Allison's bookmarks (2024 archive)

Most recent

Emerald Source Code Commentary

"[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."

videogames pokemon retro

Impossible Word: Toward a Poetics of Aphasia | The Poetry Foundation

"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."

poetics poetry linguistics psychology

An Indigenous Modernist Artist Finally Gets Her Due

"[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

art design nativeamerican modernism

A Student’s Guide to Not Writing with ChatGPT

"[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"

ai chatbots education

“Multiple Worlds Vying to Exist”: Philip K. Dick and Palestine (by Jonathan Lethem)

"... 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."

writing scifi philosophy palestine

AI in education is a public problem | code acts in education

"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."

ai edtech education technology

Adactio: Journal—Unsaid

"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."

ai ux design

Wordplay

"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."

programming teaching

Agile’s insistence on co-location is disabling | Thudfactor

"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."

business architecture design work accessibility disability

Artificial intentionality - by Rob Horning - Internal exile

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."

ai communication language

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s New ‘Message’ on Israel and Palestine

"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."

politics culture

Paul Graham and the Cult of the Founder - by Dave Karpf

"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."

tech culture

Info - Data Vandals

"We present data in interesting, exciting, and revolutionary new ways, stopping people in their tracks and making them want to learn more"

data activism nyc

Getty Vocabularies (Getty Research Institute)

"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)

datasets language art

wordfreq/SUNSET.md at master · rspeer/wordfreq

"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

ai nlproc text

Writing a C Compiler | No Starch Press

"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."

programming

Library Field – Syllabus

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?"

libraries epistemology ecology geography syllabus

Trilling, 2006 (continuous loop) on Vimeo

"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."

video art nostalgia

reMarkable Connection Utility (RCU)

"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."

software remarkable opensource

American Suburbs Are a Horror Movie and We’re the Protagonists

"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?"

urbanplanning horror

American academic freedom is in peril | Science

"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"

politics research academia

The Dungeon Mode

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."

videogames architecture dungeons fantasy theory

AIAAIC - AIAAIC Repository

"The independent, open, public interest resource detailing incidents and controversies driven by and relating to AI, algorithms, and automation"

ai datasets journalism

Ali Alkhatib: Destroy AI

"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."

ai academia design hci

CLLD Concepticon 3.2.0 -

"...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..."

linguistics semantics datasets

Adding Crush Ribs To 3D Printed Parts For A Better Press Fit | Hackaday

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?!

fabrication 3dprinting

Fast Crimes at Lambda School

"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."

education technology culture

On the Grid - by Michele Banks - Artologica

"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."

art aesthetics writing poetics

The Encyclopedia Project, or How to Know in the Age of AI - Public Books

"[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."

epistemology ai text language internet culture

How Q Became Everything – Mother Jones

"... 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."

politics gender culture

How to help someone use a computer

"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."

computers pedagogy

Another RPG Engine by Another RPG Enthusiast

"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."

games rpgs programming twine interactivefiction

What Liberal Arts Education Is For – Teaching – innig.net

"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."

programming pedagogy academia

The Deaths of Effective Altruism | WIRED

"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."

politics philosophy philanthropy

Pankaj Mishra · The Shoah after Gaza

"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."

politics history

Doing their hype for them • Buttondown

"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"

ai text poetics

Projekt Weberknecht

"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

weaving fabrication

How to Escape From the Iron Age? | LOW←TECH MAGAZINE

"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."

materials climatechange

Jakob Nielsen’s Bad Ideas about Accessibility – Brian DeConinck

"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."

accessibility ux interface ai

Poetix – Post Position

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."

poetics poetry text language computation

A Body That’s All Surface

"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."

art

BlueSCSI

"an open source, open hardware, and open design SCSI solution for vintage computers"

retrocomputing mac

Always Do The Right Thing

"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."

politics

Long Covid Research Library - Research-Aid Networks

"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."

health medicine longcovid

No Vehicles In The Park

"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."

moderation socialsoftware culture games law

The Insurance Apocalypse Conversation America Won't Have

"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."

realestate climatechange politics

Why Would I Buy This Useless, Evil Thing? - Aftermath

"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."

ai design consumerelectronics

AI versus old-school creativity: a 50-student, semester-long showdown – Still Water Lab

"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."

ai teaching pedagogy

Large Language Publishing

"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."

publishing academia ai web copyright