Alternative Layout System
"This research rethinks paragraph formatting, inspired by techniques from Hebrew and Arabic manuscripts to challenge conventional layouts" with downloadable scripts for indesign. very cool
building ramps to extend corgispace
i love that v's example of "tools which make expensive things cheaper" is a swiss roll production line. yes please
Threaded code – muforth
"Threaded code is an extraordinarily simple and elegant way to implement language interpreters. Compared to bytecoded interpreters it is quite fast, and compilers for it are essentially trivial... Because it creates a system entirely composed of uniform pieces, extensibility of the system by users is almost unlimited, and building generic tools is dramatically simplified!"
Personal and physical security for founders, operators, and investors - a16z crypto
or you could just. you know. not do anything related to crypto
The Seven Part Pact: the First Actual GM-Full Game - Old Men Running The World
"One of my ongoing theories is games are most magical when they are beyond your fingertips of understanding. When you grasp the machinery, you gain mastery… but the uncertainty of how things will end up is the tension. ... The Seven Part Pact is constructed to be such a complicated machine that it’s always unreal. Everyone is a mystery. They’re playing wizards, and to you – across the table – it may as well be magic."
The role of the University is to resist AI
"Resistance is necessary to preserve the role of higher education in developing a tolerant society. For the alternative, we only have to look at the resonances between right wing narratives and the ambitions of the tech broligarchy, resonances that are antiworker, antidemocratic, committed to epochal transformation, resentful and supremacist." (helpful reading of Illich's "Tools for conviviality")
The Era Of The Business Idiot
"Mark Zuckerberg wants us to have fake friends, Sam Altman wants us to have fake colleagues, and an increasingly loud group of executives salivate at the idea of replacing us with a fake version of us that will make a shittier version of what we make for a customer that said executive doesn’t fucking care about. "
Bad Times for College Graduates - Paul Krugman
"Graduating into a bad labor market can make you miss a step on the job ladder, depressing your earnings for a decade or more. It increases your chances of being in poor health well into middle age. It even reduces your chances of having a successful marriage."
AI copyediting: how Paperpal butchered my paper on AI-generated writing – Jill Walker Rettberg
"The irony here is that the paper that Paperpal butchered is about how generative AI normalises and homogenises our writing. Which is exactly what Paperpal was doing to my writing."
HOW TO - Riley Cox
very cool and clever card-driven small jacquard loom build
scificorridorarchive.com by Serafín Álvarez, 2013
needs a taxonomy (featureless white, rundown office, wet brutalist, pipes-and-rivets...)
Predictive Capital – Roads to terminal alienation, soil to server farm, reason to vibe – CreativeApplications.Net
"Vibe Coding severs this constitutive relation. The Vibe Coder does not enter the Symbolic order, but submits to its statistical imitation. The model offers no Law, no withholding, no exteriority. It does not confront, it echoes. It does not interpellate the subject, only returns a semblance of dialogue without ever addressing you as subject. The Vibe Coder becomes neither full author nor full subject, but a medium through which predictive recombination speaks —spoken by the model as much as speaking through it. The Symbolic order is not engaged but simulated. What emerges is not understanding, but interpolation: machinic consensus dressed in familiar cultural forms."
lcamtuf: "My 101 of analog electronics, …" - Infosec Exchange
thorough, accessible
Reverse engineering the incinerated Waymo - Placing Technologies
"[E]very time someone complains about vandalizing the Waymos in Los Angeles as some kind of violence against Alphabet’s balance sheet, just remember that Waymo isn’t profitable and never has been! They already lose money, the amount lost by destroying the car is pocket lint in the Alphabet balance sheet realm."
Is the AI Bubble About to Burst? | Verso Books
"[T]he way technology changes work is neither automatic nor inevitable. It is shaped by collective choices about what kinds of work, and what kinds of working lives, society is willing to sustain."
Deciphering Glyph :: I Think I’m Done Thinking About genAI For Now
"The process-engineering function of an LLM, therefore, is to prevent fundamental problems from ever getting fixed, to reward the rapid-fire overwhelm of infrastructure teams with an immediate, catastrophic cascade of legacy code that is now much harder to delete than it is to write."
🛠️ My Text Tools - Free, Online, Text Manipulation Tools
charming! hopefully it sticks around for a while and doesn't go all paywall on us
The 12-bit rainbow palette
"Using a 12-bit colour depth limits the available colours, so slight changes to luminance, chroma, and hue must be made, but these are small enough not to be noticeable. The resulting palette has evenly-spaced hues, only small variations in chroma, and smoothly increasing and decreasing luminance."
How to survive the weight of an entire industry trying to convince you that you're inadequate • Buttondown
"We are not building people up by giving them helpful tools, we are tearing people down by convincing them they can’t function without the tools"
Cap'n Proto: Introduction
"I... was the primary author of Protocol Buffers version 2, which is the version that Google released open source. Cap’n Proto is the result of years of experience working on Protobufs, listening to user feedback, and thinking about how things could be done better."