'“Fairy-taken” is also a less individualistic explanation than “languishing.” This sadness and inability to work is happening to you, but not because of you. It’s not that you failed to hustle hard enough, or to take appropriate care of yourself—it’s just that there’s something very evil and arbitrary in the world, and it chose to snatch you up. And there’s no solution and no cure, unless you can trick the fairies into letting you go.'
"Liberal capitalism would cast our transitions as products we buy as individual consumers, or as treatments we receive as individual patients, but in fact a transition under capitalism is a commodity we labour with others to produce, a process from which surplus value is extracted to accumulate capital for bosses and in which everyone else is paid but us." 🔥
"I'm glad you're asking this. Jordan Ellenberg dropped me a note saying that I'd written a novel about wealth disguised as a novel about sex. I think that must be right."
a dissenting view. "Within this obviously capitalist and market-oriented system, are their windows for radicalism or at least harm reduction? To me this is an unequivocal yes (at least on the latter) as long as you don’t subscribe to hyper-campism and the original sin of proximity to libertarianism. Minimally, there are a lot of really cool BIPoC projects popping up."
"Imagine if someone were to suggest that all web infrastructure should share the same database. That would rightly be seen as an absurd idea — but that’s what Web3 advocates are essentially suggesting. A blockchain is a distributed append-only database, spread across multiple nodes, but it is still one single database. In the name of decentralisation, Web3 advocates in fact seek to create a new form of centralisation around the blockchain."
'So, Bitcoin was a good effort, it deployed some new ideas and
technology, and showed that at some scale the "block chain" idea
worked, but ultimately, although a successful proof of concept, failed
to deliver. It doesn't scale, except by becoming the very thing it was supposed to replace. The more scalable the network becomes, the more centralized it becomes, until ultimately a "scalable" cryptocurrency would be doing things exactly the same way as a credit card processor.'
"Gambling relies on addiction for its business model to function; everybody knows that. But addiction is also the business model for a huge chunk of Silicon Valley. Gambling ruins lives by way of soul-crushing debt; everybody knows that too. But so do the American educational system and the health-care and real-estate markets, which have been rigged by the people at the top to extract as much as possible from the suckers otherwise known as regular people. For most Americans, to participate in the economy in the most basic ways requires engaging in existential risk."
"We’ve gone from the world of abundance in cloud computing where the cost of compute time per person was nearly at post-scarcity levels, to the reverse of trying to enforce artificial scarcity on the most abundant resource humanity has ever created. This is regression, not progress."
"All curation grows until it requires search. All search grows until it requires curation." see also Halt and Catch Fire syllabus week 13 https://bits.ashleyblewer.com/halt-and-catch-fire-syllabus/classes/13.html
"To use devices for longer, a change in business models as well as consumer attitudes is needed. This requires raising awareness and education but also providing incentives for behavioural change. And to support devices for a long time, an infrastructure for repair and maintenance is needed, with long-term availability of parts, open repair manuals and training. To make all this happen, economic incentives and policies will be needed (e.g. taxation, regulation)."
"Kim explains that since the religion prioritizes women marrying and starting families young, blogging has become a natural outlet for people to share their domestic lives, all with a coat of glamour. And it allows them to generate income without having to compromise their duties at home. The way Mormon women have used the internet to manage these basic needs has come to define a huge portion of the influencer culture we consume and criticize today."
"We see crypto as a mob of misguided fools repeating the ecological disaster of Easter Island on a global scale for the sole purpose of selling man-child themed Neopets."
"As a capital extraction mechanism, the crypto aspect is brilliant - it’s a natural connection to a speciously valuable industry full of frothy capital and desperation."
"a website that produces event scores for performance. The material objects, locations and activities within each score are based on the performance archives of Nathan Walker between 2009-2014 and work towards shuffling and redistributing the archival record to create an anarchive."
"Crypto investments cannot be anything but a zero sum game, and many are actually massively negative sum. In order to presume a crypto investments functions as a store of value we simultaneously need to suppose an infinite chain of greater fools who keep buying these assets at any irrational price and into the future forever."
from Joanne McNeil: "... artificial intelligence with personality could become an early twenty-teens kitschy retro artifact. [...]
The Tesla Bot announcement seemed to pre-figure this. The person in robot costume danced to music that sounded reminiscent of Daft Punk’s Tron: Legacy soundtrack, which was released more than ten years ago. This isn’t the future. It’s an aesthetic that’s played out."
super interesting article about coppices and pollarding. "[A]round two-thirds of the wood that is harvested in developing societies is harvested sustainably.... People collect mainly dead wood, they grow a lot of wood outside the forest, they coppice and pollard trees, and they prefer the use of multipurpose trees, which are too valuable to cut down. The motives are the same as those of our ancestors: people have no access to fossil fuels and are thus tied to a local wood supply, which needs to be harvested and transported manually."
matches skull pose to photograph of animal with matching pose! actually a good example of (benign but illustrative) algorithmic bias, e.g., all of the upside-down skulls are bats, all of the skulls viewed underneath are birds
"I’m not suggesting that Rushdie carries a picture of Mario around with him at all times, but I am suggesting he might force it into conversation in the green room of a writers’ festival, and that by the power of the novelists descriptive language, Oates would have a pretty good idea of what Mario looked like, and what his deal was. It’s possible that she might respond to a picture of Mario with “oh that’s Salman’s little friend” but I’m fairly sure she would remember the name."
"Imagine you go back in time to the 1970s to change the history of the internet to your own liking. Based on the events described in the reading, how would you do it? How much funding would you need to achieve the changes you seek? Where do you get that funding from at the time, and how difficult is it to obtain? What does your answer to these questions say about the “great man theory” of history?"
"If you’re not a stereotypical Scorpio, you’re not a walking definition of what someone else thinks of as sexual appeal. You’re not a walking tornado of revenge and suspicion. You only seek to honor hunger, to honor desire, and to honor the integrity of you. You get pretty good at refusing when you’re a Scorpio—at refusing what people want from you and also at refusing what people want to see you do."
"I love GTD but the book sucks (system’s amazing, the book just doesn’t explain it well). Apps are often over- or under-engineered for it or for what you need."
'I started to ask myself the question – how long will it take before we start seeing “documentary photojournalism” that has no other basis in reality than the photographer’s fantasy and a powerful computer graphics card? Will we be able to tell the difference? How hard is it to do? How skilled will our own community of photographers and editors be in sniffing out what are deep fakes and what is real?'
"As always, the discourse waits at the whims of some of the most arbitrary shit we shouldn’t ever have to care about and inevitably curdles into the most annoying version of itself the moment it gets big enough."
"Created in collaboration with futuristic folk artist Lyra Pramuk, this collection of emotive vocal drones, chants, tempo-synced rhythms and pads has been made using recordings from her debut album, ‘Fountain’ — composed entirely from the sound of the artist’s own voice. These experimental textures will bring a human touch to your tracks, with a hint of alien-like processing — serving as a testament to the limitless possibilities of the human voice."
"The turn towards process is also a good thing; everyone should have the opportunity to create art. From that perspective, it's true that Suum Cuique Labs infringe nothing with these pieces. From an art perspective, though, that's sort of beside the point. They cynically take advantage of open culture to enclose it again, aspiring to use blockchain to create Supercopyright with ludicrously high buy-in. And more to the point perhaps, this free ganking is a tacit acknowledgement that the artists they got were simply not good enough to achieve anything other than a bad copy of a dead black artist's style."
"While these languages are obviously not in common use today, we find it fascinating to think about the world that might have been. Even more surprisingly, it happens that many of these other options include features which developers would love to see appear in CSS even today."
"The basis of performance shifted from small binaries to smooth interaction. [...] Navigation shifted from keyboard to springboard. [...] Log-in disappeared completely. [...] Discovery shifted from search to app store. [...] Engagement shifted from links to icons. [...] Business models expanded to IAP, subscriptions, and app purchase. [...] Security shifted from sandbox to app review...."
"BLABRECS is a rules modification for the wordgame SCRABBLE that swaps out the dictionary of real-if-obscure English words for a capricious artificial intelligence. In BLABRECS, real English words aren't allowed! Instead, you have to play nonsense words that sound like English to the AI. These nonsense words are called – you guessed it – BLABRECS."
"... modelled after two tools I admire for their accessibility, cuteness, and strong followings among fringe gamedevs: Bitsy and Puzzlescript. My aspiration for Gruescript is to be IF's answer to those."
"a driver board which talks to affordable E-Paper (or E-Ink) screens, which are usually sold as replacement screens for E-Book readers... This project uses Kindle replacement screens, which are available for 20$ (small) / 30$ (large) on ebay!"
"[W]e must keep all of our tools to hand, both the paranoid and the reparative. Otherwise, we run the risk of simply saying to these safety-pilled kids, 'Don’t worry. Language can’t hurt you. Calm down.'"
some helpful historical and technical threads, comparing the immersive art room to Palazzo Te, Kusama, VR, raree shows, etc. what's interesting to me is how the space in question is treated like an interchangeable substrate
"The organizers of NT initially sought to consciously accompany and form the historical transition in which the computer was perceived as medium of artistic creation. They set computer generated works in relation to Constructive and Kinetic art (1968/69) and to Conceptual art (1973). The arts of the electronic media were not considered as an isolated phenomenon but rather incorporated into the history and discourse of fine-and performing arts."
well this is fucking horrifying. '“We call them tentacles,” Ricketts said. “When you see them wash up from the sea they’re very long, you know they can be eight feet to 30 feet (2.4m to 9.1m), and sometimes three feet wide,” she said. “When we’ve done clean-ups here, we’ve been digging 15 feet and still find tangles of clothing.”'
"In short, the look and feel and vision of Pixar all came from inside and predated Jobs by at least a decade. Steve Jobs was a crucially important money man for the company, and later a business dealmaker of the first order for it. He was responsible for the look and feel and vision of Apple, but not of Pixar. The marketing message seems to have been crafted to make it seem that what was true for Apple was also true for Pixar - one genius fits all - but that was not the case as the details make clear."
"Unlike Transformers, Perceivers first map inputs to a small latent space where processing is cheap and doesn't depend on the input size. [...] Perceiver IO can produce (for example) language, optical flow, and multimodal videos with audio." this seems interesting and potentially pedagogically useful
"What I feel most grateful to myself for in that home video is breaking me of that binary. If seven-year-old Jules was more like me today than not, then there was no opposite of dissociation to call on. There was nothing, or no one, to reintegrate. She was already there, which I suppose is how dissociation actually works, but not always how it feels when the child appears in the depths of our flesh as real, but our culture tells us she is a figment of retrospection."
"... nor are they at all the fault of the people in your life to whom different unfortunate and dispiriting things have happened. Withdrawing from those people only allows you to keep imagining that happiness is as easy as signing a mortgage. [...] Some people are claimed early by bitterness. You can spot them pretty easily — the querulous, the chronically disappointed. Maybe you were taught by one of these people, or employed by one, or raised by one. These are not fun people to be around. They are shabby and mean, and they probably all became that way one tiny resentment at a time."
"it uses HD video, and not one, but two monitors, plus a sheet of beam splitter glass to create a reflection that gets folded back in to the image. [...] All the images in this video are created by video feedback only - no computers are involved. The upper and lower monitors both display the same thing - the image from the camera, which is looking at the upper monitor. This creates a video feedback loop (much like a microphone next to a speaker creates an audio feedback loop)." what's the poetry equivalent of
"a software license that developers can use to prohibit the use of their code by applications or companies that threaten to accelerate climate change through fossil fuel extraction"
"Vosk is an offline open source speech recognition toolkit. [...] Vosk models are small (50 Mb) but provide continuous large vocabulary transcription, zero-latency response with streaming API, reconfigurable vocabulary and speaker identification." Bindings for various languages, "scales from small devices like Raspberry Pi or Android smartphone to big clusters."
"...the method here is quite different. DALL-E is trained end-to-end for the sole purpose of producing high quality images directly from language, whereas this CLIP method is more like a beautifully hacked together trick for using language to steer existing unconditional image generating models." good history of the emergence of CLIP art
"Using a 2 warp system on a floor loom, the Moorman Technique is a method of inlaying weft yarns using a tie down system of warp yarns. The tie-down yarns are twice as fine as the ground warp, and given the selection of color, can be nearly invisible."
"A collection of interactive explorable explanations of complex systems in biology, physics, mathematics, social sciences, epidemiology, ecology and other fields...." lots of ideas here
'[T]he structure of Twitter and the way it rewards a constant escalation of emotion makes it exceedingly difficult to just back down, to say, “I thought I was doing the right thing, but I hurt somebody very badly in the process.”'
"At the top of the machine, an LED panel endlessly regurgitates its own new neoist verses into the eyes of the audience, equally brainwashing humans, cyborgs, robots, and other technobiological systems. Anyone can directly hack into the system's artificial neural synapses by unplugging, replugging, and criss-crossing jack cables directly on the machine, thus deconstructing, reconstructing, and even destroying the generative capabilities of the system in real-time."
"Cars, however they’re powered, are environmentally cataclysmic, break the tethers of community, and force an infrastructure of dependency that is as financially ruinous to our country as it is dangerous to us as people. In order to build a more sustainable future and a better world for humanity, we need to address the root problems that have brought us to where we so perilously lie today."
"Goodnight Moon is an esoteric text whose colorful pages promise dangerous knowledge to those who know how to look" tongue in cheek but I think there's something to this
"Application for the sonification of text which can be transformed according to various triggers and parameters to facilitate the learning and analysis of literacoustics, reading by listening."
"Voluntarily provocative, The Hater Box transforms the principle of old split flap displays into a random generator of contestations, cold and impersonal." 2018 – Wood, motor, cardstock, print, 3D print
"One of its early tasks was the elaboration of daily orders which were phoned in every afternoon by the shops and used to calculate the overnight production requirements, assembly instructions, delivery schedules, invoices, costings, and management reports. This was the first instance of an integrated management information system."
"TextOCR provides ~1M high quality word annotations on TextVQA images allowing application of end-to-end reasoning on downstream tasks such as visual question answering or image captioning."
"But the smartest and most effective move the industry made (the aforementioned measures wouldn’t work without it) was to push people from My to Me. To introduce forms that would motivate people to see themselves as the main – and then the only – content of what they do online. I’d like to stress that although early web pages (or home pages) are remembered as personal, the person who made it was not the initial content; that turn took place later."
could be fun to play with. "With the help of state-of-the-art deep learning models, Layout Parser enables extracting complicated document structures using only several lines of code. This method is also more robust and generalizable as no sophisticated rules are involved in this process."
"I set my goal not use ANY microcontrollers or FPGAs in my build - just basic discrete logic components. So, what exactly am I going to build? I needed to NOT set too a high goal for myself, so I would be able to finish this project in *relatively* short time (Is 2yrs short enough? :-) ). The most basic RISC-V CPU, that is supported by compilers, must include the extension "I" (Integer) and it must be at least 32 bit. So now I had all the information I'm going to need, so it was time to start building."
"Cryptocurrency is one of the worst inventions of the 21st century. I am ashamed to share an industry with this exploitative grift. It has failed to be a useful currency, invented a new class of internet abuse, further enriched the rich, wasted staggering amounts of electricity, hastened climate change, ruined hundreds of otherwise promising projects, provided a climate for hundreds of scams to flourish, created shortages and price hikes for consumer hardware, and injected perverse incentives into technology everywhere. Fuck cryptocurrency."
"The Loop of Restarting is a danger in any long-term creative project.... The longer a project goes on, the more you will learn and mature, and consequently, the worse the temptations will become. Over the many months and years that a game takes to make, new tools will also come out that will tempt you to switch over, with the tantalizing promise that, after some initial rejiggering, your productivity will soar. New games will release during your development, too, adding extra pressure to "keep up" and stay competitive. [...] The problem is that these temptations never go away. There will always be a better way to do it, a better tool, more games coming out. At some point you either learn to live with it and release your game or simply stay in the loop forever."
on data and dysphoria: "The data fetishist is no doubt riled up at this point, eager to move the goalposts again. But I have left the field, there is no game left here. Every time you melodramatically invoke your concern, or interest in studies and numbers, I see your admission that you are in want of a justification for your aggression, for your eugenics, and for your authoritarianism."
"Pleasant people doing pleasant things and there's not much drama and you just kind of feel lovely about the world." incl some of my favorites like totoro, paterson, tampopo, whisper of the heart
"Trans narratology teaches us that neither a singular narrative of becoming, nor the laying out of life as a causal sequence, will do justice to the complexity of trans identification. Trans lives slip and slide, forward and backward in time."
"a noisy but fascinating collection of documents which can be studied through the lens of natural language processing, information retrieval, and linguistics"
includes pre-trained models for a bunch of interesting tasks: speech recognition, speaker recognition, speech enhancement, speech processing (including multi-microphone processing)
'Our leaders will blather on about the burden these programs put on "taxpayers" but they don't actually care about that, they only care that the solution feels sufficiently punitive. This pointless refusal to implement workable policies has been a catastrophe for society, directly costing billions to taxpayers and sucking literally trillions out of the economy in lost productivity and excess crime'
"Icons are not primitive or rudimentary attempts to duplicate the physical world; they are nuanced and complex attempts to embody the spiritual world."
"How many words can we form by making folds in the straw-paper slogan? I could not have answered that question in 1967. I couldn’t have even asked it. But times change. Enumerating all the foldable messages now strikes me as an obvious thing to do when presented with the straw wrapper. Furthermore, I have the computational means to do it—although the project was not quite as easy as I expected."
"So conservatives shifted from blocking marriage equality to blocking restroom access for transgender people in 2016. Having lost that round, they’ve shifted to “protecting” young people from gender-confirmation treatment, still grounded in the same theories of sex and gender as biologically determined."
'This site features a curriculum developed around the television series, Halt and Catch Fire (2014-2017), a fictional narrative about people working in tech during the 1980s-1990s. The intent is for this website to be used by self-forming small groups that want to create a “watching club” (like a book club) and discuss aspects of technology history that are featured in this series.' really thoughtful and thorough!
'Slowly, slowly we reconnect the threads that connect me typing at my laptop in 2021 CE London backwards in time... to the dawn of the written word in the fertile crescent, when the gala priestesses of Inanna, who spoke only in the women’s tongue, sang in praise of her, “To turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man are yours, Inana” nearly four thousand years ago.'
"Despite impressive performance on standard benchmarks, deep neural networks often fail when deployed to real-world systems, due to distribution shifts, training artifacts, and noisy data. To address these vulnerabilities, we introduce Robustness Gym: a simple and extensible toolkit for robustness testing that supports the entire spectrum of evaluation methodologies, from adversarial attacks to rule-based data augmentations."
"I've received several DMs from friends asking what do to about parents/family members who believe misinformation regarding the election, vaccines and COVID. Here's a research-based thread to help explain the roots of these beliefs and how to (and how *not* to) address them."
"graphs the usage of words (whether in description or dialogue) over time, distinguishing that usage both by the gender of the fictional characters the terms are associated with, and by the gender of the authors who used them"
"detects toxic, disruptive, or otherwise problematic speech in real-time, and gives you the option to have our software respond immediately, or to escalate to your moderation team"
"Hate speech can come in many forms, including memes that combine text and images. This kind of multimodal content can be particularly challenging for AI to detect because it requires a holistic understanding of the meme." that is not the reason that hate speech is difficult to detect, and it's actually harmful that you think it's the reason, sorry
