Cosine Thoughts

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Kyudo - Tuesday Practice Notes

Just a bit of reflection and some insight into what I'm doing at the moment and what is working. I started practice by taking a look at some notes I had made from a video posted over the weekend and I started to understand some of the feedback I was getting from watching it. My sempai, who was giving me advice was at a bad angle to see it, but noted that I didn't have the space left in my draw to open properly into kai. At his angle though, he wouldn't have been able to clearly see my mete elbow being pulled with the bow. This meant my mete ended up further left and leaving me with more space to cover during the draw. So, I wanted to fix that, along with a few other things today: Keeping my arms relaxed while maintain the ensou shape. Breathing. I have a tendency to not breathe enough. I clearly don't know how to live. During my first shots my yunde wasn't pushing "along" the arrow. I went and took 2 more arrows. Observed that correcting the mete require...

Kyudo: Little changes, big results.

Today was a good day at practice. A very good day. I had mentioned previously that one piece of advice I had received was that I was making too many corrections. I got to start addressing that in practice this evening and something weird happened. Actually, two things. First, I don't feel like I've fired more than 1 or 2 arrows despite firing more arrows tonight than I do in a normal practice. And second, I was actually able to find time to think about and apply feedback. That first point is unexpected. I just kept practicing and firing more arrows and never seemed to get tired. The best I can guess is that the act of making all of those little adjustments was causing me to tense up far more than normal and that the corrections themselves may have been doing even more damage to my form than I had thought possible and thus increasing the wear and tear on my body. Honestly though, I think it is the lack of tension. I wasn't able to completely stop myself from making adjustm...

Kyudo: Approved for Ni-Dan Shinsa and Training

I find writing down my thoughts helps to internalize things and get the most out of things like advice or observations. So, here is the first post in my run-up to testing for Ni-Dan later this year. Internally we had an internal "mock" shinsa at out dojo to see who the instructors felt were ready to challenge for their respective Dan in either the upcoming video or in-person Shinsas. My result? After a pretty good result in an earlier internal shinsa, I regressed a bit. I still got the green light to go forward with a few areas of note that I need to work on. Some from their perspective, some from my own, and some from a pair of guest instructors from the day of the mock shinsa that likely saved me from failing out completely. I'll start with my own thoughts. I always need to work on rhythm and timing with a TACHI . I'm doing video shinsa, so that is less important to testing this time, but would be critical for any in-person shinsa. And beyond Ni-Dan all testing is i...

Why token usage as a KPI fails

Why do companies keep trying to use AI/token usage as a performance metric? Because they've lost (or never had) the ability to quantify success. Put another way, it is the exact same reason that vibe coders exist and succeed until they fail. AI is not currently reliable and the people who tend to rely on it most, also let it replace their own judgement and faculties. And they let it get that way because of a few (sometimes big) early wins. Tokenmaxxing is an obvious result of an obviously flawed system. How is the system "obviously flawed?" I've written up a number of examples of my struggles with AI at work. But it boils down to this; AI isn't actually "smart" in the human sense and the results are non-deterministic. This means that the 2 developers using identical prompts can wind up with WILDLY different tokens spent for the same problem. AND more than likely, the developer that spent more tokens ends up with the inferior solution. Identical prompt...

AI Loops?

I've already made my arguments against AI on a financial level and on a technical level. Now they've started suggesting that you combine these catastrophes into one big, uber-catastrophe: don't even write prompts any more, just write loops! The hubris! AI is not ready. Period. I'm NOT saying that AI will NEVER be ready. I'm saying that, at the current moment, we're not there. Not even close. If you thought the crazy AWS bills of the past were something, wait until the first engineering teams start taking this advice. I guarantee you that it will be epic. A little part of me actually wants companies to just take this advice and let Claude run without any token caps. Why? Not because I want to see those companies fail, but because I want to see how fast Anthropic can destroy itself when these companies suddenly can't afford the bills which they need them to pay to keep the lights on. It would be short term pain for long term gain in the software industry. A me...

Kyudo - Internal Shinsa Thoughts and Fundamentals

A recent development in the past year or so at our dojo has been an "internal shinsa" to test for whether or not the dojo leadership would allow us to challenge for the next shinsa. I love the idea. My own feedback? I wish I had done worse. I have a problem. I don't like positive feedback. It doesn't tell me much. By no means was the performance perfect, and there were critiques. They were simply stifled by the positives. It deflates the sense of urgency and need for me. I suppose that there is an up side. It forces me to be the negative one. We didn't get to see the recordings, so I can only focus on what I was told and what I normally don't do well. And that too is a blessing in disguise. That performance was singular. Both in the literal sense and in the sense that I was feeling REALLY GOOD that day. I've never been able to perform so "freely". So, in some sense, focusing too much on that performance might not be as helpful. The critiques I di...