Generative AI has access to a small slice of human knowledge | Aeon Essays
"The marginalisation of local and Indigenous knowledge has long been driven by entrenched power structures. GenAI simply puts this process on steroids."
Typotheque: A typeface in four dimensions
beautiful font, fun visualization
ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering
really cool documentation of a project applying nearest-neighbor search to vectors representing spatial coverage of ascii characters for doing image to ascii rendering. great application of machine learning techniques, typography, experimental iteration
How to Support Minnesota in this Emergency
Seeing like a software company
good essay! i'm left wondering about the relationship between legibility and inequity—it seems to me like a good deal of inequity/abuse happens in the course of illegible processes, and that the primary way that organizations address inequity/abuse is by making those processes legible (and thereby subject to analysis, criticism, restoration). you know, DEI. but maybe real solutions require action on both levels. i'm also curious about what alterities within "legible" and "illegible" are being smoothed over by this neat taxonomy
POV: ur my friend at a party and im explaining why i hate "AI" so much
this is a good essay about "AI" overall as a cultural, economic and political phenomenon, but this line from the section about programming stood out: "We all know that programming languages, not natural languages, are the best way to get meaning through to computers. If we’re using an intermediary to get to the programming languages, clearly there’s room for them to be improved. Why are we just giving up instead of interrogating that?"
National Design Studio offers a rebrand of government services
"From what is visible so far, the National Design Studio isn’t functioning as a civic design program so much as an advertising agency for the administration and its policy goals. If one was feeling less charitable, they might simply call it a digital propaganda department." (see later in the piece for a vicious takedown of the Apple Store as a concept and institution)
Is Your Stuttering a Disability by Justin Ancheta — carte blanche magazine
"Every social interaction is a whistle commanding you to jump out of the trench and charge into disputed ground, praying your dignity will survive"
It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons @ tonsky.me
"[U]ntil we get a direct chip-to-brain interface, HIG will stay relevant." got it. HIG is all that separates us from full panopticon surveillance fascism
WebGPU Fundamentals
clear, straightforward introduction
'A Directive From Above': Former NYT Editor Lays Out How The Paper Pushes Anti-trans Bigotry
"It's one thing for Bari Weiss, when she was just running the Free Press or whatever, to report this. It's another thing for The New York Times to report this. I think they put a stamp of legitimacy on medical falsehoods. They also legitimized anti-trans hate, really." once more for the people in the back: fuuuck the new york times
Your mental models are out of date
"[W]e need to acknowledge that young people making speculative bets aren't stupid or weak. They're responding rationally to the world they inherited. The failure isn't theirs. It's ours, for giving them mental models designed for an economy that no longer exists."
The Enshittifinancial Crisis
"The mistake that every investor, commentator, analyst and member of the media makes about NVIDIA is believing that its sales are an expression of demand for AI compute, when it’s really more of a statement about the availability of debt from banks and private credit."
Landslide; a ghost story
"The problem with all of us being so much more a hive mind than we realize is that knowledge problems that ripple across our a information ecosystems can become not just threats to individuals with weak character or bad habits, but the equivalent of colony collapse.... Real belief in collective knowledge may also suggest that caring for our own knowledge formation in social systems is a way of caring for the system as a whole."
The Master System Girl: A Console with Cooties?
"Since this is a Master System 2 chipset, it should lack the collision detection bug that impacts ALF when played with the Power Base Converter. I know you were worried."
Apple II graphics: More than you wanted to know
tired: "What would Jesus do?" wired: "How did Woz do this?"
Unearthing The Hidden History Of A Singular Trans Punk Zine | Defector
"Maybe what makes this zine so special is... but that it models so clearly the movement between [the personal and the activist]—the way you might get from personal frustration to organizational commitment. Gendertrash distilled hundreds of personal viewpoints into a hard-won political ethos that made itself known through coherent and moving writing. It is a model we sorely need now."
Big tech’s selective disclosure masks AI’s real climate impact – Ketan Joshi
"By foregrounding per-query impact, substack writers and companies are erasing the real problem with generative systems: they are oversold and overused, in an anxious bid to make impossibly high hopes come true.... [I]n terms of diversion away from real action, it is the weird flipped cousin of the way fossil fuel companies exploited and popularised 'carbon footprint' messaging to divert responsibility for action away from themselves."
Building a GDB Stub in C (for emulators) - Retro Reversing (Reverse Engineering)
good and very simple tutorial for writing gdbstub interfaces with example code
Benjamin Button Reviews macOS | exotext
"After High Sierra there was Sierra, and then Apple had decided to rename macOS into OS X. This was the culmination of the multi-year project of decoupling the mobile iOS from the desktop OS, which made perfect sense to most users. Apple continued to prove their dedication to open platforms, because in a later version of their desktop OS (Snow Leopard) they had discontinued App Store altogether."