Hiyo!
How are you doing? Hope that you are having a great Monday!
Life updates:
I picked up some Okra chips from Trader Joe’s two weeks ago and felt like making some myself following this recipe. If you feel like trying it too, here are my tips for you guys.
The Expaorimental Kitchen’s guide: How NOT to make okra chips
Don’t turn on the air ventilator when you cook in a tiny Brooklyn apartment. For a more dramatic effect, close your windows.
To save some time (like who has 3 hours for this thing anyway?), slice your Okra thinner than what the recipe calls for but retain the same baking time and temperature.
When the fire alarm went off, be prepared to jump on a chair and shut it down with a broom.
Some of the Okra chips were edible but no photos for your delicate eyes’ sake.
Fun stuff:
OpenAI trains agents to play hide and seek with reinforcement learning. It is cool to see how emergences of different strategies (using a block to hide from seekers, using the stair to climb over a wall, dividing work within a team). However, before it gets to this point, you have to train agents multiple rounds. On the other hand, these strategies are obvious to a human.
I wonder how fun it would be to train agents to play Overcooked as a team of all agents and as a team with human players. If anyone wants to work on this as a pet project, let me know!
My favorite podcast episode this week is Technopolis’ interview with the creator of Wakanda. After Black Panther came out, urbanists raved about how “right” the city Wakanda feels. (See the Wakanda Reader for a compiled list.) In this episode, Hannah Beachler, Black Panther’s production designer, talks about designing Wakanda. Putting people at the center instead of technology, Beachler shows a city that evolves without discarding its historical root. Unlike other cities in futuristic movies with gleaming steel tall buildings, Wakanda’s buildings are inspired by their traditional buildings.
Wakanda even has buses with bus drivers! Why do they still have bus drivers? Surely, a city with hyperloop rapid transit could invent self-driving technology. To this Beachler response is “You don’t [need a bus driver] but I think we do. There is something about bust drivers that is also a part of African American history. It’s the part of who we are”. After all, “innovation and technology have to be about people,” for people in Wakanda, "They understand that they don’t need technology to survive. They don’t need to do sth faster or quicker.”
That’s it for this week. Hope you enjoy it. If you have feedback on how this newsletter can be more helpful to you, let me know. :-D