completely failed and it's just sort of a reflection on what Programming design programming seems to be these days that the reason I failed is because there was a package called Mujoko underscore pi of a python package that was Previously used a lot. It had a lot of documentation Uh, it had a lot of tutorials easy to get going But now the the authors of the the creators of Mujoko came out with their own package Which is much lower level and there's very little Friendly documentation for it and I tried and tried to figure out how to do things in the new Mujoko way And I couldn't I even tried one of the large language model AI things and said stuff like you know How do you you know connect to the display in Mujoko without using Mujoko pi? As part of the prompt and it would give me a bad answer would say okay Here's how to do it without using Mujoko pi step one import Mujoko pi Kind of thing. Anyway, I finally gave up And so I looked around and I found you know, this our ludobots on reddit subreddit, uh for doing Little robots little 3d robots in a world and I didn't even I started working through it It's wonderful tiny little steps And I didn't even realize at first that it was created by josh bongard. Who's an artificial life guy? He's a buddy And this thing is great. So I just went through it, you know installation You know, here's an example of how finely down he takes it to he reminds us in each step to start a new branch So that you don't lose our old stuff and go check it out Very very detailed very nice Simulation one link two links joint sensors motors. I did it all the way up to the refactoring step that he's got to clean it up It's great. Uh, now I'm branching off because Um, I'm not going to use neurons and senses like he's doing since the point is to connect to the t2 matrix Uh, but it got me this far and you know, so that's the new plan To use pie bullet. So here's a little bit of what that's looking like so far This is one of the evolutionary robots The the simple beginning is three cubes that are that are connected together by joints And I started looking for wheels, you know, instead of just cubes. I wanted cylinders I found wheels I mean, there's basically this whole examples directory that I hadn't looked at but has like a ton of stuff in it Including a really complicated little car That I spent a lot of time trying to get it to drive like on the upper right here This thing is like the wheels are spinning 360 degrees. That's pretty tricky. Yeah But that's where we're at now and There's no sensors yet and there's, you know, these things are way more complicated than the, uh Um The Breitenberg vehicles are supposed to be now. I'm not a hundred percent sure it has to be Breitenberg vehicles But we'll see so overall, uh, we're supposed to do deploy the interface. Hello t2 matrix I'm saying enumerating a loop is hello t2 matrix. So we did okay The next goal is to actually come up with a Breitenberg vehicle Breitenberg car controlled by the t2 matrix plane. That's it That's the next goal and you know have lots of fun and so that's it and I've run a little bit long but Happy new year, uh, and thanks so much for stopping in whenever you came to take a look