Uncle Josh – Page 7 – Uncle Josh Talks too Much

Uncle Josh Misses January

Published by Uncle Josh on February 3, 2020

How did that happen? How did a month just go by? I have been reading. I have been writing most weekday mornings. As far as blog posts go, January was sucked up trying to read, understand, and process I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter. I keep reading it and re-reading it and the commentary …

Uncle Josh Reads Isaiah

Published by Uncle Josh on December 8, 2019

I read a difficult passage in church today, the Old Testament lesson from Isaiah 11:1-10. The first struggle I had are the words “Jesse” and “shoot” and “shall”, of where there are a lot in this passage. I was in speech therapy as a child for these confounding “s” and “sh” sounds, and of course …

Uncle Josh Sets Up the Creche

Published by Uncle Josh on December 1, 2019

Today in the first day of Advent. We don’t have many traditions for house decorations. We don’t do a tree but we feel the house is empty without it. Our lives and our living room do not support a tree, even a fake one. I hope one year to get the front room together to …

Uncle Josh On Finishing NaNoWriMo 2019

Published by Uncle Josh on November 30, 2019

My goal for this effort was to actually write the stuff I didn’t write last year. The conceit of the project is The Magician’s Journey. We know the Hero’s Journey or some “best-seller-in-a-box” checklist version of it. It is tied to Jungian archetypes (probably very loosely) and I thought about another archetype of the Magician. …

Uncle Josh Scrapes His Knuckles on ML, Pt. 5

Published by Uncle Josh on September 15, 2019

When last I left this project I had a runner going in circles, which is not what I want. It seemed that no matter how random the synapses or weights, the final result of the thinker’s thinking was always a number pretty damn close to a number it already produced. I dusted off a little …

Uncle Josh Scrapes His Knuckles on ML, Pt. 4

Published by Uncle Josh on August 28, 2019

I did some simple work with JSON getting the thinker saved and I should be able to reconstitute them at will. I will confirm this is working when I have something worth saving. I have a Python object that can read the five inputs from the map, run them through the matrices, and spit out …

Uncle Josh Revisits His Role-Playing Game

Published by Uncle Josh on August 26, 2019

On April 1 2017 I published a very simple rule set for a role-playing game called “Scatological Utterance.” The original post was lost1 but is archived on my old LiveJournal2. I did not cover the topic of characters leveling up, as that seemed inimical to the idea of the game itself. Then today I was …

Uncle Josh Scrapes His Knuckles on ML, Pt. 3

Published by Uncle Josh on August 17, 2019

So I need to figure out how I’m going to make a neural network, and while I get the examples all over the web, I struggle with the implementation, which probably means I really don’t get them, but I’m happy to blame my lack of understanding of numpy. I tried to build a simple model, …

Uncle Josh Cracks His Knuckles on ML, Pt. 2

Published by Uncle Josh on August 10, 2019

There is an often-misapplied quote from Donald Knuth about premature optimization being the root of all evil. The quote originally meant that developers were often looking at optimization in the wrong places in their code at the wrong point in the development process. I really thought that my ray-segment code was clunky and needed to …

Uncle Josh Cracks His Knuckles on ML, Pt. 1

Published by Uncle Josh on August 5, 2019

I’ve had an on-off relationship with Machine Learning and Neural Nets. They fascinate me but they also look incredibly complicated and I’m busy and scatterbrained and can’t remember most of the calculus and linear algebra I learned so I went ahead and got started on a ML project that is a direct ripoff of Jabril’s …