3Blue1Brown - Calculus
3Blue1Brown calculus lessons are back! in pog form. i mean blog form
Opinion | My Life With Long Covid - The New York Times
nytimes is normally publication non grata round these parts but I make an exception for Giorgia Lupi's powerful piece on long covid
The Gumbel-Softmax Distribution – Emma Benjaminson – Mechanical Engineering Graduate Student
New Words
"a speculative research project exploring the use of machine learning for the evolution of language. Large language models (LLM's) are fantastic at capturing our language as it currently is - but language is constantly evolving and adapting. Can machine learning help us create something truly new and unbounded by its training data?"
Pencils, Brushes and Paint 鉛筆、筆、絵の具
presents "code using physical tools like pencils, brushes, and paint as inspiration. [...] By observing things and attempting to express them in code, you can develop your skills and perspective. The freedom to design your own tools can be an invaluable asset for your creativity."
Trans Journalists Association Stylebook and Coverage Guide
concise yet thorough. should be stuff that is second nature to every journalist
Too many news orgs adopt right-wing frames about trans people » Nieman Journalism Lab
"Reporters and editors have unconscious biases. In the case of trans people, that often manifests in worrying more about people who may mistakenly identify as trans — and regret that decision — than about the challenges that trans people face."
'Endemic' SARS-CoV-2 and the death of public health - John Snow Project
"It should also be stressed that this radical shift in our approach to emerging infectious diseases is probably only the beginning of wiping out the hard-fought public health gains of the last 150+ years. This should be gravely concerning to any individuals and institutions concerned with workers and citizens rights. "
cohost! - "Metroid 2 Hacking Retrospective (feat. Maps)"
"clear evidence that children yearn for the depths of SR-388"
Meta in Myanmar, Part IV: Only Connect - Erin Kissane's small internet website
"Our networks don’t create harms, but they reveal, scale, and refine them, making it easier to destabilize societies and destroy human beings. The more densely the internet is woven into our lives and societies, the more powerful the feedback loop becomes."
Patricia Lockwood · Diary: When I Met the Pope
"The raw now is where your elbows live, and your bruises, and your socks slipping down your ankles. It is what cannot be recovered later; the strap of your bag that has flopped over your grave Italian seat mate’s programme; the fear that you have left the sound on your phone on; a text from Hope: ‘You’re about to meet the pope!’ It is the point, probably, of the hair shirt and the cilice that we saw in the Capuchin crypt. Your awkwardness, the edge of confusion, irritation, pain, incomprehension on the pope’s face as you approach him, your hand circling your tummy, clashes of bodies, like beads against one another, which will be worn smooth over time."
Dungeons of Freeport Log 2 – Proc Gen Dungeons – Elissa Black
great discussion of dungeon generation techniques
An Interview with Kimberly Alidio, Author of Teeter – Nightboat Books
"Working with or against writing systems and what other poets and artists have done with them, we learn something vital about language as it relates to identity that isn’t taught in critical ethnic studies classes or by community elders or culture workers. Or in an MFA poetry workshop, for that matter. And what poets know about language and identity that people whose institutional job or mission it is to know about language and identity do not know is in the poet’s work, in the poems. "
We’re Alive, Pablo Is Dead - Momus
"Picasso is the twentieth century’s great Mr. Potato Head, constantly being taken apart and reassembled with his nose in his eyehole and his mouth upside down, because he made himself a plastic body of work and celebrity and left it unattended when he died."
On AI Deployment: AI supply chains (and why they matter)
the claim here is that AI systems are 'different,' but it just looks like regular ol' 'building your software on other people's APIs' to me. except the APIs are garbage and they don't work
Ex Astris Scientia - Commercially Available Chairs in Star Trek
"Countless off-the-shelf office chairs, lounge chairs or car seats appeared in Star Trek productions. Here is a list of the models that we found, among them many design classics." incredible
Community servers - Monoskop
tremendous resource from monoskop: wiki page dedicated to "interdependent, feminist, trans*feminist, free/libre, self-hosted, autonomous, collective, community and art servers"
Jammy Fruit Bars Recipe
yum
Ask Disabled People What They Want. It’s Not Always Technology.
"Technoableism is a particular type of ableism, one that is highly visible in media and entertainment and omnipresent in the ways most people casually talk about technologies aimed at disability.... Technoableism is a belief in the power of technology that considers the elimination of disability a good thing, something we should strive for. It’s a classic form of ableism: bias against disabled people, bias in favor of nondisabled ways of life. Technoableism is the use of technologies to reassert those biases, often under the guise of empowerment."
dell-research-harvard/AmericanStories · Datasets at Hugging Face
"a collection of full article texts extracted from historical U.S. newspaper images [that] includes nearly 20 million scans from the public domain"
Asking for a Letter of Recommendation — Carrie Shanafelt
"Avoid references to family expectations or money. Professors are generally people who have rejected both."
Turn-On Found – cabel.com
this show is... actually kind of amazing
What Is Code Poetry?
Daniel Temkin on Code Poetry
Modern Font Stacks
"System font stack CSS organized by typeface classification for every modern OS" more than sufficient for like 95% of my needs
From Python to Numpy
presents "a different approach concentrating on the migration from Python to Numpy through vectorization..." with "a lot of techniques that you don't find in books and such techniques are mostly learned through experience"
America’s Surprising Partisan Divide on Life Expectancy - POLITICO
"Whiteness encourages whites to reject policies designed to help the poor and reduce inequality because of animosity toward people of color as well as being unaware that the poor include a great many white people."
I use a wheelchair and I want more bike lanes | The Spinoff
"Well planned, inclusive and accessible infrastructure benefits all members of society, especially the marginalised. Lack of cycle infrastructure is negligent, ableist and ageist."
Introduction | Coldtype Tutorial
"[D]o you want to make typographic graphics and animations with code? This is a good & idiosyncratic way to do that." this is tremendous, wow!!
LPython
"a Python compiler that aims to provide optimized machine code by compiling type-annotated Python code. It offers several backends, including LLVM, C, C++, and WASM, which allow it to generate code into multiple target languages simultaneously."
Gender Criticism Versus Gender Abolition: On Three Recent Books About Gender
"Gender is how women are oppressed; sex is the excuse patriarchy uses for the oppression of women. Reality—the reality shared by women, actual women, in the world—really does matter for feminism. Metaphysical definitions of the category “woman” really, really don’t."
Expand my experimental music horizons - noise industrial ambient | Ask MetaFilter
"industrial / noise / ambient / experimental music by women/non-binary/trans folks"
A card game is teaching players about the future of renewable energy
"I like the skeuomorphism of playing cards in video games because they instantly communicate aspects of chance and probability, as well as common affordances like 'drag to play' or discard. They are also able to represent heterogeneous actions. Had the game been a top-down tycoon game, things like public transportation, job training, or insulation retrofits would have been more difficult to visualize as objects you drop on a map. [...] [A]nother design problem addressed by the deck-building gameplay: instead of choosing an action and then choosing where to apply it, the action is already chosen for you, so your choice is about where and not what."
Ekphrasis: a game about looking at things by martha hipley
"a game about going to the museum to get away for a bit and to think about feelings you like to feel"
Chorus: The Modern Media Stack
"I was happy to see that on its way out the door the editorial folks managed to write and publish an 'oral history' of Buzzfeed News. I guess I had been out of the game just long enough to be surprised, and a little hurt, when I realized the story was being told entirely from the editorial perspective. It's a perspective I value, but I can't help but feel a little bit sad that a product came and went... and I still have no idea who was involved in making that, what difficulties they had, what successes they celebrated."
beardicus/awesome-plotters: A curated list of code and resources for computer-controlled drawing machines and other visual art robots.
"A curated list of code and resources for computer-controlled drawing machines and other visual art robots"
What Humanities Scholars Want Students To Know About the Internet: Alternative Paths for Alternative Endpoints | Computing Ed Research - Guzdial's Take
"Computer science sequences don’t usually start with databases, HTML, and building web pages from database queries, but that’s what my humanities scholars advisors wanted. [...] We’re showing that we can start from a different place, and introduce 'advanced' ideas even in the first class. Computing education isn’t a sequence — it’s a network."
Artificial Intelligence - The Authors Guild
"We need to ensure that human creators are compensated, not just for the sake of the creators, but so our books and arts continue to reflect both our real and imagined experiences, open our minds, teach us new ways of thinking, and move us forward as a society, rather than rehash old ideas."
blackout engine
intuitive and fun blackout poetry interface, using snippets from project gutenberg
cohost! - "social alienation in We're All Going To The World's Fair"
"we go to the cinema to suspend our disbelief and imagine a fantastical world. it's the same drive that the protagonist feels. we want to believe that she is experiencing the supernatural, we want the tension to explode into something we can point to as the Monster, the Villain, the Dark Force. but it refuses to give us that, because reality doesn't give us that."
Tiny Awards, a celebration of the small, playful, and heartfelt web - Waxy.org
finalists for the Tiny Awards, honoring websites that 'best embody the idea of a small, playful and heartfelt web.'"
About Bunny Fonts | Faster & GDPR friendly Fonts
"an open-source, privacy-first web font platform designed to put privacy back into the internet" with "a zero-tracking and no-logging policy" though it makes me nervous that there is no like... explanation of why they're doing this, and how they're paying for it, and how long it will last!
The Thesis Whisperer
"Please stop encouraging academics to use social media as a way to create research impact and engagement."
COVID Hasn’t Disappeared — But Empathy, Care and Solidarity Have - Truthout
"Facts about long COVID, about COVID deaths, continue to exist as stray facts; some invisible force stops those facts from coalescing into a map, a narrative. From becoming knowledge." [...] "In the U.S., only if you pledge to die for capitalism, do you get a chance to live"
About - West
"a linked collection of poems that respond to a Chinese elegy carved into the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station... translat[ing] this elegy character by character through the lens of Chinese and other transcontinental railroad workers’ histories" grand, ambitious work of elit/epoetry
The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic's con
"The chatbot’s answers sound extremely specific to the current context but are in fact statistically generic. The mathematical model behind the chatbot delivers a statistically plausible response to the question. The marks that find this convincing get pulled in." this is really good but i wish it approached the topic of psychics with a bit less bro-ey skepticism
Facebook's Threads is so depressing - by Jason O. Gilbert
"Have you ever been high/drunk and you walk into a CVS and the security guard is staring at you? That’s what Threads is. It’s deodorants locked behind plastic. It’s TikTok Hype Houses. It is Joe Biden’s reelection campaign. It’s a sneaker collab between Nike and JP Morgan. It’s your favorite stand-up comic showing up in a commercial for Carvana. "
The algorithmic anti-culture of scale - by Ryan Broderick
on Threads: "It’s like watching two large cryptocurrencies trade with each other. No cultural value is ever really generated, but the numbers go up. And these creators all operate with a nervous intensity that feels almost biblical, constantly jumping to and from recycled trends, hoping to please a finicky and vengeful god that treats them like an invasive species. And, save only a few, most of the Meta creators I’ve met seem to, in return, deeply loathe the content they make, the people who like it, and Meta, itself."
Degenerative AI in education | code acts in education
"[E]ducational technology is overly dominated by psychological conceptions of individual learning... AI-based personalized learning systems [are] based on notions of mastery and... statistical measurement," reflecting an "assumption that human intelligence is an individual capacity, which can therefore be improved with technical solutions — like tutorbots — rather than something shaped by educational policies and institutions."
Why longtermism is the world’s most dangerous secular credo | Aeon Essays
"That is what our ‘vast and glorious’ potential consists of: massive numbers of technologically enhanced digital posthumans inside huge computer simulations spread throughout our future light cone. It is for this goal that, in Häggström’s scenario, a longtermist politician would annihilate Germany. It is for this goal that we must not ‘fritter … away’ our resources on such things as solving global poverty." ugh
/u/spez is right about feudalism and that’s why reddit as we know it is doomed | maya.land
extremely smart, damn "You need manorialism to make little farmers produce surplus, and you need moderation to make openly hosted user-generated content ad-monetizable"
Everest Pipkin on the Utopian Potential of Gardens
"My interest in 'data as medium' is partly motivated by the horror of that, the misery of the being watched, being gathered, with no real opportunity to revoke consent. And also, in truth, by the closeness of that — the touching of me against the whole world." [...] "I want queerness not as a condition under which we are labeled and are made to suffer, or even as a condition under which we are labeled and find individual joy, but as one (of many) gifts for the world."
cohost! - post from @Nalathni
"OceanGate's underengineered, undercooked, doomed submarine isn't merely a metaphor for the hubris of the wealthy, it is a scale model of the way the wealthy dictate our reality. All consequences can be ignored, all blowback can be forestalled, let the end-user eat the cost."
PotionsPress - Etsy
"nature inspired linoleum block prints" that I want in my house
archives.design
an "archive of graphic design related items that are available on the Internet Archives", usefully opinionated, includes some interesting type specimen books
Inside the AI Factory: the humans that make tech seem human - The Verge
"These AI jobs are [the] bizarro twin [of 'bullshit jobs']: work that people want to automate, and often think is already automated, yet still requires a human stand-in." [...] "When AI comes for your job, you may not lose it, but it might become more alien, more isolating, more tedious."
How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)
"By competing against Meta in the brainless growth-at-all-cost ideology, we are certain to lose. They are the master of that game. They are trying to bring everyone in their field, to make people compete against them using the weapons they are selling."
Epicycle Clock by Sophie Houlden
brilliant
My Current Approach To Reducing My COVID Risk | Cogito, Ergo Sumana
thorough and detailed!
Generative AI Takes Stereotypes and Bias From Bad to Worse
"In the US, women are underrepresented in high-paying occupations, but data shows that gender representation across most industries has improved significantly over time. Stable Diffusion depicts a different scenario, where hardly any women have lucrative jobs or occupy positions of power. Women made up a tiny fraction of the images generated for the keyword “judge” — about 3% — when in reality 34% of US judges are women, according to the National Association of Women Judges and the Federal Judicial Center. In the Stable Diffusion results, women were not only underrepresented in high-paying occupations, they were also overrepresented in low-paying ones."
Black Box Mechanics — Crab Fragment Labs
"The reason that black box mechanics are so dicey outside of the casino is that it’s not always clear that a player has opted into the metagame, or that they are qualified to give consent. Those qualifications are, basically, maturity and intelligence, specifically with regard to the mechanics of the game. Any repeatable real-money transaction, such as a loot box, breaks the magic circle and turns every armchair into a swimming pool."
Aureum - Greenhouse Type
gorgeous typeface inspired by victorian houseplants
The Dangers of Forensic Architecture’s Investigative Art – ARTnews.com
on the perils of "art-as-investigation": "Latour was influential in asking people to question the ways that knowledge is produced. But late in life, he made an important clarification: in questioning tools and infrastructure, he said, he never meant to pave the way for post-truth. As Farocki and Latour advocated, we ought to abandon our faith not in truth but in tools. [...] Art does not have protocols for verification or accountability the way other disciplines do"
Erin Kissane
"Despite late capitalism, despite all the things we’re going through, the internet already runs on dedicated volunteer labor."
i refuse to talk to you w those stupid ass ski goggles on your face
"how the hell am I gonna believe you when you say ‘yea I’m listening’ but you’re actually watching a 100 foot screen of Animal Planet bears wrestling each other"
Climate risk is (still) not priced in - by Ethan Fletcher
"The combination of these interconnected shifts - declines in home values for some and increases in home values for others - will result in a shift in wealth away from residents of climate vulnerable places to those in climate durable ones. This climate wealth shift will become a mega-trend in the years ahead."
Predicted benefits, proven harms - The Sociological Review
"AI is not a way of representing the world but an intervention that helps to produce the world that it claims to represent. Setting it up one way or another changes what becomes naturalised and what becomes problematised. Who gets to set up the AI becomes a crucial question of power."
Interpretive Labor: Bridging the Gap Between Map and Territory
"because the needs of these groups are devalued, that struggle is largely seen as a tolerable sacrifice, as the system more or less working, rather than a warning sign that something's wrong."
mr. openai I don’t feel so good | maya.land
"making my writing available for automated summarization? So someone can sell ads by a depersonalized version of my stuff? The feeling is nausea."
Procedural Chinese Landscape Painting in Geometry Nodes Blender 3D | by Shahriar Shahrabi | May, 2023 | Medium
gorgeous procedural geometry in blender (via lynn cherny's newsletter)
For graphic designer Yosh, it’s all about “pushing the edge” through abstract typography
<3
Understanding the Anti-Trans Parent Movement | by Julia Serano | May, 2023 | Medium
'If you understand the two tendencies that I just described — outsiders’ propensity to identify with cis parents rather than their trans children, coupled with parents’ tendency to disbelieve that their children are “really trans” (at least initially, and in some cases permanently) — then it becomes obvious how easy it is for journalists and media producers to manipulate audiences’ opinions of trans youth and gender-affirming healthcare with a few well-placed quotes from reluctant or skeptical parents.'
LOOMIA Soft Electronics | E-textiles
interesting flexible circuit technology for integration with textiles
Synthetic Users: user research without the headaches
after twenty years in this business i thought i'd seen some horseshit. but not until today did i truly see horseshit
Cannes 2023: Asteroid City review
"It’s as if he wants to convince us that behind all the origami is a raw human heart, so he fridges a wife and hopes that’ll stand as a placeholder for emotion."
Trans Studies Syllabus for Bullshit Times – The Abusable Past
"This micro-syllabus offers materials to help students historicize current anti-trans legislation, contextualize it within broader legacies of repression and resistance that stretch beyond the law, and think across multiple strands of political struggle."
Gemini Portal
collected resources on degrowth, communities & scale, forgiveness & growth, and imagining a kinder future on and offline
Prompt injection explained, with video, slides, and a transcript
Statement on the Genocidal Nature of the Gender Critical Movement’s Ideology and Practice
Laying Out a Print Book With CSS | Ian G McDowell's Blog
1-Line Layouts
How I use fountain pens with colored ink for sketching – Julia Bausenhardt
cohost! - "some engine findings"
list of small game engines!
The mounting human and environmental costs of generative AI | Ars Technica
turn your back for a second and everything just gets much, much worse
Typography for Lawyers
Stochastic Parrots Reading / Viewing List
"readings which popped up in the Twitch chat" during Stochastic Parrots day
Introduction - Textual
terminal-based gui toolkit for python
Lessons from the Silicon Valley Bank bailout - by Max Read
"If all bank deposits are backed up by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government, banks in their capacity as depositories and payment processors are essentially public institutions. And if that’s the case, well, why is all my government-insured money funding privately held and profit-generating institutions? Why can’t I just open a free checking and savings account at the Post Office?"
The Case For Shunning - by A.R. Moxon - The Reframe
'It’s almost gotten to be boring, the degree to which people believe that what they refer to as “free speech” should not only allow them to say whatever they want (which it does), but should also prevent other people from understanding them to be the sort of person who says those things.'
William Davies · The Reaction Economy · LRB 2 March 2023
"There’s an ambiguity here as to where the real value lies. Is the reaction testament to the value of the song (or the computer game, the Christmas present or whatever else)? Or is the artefact just an instrument used to provoke the impulsive emotional reaction? The simultaneity of artefact and response suggests a novel synthesis of criticism with behavioural experiment." [...] "reactionaries’ explicit purpose is to restructure society around ‘natural’ hierarchies of race and gender, and to dehumanise those who, for example, exercise the perilous freedom to cross the English Channel in a small boat." via https://www.metafilter.com/198362/The-Cult-of-Reaction
Well, Here We Are - by Frank Lantz - Donkeyspace
"It matters that the first staticky voices we’ve dialed in with our massive, multi-billion-parameter arrays are dreamers, confabulators, and improvisers. It matters that Chess and Go, the sites where we first encountered their older, more serious siblings, are artworks. Artworks carved out of instrumental reason. Artworks that, long before computers existed, were spinning beautiful webs of logic and attention. Art is not a precious treasure in need of protection. Art is a fearsome wellspring of human power from which we will draw the weapons we need to storm the gates of the reality studio and secure the future."
Prey On Invasives
" The proliferation of invasive plants is brought on by broken relationships between people, plants, land and more. Rather than viewing these plants as enemies to be combatted and discarded, we can instead work to value them and bring them back into balanced relation with us and the ecosystems around them. We can become the predators many of these plants lack."
How Creative Writing Programs De-Politicized Fiction ❧ Current Affairs
"I started putting a dividing line between literary novels written before and after World War II. It seemed like the books from the before times were good at doing lots of things. They could world build and philosophize. They could be love story, adventure novel, and satire all in one. Books written after the war, however, could only do one thing at a time. Mostly that one thing was soul-searching or introspection. Serious postwar fiction, whether it was what I was being fed in school or read in the pages of The New Yorker, was about sad white people with relationship problems."
Better Broccoli Casserole Recipe - Cookie and Kate
quinoa, 'cause it's fancy
10 PRINT "YADA YADA YADA" / 20 GOTO 10 / RUN | MetaFilter
on a generative seinfeld
Priya22/project-dialogism-novel-corpus: The official repository for the The Project Dialogism Novel Corpus, a dataset of annotated quotations in full-length English novels.
(via data is plural): "every quotation from 22 novels, plus who speaks each line, who they’re addressing, the characters they mention, and more. With 35,000+ quotations, the corpus 'is by an order of magnitude the largest dataset of annotated quotations for literary texts in English.'"
Why Does It Feel Like Amazon Is Making Itself Worse?
a good explanation
The 20 Essential Bach Recordings | WQXR Editorial | WQXR
generating glitched textiles. celebrate error in code, weaving, and… | by Deanna Gelosi | Jan, 2023 | Medium
Legends of the Hidden Temple by anna anthropy
quack!
An Extremely Intelligent Lava Lamp: Refik Anadol's A.I. Art Extravaganza at MoMA Is Fun, Just Don't Think About It Too Hard | Artnet News
'I sat through two hours of “Unsupervised.” I can’t think of a single image in it that evoked any feeling in me besides curiosity about what it might be referencing.'
Perfectly Good MacBooks From 2020 Are Being Sold for Scrap Because of Activation Lock
"... we have property rights, so the original owner is not the current owner and does not technically have a right to condemn to death what is no longer their property."
About: Mushroom Color Atlas
"a resource and reference for everyone curious about mushrooms and the beautiful and subtle colors derived from dyeing with mushrooms"
Pluralistic: Tiktok’s enshittification (21 Jan 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
"Tiktok won't just starve performers of the "free" attention by depreferencing them in the algorithm, it will actively punish them by failing to deliver their videos to the users who subscribed to them. After all, every time Tiktok shows you a video you asked to see, it loses a chance to show you a video it wants you to see, because your attention is a giant teddy-bear it can give away to a performer it is wooing."
Generative Art Is Stupid. That's How It Should Be. - The Atlantic
'Contra OpenAI’s mission, Compton sees generative software’s purpose differently: The practice of software-tool-making is akin to giving birth to a software creature (“a chibi version of the system,” as she put it to me) that can make something—mostly bad or strange or, in any case, caricatured versions of it—and then spending time communing with that creature, as one might with a toy dog, a young child, or a benevolent alien. The aim isn’t to produce the best or most accurate likeness of a hipster cocktail menu or a daybreak mountain vista, but to capture something more truthful than reality. ChatGPT’s ideas for new emoji are viable, but the Emoji Mashup Bot’s offerings feel fitting; you might use them rather than just post about the fact that a computer generated them.'
Pronouns as Linguistic Care Work | Linguistic Society of America
'None of this is predicated on “trying not to misgender someone” or even “trying not to mess up pronouns accidentally and get yelled at.” Linguistic care work, like any care work truly based in principles of a loving community, cannot run on shame-based fuel. Avoiding shame and harm are only the barest, most basic bar to clear—they do not constitute showing affection. Failing to abuse someone isn’t the same as loving them.'
Towards Declarative Content Generation for Creativity Support Tools - Google Slides
chris martens' slides
Covid & The Immune System
collection of links to papers
Michael Kohn - nintendo64 java
java on the nintendo 64. banger hack imo
Scripting Curves In Blender With Python | by Jeremy Behreandt | Medium
wow. thorough and easy to follow, definitely need to go through this a some point
User Generated Content and the Fediverse: A Legal Primer | Electronic Frontier Foundation
"an introduction to some common legal issues, along with a few practical considerations" (much of which seems to apply to hosting ugc in general?)
cleanEdge
"cleanEdge is a pixel art upscaling algorithm designed for rotating sprites. Its goal is to improve the jumbled pixels and broken lines and edges that result from basic nearest neighbor rotation. The way this works is by upscaling the art in a way that prioritizes those lines and edges."