Boxes that Go Bing – Uncle Josh Talks too Much

Uncle Josh on Doctor Who and the Fifteenth Doctor

Published by Uncle Josh on April 1, 2025

This is spoiler-laden. If you haven’t watched the end of the the 2025 season (volume 3 season 2) then click away now. A brief history of my relationship with Doctor Who: As a kid, people told me it was the kind of show I would like, but I never really got to see it, so …

Uncle Josh on Impatience and the Pixel 7

Published by Uncle Josh on October 23, 2022

My phone, a hardy Samsung Galaxy S7, has been through some rough times and got old. The battery life was measured in minutes, not hours. I could not find a case that didn’t lift the protective screen up enough to turn it into a touch-insensitive surface. The screen protector itself had taken several blows and …

Uncle Josh on Themes

Published by Uncle Josh on January 1, 2022

I have not done much writing in the past few years, and I have not submitted a story in at least three. But I have been writing, slowly, haphazardly, and sometimes way too cautiously. I didn’t make the 50K wordcount for NaNoWriMo last year, but I did get a first draft of a short story …

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 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 …

Uncle Josh Gets a New Toy

Published by Uncle Josh on December 4, 2018

Several years ago I wanted to try my hand at robotics. I picked up a multi meter, bread board, wires, buzzers, and a book on making robotics that was easy enough to understand but I failed miserably at understanding and manipulating an integrated circuit. Once again we have the robot-toy-bug in our house and the …