"In a recent press release, the company insisted that 'we will not hyperfinancialize the social experience (through tokens, crypto trading, NFTs, etc.)' For what it’s worth, that press release also announced they’d raised $15 million in Series A funding from Blockchain Capital." lmao
ttf fonts with wood type distressing and sort of an "overexposed microfiche" look?
good thread on the use of "public" social media posts in ML datasets
"Defining AI along political and ideological language allows us to think about things we experience and recognize productively as AI, without needing the self-serving supervision of computer scientists to allow or direct our collective work. We can recognize, based on our own knowledge and experience as people who deal with these systems, what’s part of this overarching project of disempowerment by the way that it renders autonomy farther away from us, by the way that it alienates our authority on the subjects of our own expertise." (I would add, though I'm sure Alkhatib would agree with this, that attributing authority to something that "learns from examples" is itself a political and ideological act!)
"Consider doing this same experiment, but, instead of poetry, it's literally anything STEM, and, when our criminally underpaid participants preferred ChatGPT, we gleefully write a paper titled 'AI-generated physics is indistinguishable from human-written physics.' It's unimaginable that such a paper would pass peer-review in any scientific journal."
"The individual human psyche does not seem like a thing held in common. But, in fact, that presumption may itself be a symptom of the enclosure of the psyche, although there are certainly many other forces leading toward that same conclusion.... From this perspective, the enclosure of the human psyche deprives us of a common world, which yields an experience of solidarity and belonging."
"100 million commercial points-of-interest (POI) worldwide and is rich with real-world information" some good open source data, but a lot of the actually interesting attributes (hours, tips, descriptions) are only available for $$$
"Their results say that 3% of participants' actual lives might've been saved by Replika. That means 3% of participants are tethered to life by a venture funded tech company that can simply disappear at any time, or, more likely, decide to charge more money, because they can. How much are you willing to pay to not die tomorrow?"
"[E]conomic elites have 'avoided questions of structural violence and a broader critique of power relations' by convincing historically marginalized individuals that 'telling one’s story' doesn’t just offer healing, it can also lead to personal advancement... Unfortunately... 'the majority of those who tell their stories are not able to improve their conditions.'"
nyu library has this online, but it's in the goofy o'reilly ebook reader thing
these are kinda fun
"over 4 million frames of motion capture data for 100 different styles of locomotion"
"When the incoming administration leverages technology to carry out mass deportations and other human rights violations, do we have a plan to stop it, or at least mitigate harm and build power for the future?"
good list of things to try
this is about M:TG (obviously) but a lot of stuff here is relevant to designing, e.g., skill trees
"[A] book in the spirit of "A Commentary on the Sixth Edition Unix Operating System" that examines and explains the source code of one of the most popular video games ever made, based on the decompilation work of PRET."
"The notion that the language of one (Cummings) is considered legitimate due to its production by an autonomous will or intention into language and its subversions, and the other (Wernicke’s patient) not so because it is an effect of illness and therefore an unintended accident, reproduces a system of value contingent on the Western subject of colonialism-capitalism. The division of poetic versus aphasic (read: not-poetic) speech is layered with the racism, heteropatriarchy, and ableism of a colonial order that also continues to delegitimate other syntactical and linguistic deviations found in linguistic practices."
"[T]he top panel of each piece... captur[es] the essence of her subject through narrative symbols and shapes... The middle panel riffs on the imagery established in the first panel, zooming in on particular forms to create a graphic pattern, inflected with Art Nouveau style... The third panel brings in Native imagery, often referencing Plains Indian culture, stories, objects, and motifs used in beadwork and leatherwork." gorgeous
tons to explore here, esp David Drake
"[S]tudents [are] creative young people, so they empathize with robbed creators. They want tools that help them, not hinder them. And a lot of them are (rightly) concerned about the environment, so they’re shocked to learn that ChatGPT takes ten times the amount of energy Google does to answer the same question, usually worse." Also the Jared White quote: "You can literally just not use it"
"Here sonic absence is visualized, and it is yellow.... Auditory interruption gets transposed onto the textual plane, as the rectangle veils the ruled lines it floats above.... The effect becomes all the more palpable when we consider that the manuscript may have been read aloud."
"... in Dick’s novels, again and again, the veil of a unitary reality is ripped off, in favor of the revelation that we live in an existential abyss—one that is also an existential plurality. However painful the transition may feel, the true nightmare isn’t this abyss of infinite possibility but the attempted imposition upon it of a single viewpoint."
good tips toward stack allocation in gameboy assembly
"AI in education can be characterized by ‘critical hype’—forms of critique that implicitly accept what the hype says AI can do, and inadvertently boost the credibility of those promoting it. The risk of both forms of hype is schools assume a very powerful technology exists that they must urgently address, while remaining unaware of its very real limitations, instabilities and faults or the complex ethical problems associated with data-driven technologies in education."
"There’s a quote by Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen that UX designers like repeating: 'Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context. A chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.' But none of the speakers at [the conference] chose to examine the larger context of the [generative AI] tools they were encouraging us to use."
"A single PHP file which acts as a basic ActivityPub bot server"
jeremy douglass breaks fatfinger.js for fun and profit
"a tool for converting vector artwork to KiCAD PCB files that lives in your browser"
"a programming platform designed to be global, supporting all of the world's languages, but also be about the world's languages. A platform on which everyone can create, with whatever abilities they have, to share interactive content that anyone can experience. For youth and young adults who want to express themselves through interactive words, emojis, and typography, playfully and artfully. Not with the goal of getting power for themselves, but to create a computational world that recognize the incredible strength and necessity of our beautiful differences."
very informative essay with good inline demonstrations
"beyond inflated key user metrics, our in-game research revealed an X-rated pedophile hellscape" has to be one of the worst buried ledes of all time
christ what a piece of shit
i always lose track of this site, which is very nice
"Fully remote work combined with regular and easily-accessible video-conferencing mimics much of the hub-and-spoke workspace design. In some cases ways it works even better. Video conferences can handle arbitrarily small or large groups of participants without any conference room conflicts. For those of us with other needs — with ADHD, anxiety disorders, hearing or vision loss, or mobility issues — we are more free to create the kinds of workspaces we need without impinging on other people’s work styles or space. A brightly-lit but cramped office space, again with long desks but pushed close together."
"When a decision making apparatus is non-human and your system's POSIWID function is to extract and dehumanize and murder for profit and power, let's call that what it is: humans with power deciding to harm the world, with some extra steps."
too many good quotes from this, among them: "[T]here are no labor shortcuts for caring, in and of itself, no stretching a little bit of intentionality to provide focused attention across some ever increasing population. Care doesn’t scale; cruelty does. You can’t automate your way around the infinite obligation to the other."
a few data points from a report that is hidden behind a form asking you to donate your e-mail address to a sales department; mostly anecdotes otherwise
at once hilarious, useful, and brilliant from a technical perspective
"I have a deep-seated fear... that the Black struggle will... just be about narrow Black interest.... I don’t think that’s how Martin Luther King thought about the Black struggle. I know that’s not how Du Bois thought about the Black struggle. I know that’s not how Baldwin thought about the Black struggle. Should it turn out that we have our first Black woman president, and our first South Asian president, and we continue to export 2,000-pound bombs to perpetrate a genocide.... I’m going to do what I can in the time that remains, and the writing that I have, to not allow that to be, because that is existential death for the Black struggle, and for Black people, as far as I’m concerned."
detailed description with lots of links
"The tech industry was never perfect. It never lived up to its lofty ambitions. But it has gotten demonstrably worse. And I think the fork-in-the-road moment was when the industry stopped trying to celebrate old-school hackers like Aaron Swartz and started working full-time to build monuments to Sam Altman instead."
"We present data in interesting, exciting, and revolutionary new ways, stopping people in their tracks and making them want to learn more"
not sure why i couldn't find these before? small, relatively inexpensive, same brand as the trackpads in the steam deck
"we should approach the public policy debate around this assuming that someday, we could be victims of exploding batteries, too"
"structured resources for the visual arts domain, including art, architecture, decorative arts, other cultural works, archival materials, visual surrogates, and art conservation" tons of fun stuff in here, love me a controlled vocabulary (via data is plural via lynn cherny)
"The field I know as 'natural language processing' is hard to find these days.... It's rare to see NLP research that doesn't have a dependency on closed data controlled by OpenAI and Google, two companies that I already despise. [...] [C]ollecting a whole lot of text in a lot of languages... used to be a pretty reasonable thing to do, and not the kind of thing someone would be likely to object to. Now, the text-slurping tools are mostly used for training generative AI, and people are quite rightly on the defensive. If someone is collecting all the text from your books, articles, Web site, or public posts, it's very likely because they are creating a plagiarism machine that will claim your words as its own." i feel this in my very bones
straightforward tutorial, links to complete example
"Even if these systems were providing value to disadvantaged people, that shouldn’t make them off limits to criticism. Is it classist to call out the shady business practices of companies like Walmart and Dollar General just because many lower income people depend on the low prices they provide?"
"I didn’t pay all that money for a good seat in the speakeasy just to be turned into a narc at the door."
with just a little bit of micropython code. neat!
will probably need this later
wonderful manifesto + sketches on the topic of sustainable computing and graphic design. importantly: "permacomputing requires thorough consideration to prevent it from becoming a hobby for the privileged or glorifying and aestheticizing poverty"
review of new Agnès Varda biography
"For those eager to truly grasp how compilers work, Writing a C Compiler dispels the mystery. This book guides you through a fun and engaging project where you’ll learn what it takes to compile a real-world programming language to actual assembly code."
Shannon Mattern: "What if we imagined that Field as a Library: a public space, a social infrastructure, an intellectual and ecological commons, a site for the convergence of myriad ways of knowing?"
a wonderful, thoughtful, and down-to-earth statement on LLM use in educational contexts. "I’m a super straight-laced Mormon and, like, never ever swear or curse, but in this case, the word [bullshit] has a formal philosophical meaning... so it doesn’t count :)" lmao.
fascinating overview w/bibliography concerning tally sticks, tokens, counting boards, abaci, etc
"Trilling scrolls right to left across the screen, recombining footage from the early 80s television program "Three's Company" into a sequence of traveling gestural loops."
"All-in-one offline/local management software for reMarkable e-paper tablets (RM1 and RM2). RCU ensures the user's data is never out of their control, completely unshackled from the manufacturer's proprietary cloud."
useful info on how sleep states are advertised and controlled
hahahaha "When AI is mentioned, it tends to lower emotional trust, which in turn decreases purchase intentions"
"American suburbs are full of ugly, empty, liminal spaces: spaces you are not meant to linger in or enjoy. They’re the creepy hallways of the built environment, and you can’t feel comfortable traversing them unless you’re zooming past them in a car. Why should we fill our cities and towns with places like this?"
i think what the "eventually generative ai will be indistinguishable from human-made things" folks are failing to understand is that not only do the methods of creation leave traces in the media they create, you can't predict beforehand what those traces will be; also, people are really really good at recognizing these traces
"Working at an AI-equipped workplace is like being the parent of a furious toddler who has bought a million Sea Monkey farms off the back page of a comic book"
"researchers—from tenured professors to undergraduate students—have been subjected to online harassment, lawsuits, and repeated smears in partisan media. Some have received physical threats to their safety in comments, emails, phone calls, and even letters"
"Increasingly, despair is considered a national security issue as well as a health crisis." no of course we don't live in a dystopia, why do you ask
(proprietary) platform for qualitative research from conversations
"Right now [California insurer of last resort FAIR] is facing $340bn in exposure against just $250m in cash, so a single $8bn fire around Lake Arrowhead would wipe it out" yikes
html excerpt from wiley's mfa thesis: "A dungeon raid is a violent archaeology carried out within a hostile system of architecture rather than in a specific place. The “place” of a videogame dungeon lies in a form of visionary architecture, created by some imperial force positioned in a hierarchy of power that is part of a fantasy world... Adjacent to fantasy and architecture, dungeon games have an opportunity to critique history, power, place, and orientation."
"The independent, open, public interest resource detailing incidents and controversies driven by and relating to AI, algorithms, and automation"
"... refuses algorithmic humiliation for power and profit maximisation, focusing on activities of mutual aid and solidarity"
"These systems exist to facilitate violence, and HCI researchers who have committed their careers to curl back that violence at the margins have considerably more of something in them than I have. I hope it’s patience and determination, and not self-interested greed."
"...links concept labels from different conceptlists to concept sets. Each concept set is given a unique identifier, a unique label, and a human-readable definition. Concept sets are further structured by defining different relations between the concepts..."
"As a rule, I wouldn't have said that resource burning, hype driving, copyright infringing AI companies tend to be anywhere near the left of the political spectrum. In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that those tend to be quite distinctly right-wing (and libertarian at that) "qualities"."
"a digital circuit simulation platform... designed primarily for educational use... an open-source project with an active community"
relating a fun adventure: emulating a 128k mac on a pi pico
nice simple guide with links to resources
crush ribs: "a set of very small standoffs that deform as a part is press-fit into them. Instead of a piece of hardware making contact with the entire inside surface of a hole, it makes contact only with the crush ribs. Press fitting a part into crush ribs is far easier (and more forgiving) than trying to get the entire mating surface exactly right." tried this out and... it really does work?!
"I think Austen could have found success starting an MLM back in Utah, a state run rampant with get-rich-quick schemes. His mistake was going after education in California, a state ready to deal with for-profit schools. He wasn't ready for the law."
i don't wanna be collected, i want you to dry your dishes with a towel i made until it falls apart
"Yes, someone needs to figure out what the implications of quantum computing are for cryptography, but I guarantee you that it is not Synergy Greg"
"So maybe writing about art is, as Krauss wrote of the grid, a way of covering the space between what we can know (the scientific) and what we can only feel (the spiritual). There’s probably no way to make these things join up seamlessly, so we place a lattice of words on top to cover the messy bits or the blank spots."
"[W]hat is currently sold to us as “Artificial Intelligence”... is neither intelligent nor entirely artificial, yet it’s pumping the internet with automated content more quickly than you can fire an editorial office. No system predicated on these assumptions can hope to discern “misinformation” from “information”: both are reduced to equally weighted packets of content, merely seeking an optimization function in a free marketplace of ideas. And both are equally ingested into a great statistical machinery, which weighs only our inability to discern."
"Noise is not a complicated concept, but it has many subtleties." practical, detailed introduction with code samples
helpful writeup of the very informative youtube video
practical, straightforward advice
"... debates over gender binaries are also material claims... not just cultural ones. [...] “They’re not shitting you when they say the world would come to an end, because their world would come to an end,” Moreton said."
"a resource for people who are curious about how prototyping or 'remaking' source materials intersects with the praxis of literary and textual criticism."
"a JupyterLab extension for 3D geometry modeling with collaborative editing support" this is cool but how come I didn't know about Open CASCADE until today
"Whenever they start to blame themselves, respond by blaming the computer. Then keep on blaming the computer, no matter how many times it takes, in a calm, authoritative tone of voice. If you need to show off, show off your ability to criticize bad design. When they get nailed by a false assumption about the computer's behavior, tell them their assumption was reasonable. Tell *yourself* that it was reasonable."
wonderful, fun and detailed overview of restoring a c64
well this is gratifying
expansive thread on how to do multiplication with processors that don't have multiplication instructions
"An engine for creating role-playing games using Twine's SugarCube language. Features a complex battle system that can be modified and integrated into your Twine stories."
comprehensive tutorial on raycasting for low-resource machines
cool interactive visualization/explainer
"Much of what I know about problem-solving, creativity, how to handle frustration, how to be skeptical of my own hubris, how complex systems behave, how human relationships work, how to communicate, how to help, how to puzzle things out, how to be tenacious, how to be kind — I could go on — I learned from writing software. Programming helped prepare me to be a parent, a spouse, a musician, a teacher, a citizen, a human."
"What EA pushes is expected value as a life hack for morality. Want to make the world better? GiveWell has done the calculations on how to rescue poor humans. A few clicks and you’re done: Move fast and save people."
"Technology and the rational division of labour had enabled ordinary people to contribute to acts of mass extermination with a clear conscience, even with frissons of virtue, and preventive efforts against such impersonal and available modes of killing required more than vigilance against antisemitism."
"The central claim of the tech companies selling LLMs is that any work that people do that results in text artifacts is just "text in-text out" and can therefore be replaced by their synthetic text-extruding machines. The best response to that claim is not "oh no, we can't keep up" but to take pride in one's work... and push back"
"survivable futures require that we all have access to better ways to be together online"
"a selection of reference books showcasing techniques and designs for embroidering and weaving letters" some truly gorgeous stuff in here
"Doug Clouse explores connections between typography and tectonic crafts, those that build by the accumulation of similar units. Typewriter art, food cart signs, letterpress printing, type design, needle work, weaving, bricklaying, and mosaics reveal similar creative impulses that are not well understood."
"Instead of the shafts of a conventional loom the Weberknecht-loom has a pattern device that is equipped with pattern discs. These discs have small raised rings on their surface, the warp lifters, which will lift up the warps threads when in working position. Otherwise the thread remains lowered on the larger centre ring." extremely cool idea, free 3d models and instructions, i wanna make one this summer
dyed PLA to match classic colors
"We need much more steel if we replace thermal power plants with renewable ones. Because there is not enough steel scrap available, we can only produce that extra steel from iron ore in blast furnaces burning fossil fuels. To address climate change, we need to build low-carbon sources quickly and in great numbers. However, to achieve circular material flows and build low-carbon power sources from scrap and renewable electricity, we would have to do the opposite: slow down the development of a low-carbon power grid."
"People who take precautions to avoid COVID are making the wise decision to protect themselves and their families; they are also safeguarding their ability to work and earn money in a society that disposes of people who cannot produce. It is a rational decision; in the case of Long COVID patients, it is a necessary one."
"If texts become liquid, they become flexible, permeable, and difficult to contain. If we can make them slosh around in a big bucket, maybe we can catch some drops on our tongue..."
yet another example of how the nytimes is a horseshit newspaper and organization
"In other words, some users get the full experience, the one with all the words, all the context, and all the options. But if Nielsen’s AI thinks you have a disability, you’ll get a different experience, a simpler experience that’s more appropriate for people like you. It’s an ugly kind of paternalism with a new AI twist."
Nick Montfort's poetics: "Writing very small-scale computational poems allows me to learn more about computing and its intersection with language and poetry. Not computing in the abstract, but computing as embodied in particular platforms, which are intentionally designed and have platform imaginaries and communities of use and practice surrounding them."
"Open source, open data, open training code, fully reproducible and auditable text embedding model"
references, articles, publications on the history of fax machines
I define "writing" as a heuristic or a way of making educated guesses, letter by letter, until a writing task is considered complete. Users can experience this with whichever file they choose to upload."
"Participating in their strange bureaucracies is a major concession of our time that we could use for our animal purposes, to observe and make sense of the world, and to describe OUR visions. I propose that we stop playing along. I am imagining a type of degrowth, a disassembly of dominant structures, a refusal."
"the manual can be a compound collaborative object around which a social ecology emerges and evolves" (Shannon Mattern, as always, bringing the heat)
"an open source, open hardware, and open design SCSI solution for vintage computers"
"How do we expect others to do the right thing when we think doing the right thing is dangerous? It’s a question that people won’t ask, if they’ve found a violence that makes them feel safe. The questions that people ask when they’ve found a violence that makes them feel safe ask usually focuses exclusively on the behavior of the people who suffer under that violence."
"This online library contains many of the important papers that have been published on Long Covid. We’ve gone through most of them (as we do on a daily basis) and can say for sure that the collection of papers in here are of great value for getting a good understanding of Long Covid."
"If ensuring quality is your responsibility, and the tool you’re using pushes bad quality your way, you are fighting against gravity in that situation. It’s you versus the forces of entropy."
"The best solution for working with PDF files in Linux." but it's seventy dollars?!
big list of covid studies
"If gender weren’t mostly for other people’s benefit, we wouldn’t put so much effort into it (I sweep my floors before friends come over, not once they’ve gone back home)." (by charles theonia)
"You might think you can add enough epicycles to your rules to avoid this problem. For instance, you could list all of the different sorts of vehicles from this game in either the yes or the no column. I don't think this is true. I think you can reduce the problem, but I don't think you can eliminate it."
"You work 'Eraserhead' into your repertoire of nicknames for Art but it doesn’t land as hard as some of the others because even though he senses the cruelty in your intent, he didn’t see the movie and doesn’t know what you’re talking about."
some good tips on weave structure and yarns for towels
lmao i have worked on teams where each of these dark patterns were explicit design goals
"... there is little room to doubt that the current implementation of AI Assistants discourages code reuse. Instead of refactoring and working to DRY ('Don't Repeat Yourself') code, these Assistants offer a one-keystroke temptation to repeat existing code."
"Despite its name, Red (the album) does not have the most Red (the color) references. That honor goes to Midnights." via data is plural
every onion story eventually comes true
kind of the essence of what the west looks like imo
"The coastal homeowners and the private insurance companies and the reinsurance companies and the state governments are all looking at one another to rescue them, without acknowledging that they are all in the same sinking ship. The real solution is to deal with climate change, which will be a long global struggle. But even on a slightly more practical level than that, this is at minimum a federal government problem."
Andy Baio's "told you so" about Ello. would be hilarious if it weren't so tragic. VC kills everything it touches
"Ethics rule of thumb: If you start to sound like The Zuck, stop."
"I would not trust a large language model to... plan an itinerary in a new city, because I’m not a boring or unimaginative person who lets a cheap piece of plastic tell me to do the ten most common results for 'stuff to do in London.' [...] This latest push for AI is making the world lazier, less curious, harder to navigate, ripping people off, and creating a topic somehow more tiring than that year these people wouldn’t shut the fuck up about NFTs and then never brought it up ever again when the market imploded."
"Even after the lessons, students seemed to feel more confident with a traditional approach than with AI. Most felt low-to-moderate confidence about achieving their writing goals with AI, and even less confidence about how to use AI ethically. We hope with future research to figure out whether this insecurity is due to inexperience or endemic to AI tool use."
"[I]t is actually possible to reconstruct the entire memory state of almost any game and in fact create an rp2040-based adapter that acts as a USB video class device offering the on-screen game footage in realtime. Players can simply put this adapter into their Game Boy and use it like a webcam without additional drivers or knowledge"
"There are a hundred and one reasons to worry about Elsevier mining our scholarship to maximize its profits. I want to linger on what is, arguably, the most important: the potential effects on knowledge itself. At the core of these tools—including a predictable avalanche of as-yet-unannounced products—is a series of verbs: to surface, to rank, to summarize, and to recommend. The object of each verb is us—our scholarship and our behavior. What’s at stake is the kind of knowledge that the models surface, and whose knowledge."
"We also want to encourage our users to rethink the purposes and the dynamics of publishing altogether, in ways that might allow for the development of new, open, collective, equitable processes of creating and sharing knowledge that re-center agency over the ways that scholarly work develops and circulates with the scholars themselves"
clear, well-written overview of the positive feedback/signalling game of SEO