Now
4 may 2024,
Learning chinese
I’m building a Rails dictionary-based learning app to study the Chinese language because I like the way it works, only for my use for now, locally. The dictionary part is mostly finished, it is used to access the knowledge tree of the language. For the grammatical part, I’m still taking time to learn all the twists and turns of the grammar to be able to compact it. It’s in Vietnamese though. I’d like to publish it online for free and will open-source it someday.
I’m translating the Tao Te Ching in Vietnamese as I find the vietnamese translations that I’ve read pretty bad. Either they lack philosophical insight or the understanding of the chinese language is not up to par. It’s a good exercise to learn the chinese language and I’m adding it to the practice section of the app.
Plants nursery
We are in the process of closing down our plants nursery/shop. It was fun. I’ve come to appreciate our friends, the trees (木) more. We’ve had some plans to move to a place near a lake and a small forest (林), but they fell through. So now, we’re staying in the same city for at least 6 more months. We are moving our remaining plants to our new small flat. It’s a noisy area, but it has a West-directed view, which is perfect for watching sunset every day. Our cat will still be able to use his indoor litter box and his two cardboard properties and our dog will still have to bear the hostility of city dwellers.
Making a game
I have to make a temporary halt to the process of composing a piano concerto and a symphony. Instead, with Jane and Pink Dawn, we’ve decided to make a RPG game in 2D with Godot to earn a living income, and mostly because it’s fun, and doing things together is even more fun. And, a game needs music too after all.
The name of the game will be - Wisdom of the Trees - (智慧の林 in Japanese).
And we are the - c本y crew - (pronounced K crew).
The word “cây” means “tree” or “木” in Chinese and pronounced like “K” in Vietnamese, while “本” means “root” and looks like “”.
Don’t know exactly how yet, but we plan to make a Kickstarter campaign to gather the funds beginning of 2025 to be able to do the work sustainably. We are building all the plans and stuff with Trello. I had a lot of fun coding with Gdscript, playing with Godot and implementing game design.
We need to upgrade a few PCs and buy some tablets for drawing, kind of expensive after all. Guess, we’ll upgrade everything progressively and just powerful enough so we can run StableDiffusion.
Artificial Intelligence right now is kind of cool: it helps us code, draw, make voice-overs, and everything faster. Knowledge is cheap nowadays, and AI is an extension of mankind. Simply put, it’s just an optimisation algorithm using gradient descent to minimize errors, applied on a gigantic base of inputs, with enormous computing power. Funnily, it is something quite efficient, that which knows all the stuff yet so clueless about the thing behind the word, all the intricacies of life. Like man, as he is right now after all. Who is more intelligent than whom? That might be a silly question. Rather, shouldn’t one ask what is intelligence first? In Chinese, intelligence means 慧, composed of 彗 (comet) and 心 (heart); it can be interpreted as light from the heart. And 智慧 (wisdom) literally means intelligence of the mind (active) or the intelligent mind (passive); it has the word 慧 in it. Shouldn’t the heart and the mind be one?
So, if one sees intelligence as something from the heart, not just as an ability to use experience and knowledge efficiently, then Artificial Intelligence is still artificial, just a mere cultivated intelligence, with no passion, no love. It is a powerful tool though. And, in that same line of thought, as long as man doesn’t radically change, society will not change, and AI will always be biased.
Fun right?
Things that I like: