I think she used copycat blocks and vertical slabs
from the modpack in order to get it to look so
round. "I'm excellent at creating things that are
not supposed to exist in Minecraft, in Minecraft,"
she says. The rope ladder is from me, as I needed
a non-creative-mode way to get up there.
Figure 2: A bridge connects the two tree orbs. A+ is a big fan of safety railings.Figure 3: My orb has a hammock, a furnace, and a crafting tableFigure 4: She also decided to upgrade my tree farm with rich soil, a portable storage interface, and an item sorter.
The smart chute is set to drop only full stacks (64 items) so that the extra saplings will stay in the chest and feed the deployer.
The brass funnels have the different items in their filter slots. She has them feeding into netherite backpacks.
Figure 5: As for me, I made a simple library with an enchanting table.
I've got a couple of librarians. I'll probably set
up some more eventually, maybe in a large wing
focused on trading. I've also been upgrading the
wheat farm with organic compost that's broken down
into rich soil. I started some flax plants for
string.
Here are some differences between the current
implementation and the previous ones:
The website shows the last two weeks of posts,
since I can filter by date. It should also
ignore future-dated posts.
The list of feeds on the right side is now
sorted by last post date, so it's easier to see
active blogs.
I can now filter a general feed by a regular
expression.
I've removed a number of unreachable blogs.
The feed list is loaded from a JSON instead of
an INI.
The Atom feed and the OPML file should validate,
but let me know at sacha@sachachua.com if there
are any hiccups (or if you have an Atom/RSS feed
we can add to the aggregator =) ).
A+ is 8 years old. We're letting her be part of managing more things
for her future self, like keeping track of when we're running low on her
laundry or her favourite yogurt or toilet paper under the sink. She doesn't
always get it right, but then again, even grown-ups have a hard time.
She still sometimes melts down. Maybe I can break this down
into subskills so that we can get better at them together.
Anticipating: Noticing an opportunity is the first step. Predicting what might be helpful is another.
Plan out loud
Talk about future self
Walk through questions.
Choosing your future self: Delayed gratification, investing in future
Talk about tradeoffs
Add more benefits
Preparing: Cues & memory aids
Show us using lists, checklists, notes, cues
Celebrating: Patting ourselves on the back helps reinforce the habit
"I'm glad we…"
catch her doing well
Adapting: Sometimes we forget or things don't work out. What are we going to do now?
This is hard for A+ to do in the moment, but my staying calm will help, and experience helps too.
Experimenting: Instead of blaming ourselves or blaming other people, it's more useful to treat it as a data point that can help us improve our processes.
Best done during a calm moment, maybe at the next opportunity
These things are challenging when we're dysregulated. We can grow together when things settle down.
There will be tons of opportunities to
practice, and we can all grow.
One of the neat things about parenting is that I
get to think about how to develop different
skills. Today I want to think about planning
ahead. I can see the beginnings of it developing
in A+, like when she says, "I'm going to put on my
boots before I put on my mittens because that's
easier when you have fingers." I can see when it's
more of a struggle, like when we've forgotten to
bring the stuffed toy she wanted to take along and
she's overwhelmed with frustration. I can draw
parallels between that and the way I'm learning
more about this skill myself, like when we use the
Band-aids I've stashed in my emergency kit or when
I've forgotten to pack lunch and have to find
something that A+ will like within walking
distance. Even grown-ups have a hard time with
these skills. We've got plenty of examples around
us of people working on improving that skill and
people who struggle.
I like breaking skills down into smaller chunks so
that they're easier to think about, practise, and
learn. Breaking down the idea of looking ahead
into anticipating, choosing your future self,
preparing, celebrating, adapting, and
experimenting makes more sense to me than
treating it as one big lump. I want to think about
these subskills in this blog post so that I can
get better at them and so that we can swap notes.
The parts that are hardest for A+ at the moment
are adapting and experimenting. That makes a
lot of sense. That's when planning gets tested.
That's when you get feedback from reality. That's
difficult for lots of people, even grown-ups, and
I have plenty to learn about those parts myself.
Adapting: cognitive flexibility
I think of adapting as handling things in the
moment, switching to the question, "So, what are
we going to do now?" To be able to do that, A+ needs to be able to
manage or sidestep the fight-flight-freeze
response. I think a large part of this might just
be accumulating enough experiences to know that
these things are survivable, and part of it is
probably waiting for her brain to mature. I can't
skip those things for her, but I can validate her
feelings and show her that they're tolerable by
staying calm myself. I'm pretty good at staying
calm if I've paid attention to my basic needs. If
I'm off-balance, I can ask W- for help. When I'm
calm, I can be curious about what she feels and
how she eventually calms down.
I also find this part challenging. When she asks
me for something that she's thought of late,
sometimes I'm not sure whether my figuring it out
will mean she doesn't get as much practice or
feedback in planning ahead or adapting. Sometimes
I hesitate or say no, and then she gets grumpy and
frustrated, and then I become even less flexible
because I don't want to encourage grumping at me
to get what she wants. I guess she's going to
eventually figure out how and when to ask so that
she has a higher likelihood of yes. For my part, I
think it's okay to want most decisions to be
slowed down and considered without pressure, so I
can get better at tolerating A+'s discomfort so
that she gets that feedback.
When it comes to accepting things, I like drawing
on radical acceptance and Stoic philosophy,
although A+'s probably a little young for me to
talk about preferred and dispreferred
indifferents, at least in those terms. I can model
those ideas out loud, though.
Another part of adapting is having a wide
vocabulary of ways we can solve problems, which we
pick up through experience, skills, and learning
from other people.
Sometimes I come up with ways to solve a problem,
but she's not ready to move to that step yet
because she's still dealing with strong feelings,
and I can't help her co-regulate because she's
grumpy with me. There's no rushing past that,
there's no shortcut I can do to help her with her
feelings, but I can be curious about what she does
to eventually help herself cool down.
Besides, me coming up with ways to solve a problem
is not nearly as useful as her eventually learning
how to cool down and come up with her own ideas
for solving it. I can save my ideas for wondering
out loud, if she asks me for help. Might as well
not waste a good motivating problem.
This splits cognitive flexibility further into
flexible thinking (thinking about a problem in
a new way) and set shifting (letting go of an
old way in order to try a new way).
Self-talk, switching up routines, Amelia Bedelia, jokes
Breaks, flexible/divergent thinking games, switching up routines, self-talk
Experimenting: reflective practice
It would be counterproductive for me to try to
cushion A+ from failure. I want her to develop her
own skills, so I want her to make decisions
(especially ones without long-term negative
consequences). Some of those decisions won't work
out the way she wanted them to, but that's life.
Besides, "How can we make things better next
time?" is a question that can build on both
positive and negative experiences, so even the
uncomfortable moments can be useful.
When things don't work out, it's very tempting to
blame ourselves or other people, but that doesn't
really help us more forward. I want to be able to
see the ups and downs as data points in our
experiments and as opportunities to improve our
processes. I keep working on getting better at
responding to my own oopses and my delegated
oopses. Fortunately, I have lots of opportunities
to practice.
The basic premise in the system approach is that
humans are fallible and errors are to be expected,
even in the best organisations. Errors are seen as
consequences rather than causes, having their
origins not so much in the perversity of human
nature as in “upstream” systemic factors. … When
an adverse event occurs, the important issue is
not who blundered, but how and why the defences
failed.
Failures point to multiple ways that we might be
able to learn and to improve our systems. Paying
attention to those opportunities could save us
from bigger mistakes later on. Finding bugs when
developing means dealing with fewer bugs in
production, and this is basically her development
environment. Besides, there's a lot of
satisfaction in improving our systems.
Still, it's hard to think when people are
dysregulated. It's easier to take that perspective
when things are calm and there's an opportunity to
try something new. So in the moment, my job is to
weather the storm and adapt as well as I can.
After the storm passes, I can think about what
would make things better next time around. When I
notice that A+ is calm and ready to learn, I can
invite her to think along with me. She still gets
defensive if I use the past events as an anchor
for reflection. She responds better if we're
planning for something that's coming up soon. I
can use avoidance sparingly ("last time, that
didn't work out so well") and lean more on
building on things that worked well. That kind of
reflection will probably be mostly on my side for
now, but maybe she'll grow into it eventually.
I keep a brief journal, but life with A+ doesn't
usually lend itself to quickly looking things up
so that I can pull in the appropriate anecdotes at
the right time. The tough moments tend to be easy
to remember because they're emotionally-laden, but
since I want to build on positive experiences as
well, I can:
slow down and notice things out loud in the moment,
retell it shortly after, perhaps during dinnertime,
capture it in my journal so I can look it up again, and
think of the next little step, or some cues or situations it might be relevant to.
It's also probably easier for A+ to learn from my
thinking out loud about my own processes than
about hers. Fortunately, life gives me plenty of
opportunities to practise learning out loud.
We already have a habit around drawing a moment of
the day, and I could probably add something like
Rose-Thorn-Bud to dinnertime or bedtime
conversations. A+'s teachers sometimes add
reflection to their assignments, too.
I probably don't even have to worry too much about
explicitly teaching A+ these skills. I just have
to try to not get in the way of her learning them.
If we learn together, I think we'll figure all
sorts of cool things out.
[2025-01-12 Sun]: u/dr-timeous posted a treemap_org.py · GitHub that makes a coloured treemap that displays the body on hover. (Reddit) Also, I think librsvg doesn't support wrapped text, so that might mean manually wrapping if I want to figure out the kind of text density that webtreemap has.
One of the challenges with digital notes is that
it's hard to get a sense of volume, of mass, of
accumulation. Especially with Org Mode, everything
gets folded away so neatly and I can jump around
so readily with C-c j (org-goto) or C-u C-c
C-w (org-refile) that I often don't stumble
across the sorts of things I might encounter in a
physical notebook.
Treemaps are a quick way to visualize hierarchical
data using nested rectangles or squares, giving a
sense of relative sizes. I was curious about what
my main organizer.org file would look like as a
treemap, so I wrote some code to transform it into
the kind of data that
https://github.com/danvk/webtreemap wants as
input. webtreemap creates an HTML file that uses
Javascript to let me click on nodes to navigate
within them.
For this treemap prototype, I used
org-map-entries to go over all the headings and
make a report with the outline path and the size
of the heading. To keep the tree visualization
manageable, I excluded done/cancelled tasks and
archived headings. I also wanted to exclude some
headings from the visualization, like the way my
Parenting subheading has lots of personal
information underneath it. I added a :notree:
tag to indicate that a tree should not be
included.
Screencast of exploring a treemap
Reflections
Figure 1: Screenshot of the treemap for my organizer.org
The video and the screenshot above show the
treemap for my main Org Mode file,
organizer.org. I feel like the treemap makes it
easier to see projects and clusters where I'd
accumulated notes, both in terms of length and
quantity. (I've omitted some trees like
"Parenting" which take up a fairly large chunk of
space.)
To no one's surprise, Emacs takes up a large part
of my notes and ideas. =)
When I look at this treemap, I notice a bunch of
nodes I need to mark as DONE or CANCELLED
because I forgot to update my organizer.org. That
usually happens when I come up with an idea, don't
remember that I'd come up with it before, put it
in my inbox.org file, and do it from there or from
the organizer.org location I've refiled it to
without bumping into the first idea. Once in a
blue moon, I go through my whole organizer.org
file and clean out the cruft. Maybe a treemap like
this will make it easier to quickly scan things.
Interestingly, "Explore AI" takes up a
disproportionately large chunk of my "Inactive
Projects" visualization, even though I spend more
time and attention on other things. Large language
models make it easy to generate a lot of text, but
I haven't really done the work to process those.
I've also collected a lot of links that I haven't
done much with.
It might be neat to filter the headings by
timestamp so that I can see things I've touched in
the last 6 months.
Hmm, looking at this treemap reminds me that I've
got "organizer.org/Areas/Ideas for things to do
with focused time/Writing/", which probably should
get moved to the posts.org file that I tend to
use for drafts. Let's take look at the treemap for
that file. (Updated: cleared it out!)
Figure 2: Drafts in my posts.org
Unlike my organizer.org file, my posts.org
file tends to be fairly flat in terms of
hierarchy. It's just a staging ground for ideas
before I put them on my blog. I usually try to
keep posts short, but a few of my posts have
sub-headings. Since the treemap makes it easy to
see nodes that are larger or more complex, that
could be a good nudge to focus on getting those
out the door. Looking at this treemap reminds me
that I've got a bunch of EmacsConf posts that I
want to finish so that I can document more of our
processes and tools.
Figure 3: Treemap of my inbox
My inbox.org is pretty flat too, since it's
really just captured top-level notes that I'll
either mark as done or move somewhere else
(usually organizer.org). Because the treemap
visualization tool uses / as a path separator,
the treemap groups headings that are plain URLs
together, grouped by domain and path.
Figure 4: Treemap of my Emacs configuration
My Emacs configuration is organized as a
hierarchy. I usually embed the explanatory blog
posts in it, which explains the larger nodes. I
like how the treemap makes it easy to see the
major components of my configuration and where I
might have a lot of notes/custom code. For
example, my config has a surprising amount to do
with multimedia considering Emacs is a text
editor, and that's mostly because I like to tinker
with my workflow for sketchnotes and subtitles.
This treemap would be interesting to colour based
on whether something has been described in a blog
post, and it would be great to link the nodes in a
published SVG to the blog post URLs. That way, I
can more easily spot things that might be fun to
write about.
There's another treemap visualization tool that
can produce squarified treemaps as coloured SVGs,
so that style might be interesting to explore too.
Next steps
I think there's some value in being able to look
at and think about my outline headings with a
sense of scale. I can imagine a command that shows
the treemap for the current subtree and allows
people to click on a node to jump to it (or maybe
shift-click to mark something for bulk action), or
one that shows subtrees summing up :EFFORT:
estimates or maybe clock times from the logbook,
or one limited by a timestamp range, or one that
highlights matching entries as you type in a
query, or one that visualizes s-exps or JSON or
project files or test coverage.
It would probably be more helpful if the treemap
were in Emacs itself, so I could quickly jump to
the Org nodes and read more or mark something as
done when I notice it. boxy-headings uses text to
show the spatial relationships of nested headings,
which is neat but probably not up to handling this
kind of information density. Emacs can also
display SVG images in a buffer, animate them, and
handle mouse-clicks, so it could be interesting to
implement a general treemap visualization which
could then be used for all sorts of things like
disk space usage, files in project modules, etc.
SVGs would probably be a better fit for this
because that allows increased text density and
more layout flexibility.
It would be useful to browse the treemap within
Emacs, export it as an SVG so that I can include
it in a webpage or blog post, and add some
Javascript for web-based navigation.
The Emacs community being what it is (which is
awesome!), I wouldn't be surprised if someone's
already figured it out. Since a quick search
for treemap in the package archives and various
places doesn't seem to turn anything up, I thought
I'd share these quick experiments in case they
resonate with other people. I guess I (or someone)
could figure out the squarified treemapping
algorithm or the ordered treemap algorithm in
Emacs Lisp, and then we can see what we can do
with it.
I've also thought about other visualizations that
can help me see my Org files a different way.
Network graphs are pretty popular among the
org-roam crew because org-roam-ui makes them.
Aside from a few process checklists that link to
headings that go into step-by-step detail and
things that are meant to graph connections between
concepts, most of my Org Mode notes don't
intentionally link to other Org Mode notes. (There
are also a bunch of random org-capture context
annotations I haven't bothered removing.) I tend
to link to my public blog posts, sketches, and
source code rather than to other headings, so
that's a layer of indirection that I'd have to
custom-code. Treemaps might be a good start,
though, as they take advantage of the built-in
hierarchy. Hmm…
I usually write my scripts with phrases that could be turned into the subtitles. I figured I might as well combine that information with the WhisperX transcripts which I use to cut out my false starts and oopses. To do that, I use the string-distance function, which calculates how similar strings are, based on the Levenshtein [distance] algorithm. If I take each line of the script and compare it with the list of words in the transcription, I can add one transcribed word at a time, until I find the number with the minimum distance from my current script phrase. This lets me approximately match strings despite misrecognized words. I use oopses to signal mistakes. When I detect those, I look for the previous script line that is closest to the words I restart with. I can then skip the previous lines automatically. When the script and the transcript are close, I can automatically correct the words. If not, I can use comments to easily compare them at that point. Even though I haven't optimized anything, it runs well enough for my short videos. With these subtitles as a base, I can get timestamps with subed-align and then there's just the matter of tweaking the times and adding the visuals.
WhisperX transcript (with false starts and recognition errors)
My current implementation is totally unoptimized (n²) but it's fine for short videos.
Process:
While there are transcript words to process
Find the script line that has the minimum distance to the words left in the transcript. restart after oopses
Script
Transcript: min. distance between script phrase & transcript
Restarting after oops: find script phrase with minimum distance
Ex. script phrase: The Emacs text editor
Transcript: The Emax text editor is a…
Bar graph of distance decreasing, and then increasing again
Minimum distance
Oops?
N: Use transcript words, or diff > threshold?
Y: Add script words as comment
N: Correct minor errors
Y: Mark caption for skipping and look for the previous script line with minimum distance.
Result:
Untimed captions with comments
Aeneas
Timed captions for editing
This means I can edit a nicely-split, mostly-corrected file.
I've included the links to various files below so you can get a sense of how it works. Let's focus on an excerpt from the middle of my script file.
it runs well enough for my short videos.
With these subtitles as a base,
I can get timestamps with subed-align
When I call WhisperX with large-v2 as the model and --max_line_width 50 --segment_resolution chunk --max_line_count 1 as the options, it produces these captions corresponding to that part of the script.
01:25.087-->01:29.069
runs well enough for my short videos. With these subtitles
01:29.649-->01:32.431
as a base, I can get... Oops. With these subtitles as a base, I
01:33.939-->01:41.205
can get timestamps with subedeline, and then there's just
Running subed-word-data-use-script-file results in a VTT file containing this excerpt:
00:00:00.000-->00:00:00.000
it runs well enough for my short videos.
NOTE #+SKIP00:00:00.000-->00:00:00.000
With these subtitles as a base,
NOTE #+SKIP00:00:00.000-->00:00:00.000
I can get... Oops.
00:00:00.000-->00:00:00.000
With these subtitles as a base,
NOTE#+TRANSCRIPT: I can get timestamps with subedeline,#+DISTANCE: 0.1400:00:00.000-->00:00:00.000
I can get timestamps with subed-align
There are no timestamps yet, but subed-align can add them. Because subed-align uses the Aeneas forced alignment tool to figure out timestamps by lining up waveforms for speech-synthesized text with the recorded audio, it's important to keep the false starts in the subtitle file. Once subed-align has filled in the timestamps and I've tweaked the timestamps by using the waveforms, I can use subed-record to create an audio file that omits the subtitles that have #+SKIP comments.
The code is available as subed-word-data-use-script-file in subed-word-data.el. I haven't released a new version of subed.el yet, but you can get it from the repository.
In addition to making my editing workflow a little more convenient, I think it might also come in handy for applying the segmentation from tools like sub-seg or lachesis to captions that might already have been edited by volunteers. (I got sub-seg working on my system, but I haven't figured out lachesis.) If I call subed-word-data-use-script-file with the universal prefix arg C-u, it should set keep-transcript-words to true and keep any corrections we've already made to the caption text while still approximately matching and using the other file's segments. Neatly-segmented captions might be more pleasant to read and may require less cognitive load.
There's probably some kind of fancy Python project
that already does this kind of false start
identification and script reconciliation. I just
did it in Emacs Lisp because that was handy and
because that way, I can make it part of subed. If
you know of a more robust or full-featured
approach, please let me know!
I put together a pull request to modify
ob-mermaid-cli-path so that it doesn't get quoted
and can therefore have the aa-exec command needed
to work around that. With that modified
org-babel-execute:mermaid, I can then configure
ob-mermaid like this:
(use-package ob-mermaid
:load-path"~/vendor/ob-mermaid")
;; I need to override this so that the executable isn't quoted
(setq ob-mermaid-cli-path "aa-exec --profile chrome mmdc -c ~/.config/mermaid/config.json")
I also ran into a problem where the library that
Emacs uses to display SVGs could not handle the
foreignObject elements used for the labels.
mermaid missing text in svg · Issue #112 ·
mermaid-js/mermaid-cli . Using the following
~/.config/mermaid/config.json fixed it, and I
put the option in the ob-mermaid-cli-path above
so that it always gets loaded.
