Allison's bookmarks (2025 archive)

Most recent

Predictive Capital – Roads to terminal alienation, soil to server farm, reason to vibe – CreativeApplications.Net

"Vibe Coding severs this constitutive relation. The Vibe Coder does not enter the Symbolic order, but submits to its statistical imitation. The model offers no Law, no withholding, no exteriority. It does not confront, it echoes. It does not interpellate the subject, only returns a semblance of dialogue without ever addressing you as subject. The Vibe Coder becomes neither full author nor full subject, but a medium through which predictive recombination speaks —spoken by the model as much as speaking through it. The Symbolic order is not engaged but simulated. What emerges is not understanding, but interpolation: machinic consensus dressed in familiar cultural forms."

history literature philosophy programming ai

Deciphering Glyph :: I Think I’m Done Thinking About genAI For Now

"The process-engineering function of an LLM, therefore, is to prevent fundamental problems from ever getting fixed, to reward the rapid-fire overwhelm of infrastructure teams with an immediate, catastrophic cascade of legacy code that is now much harder to delete than it is to write."

programming ai

The 12-bit rainbow palette

"Using a 12-bit colour depth limits the available colours, so slight changes to luminance, chroma, and hue must be made, but these are small enough not to be noticeable. The resulting palette has evenly-spaced hues, only small variations in chroma, and smoothly increasing and decreasing luminance."

web color

Cap'n Proto: Introduction

"I... was the primary author of Protocol Buffers version 2, which is the version that Google released open source. Cap’n Proto is the result of years of experience working on Protobufs, listening to user feedback, and thinking about how things could be done better."

programming

Mika Tajima » Negative Entropy

"These works are simultaneously images and material records of their own making. Field recordings of production sounds were made at each site, then transmuted into digital spectrogram images using a linguistic audio software. Color was assigned to the wave forms, then translated into a pattern by a weaving technician to create a Jacquard fabric."

textiles art weaving

[DAS VIDEOSPIEL] The Anxiety of Grinding – Evergreen Review

"Grinding is a fantasy by which the change you desire can be achieved by continuing to do what you are already doing in small, comfortable increments. Grinding is the copium of liberal democracy: enough small instances of inoffensive protest and general decorum will gradually push society to Max Level. Is Metaphor: ReFantazio an allegory😉 for the Obama administration, some mildly progressive status-quo-ing aestheticized as radical change?" (by Todd Anderson) I disagree with this but it is usefully provocative haha

games gamedesign rpg

What’s the Matter with Abundance? | Malcolm Harris

"Large increases in material output, we are assured, can save liberalism from the civilizational choice between socialism and barbarism. I disagree; refusing to be forthright about society’s structural antagonisms opens the door to demagogues who peddle false conflicts that still ring truer than the liberals’ false peace."

politics capitalism energy

I Used to Teach Students. Now I Catch ChatGPT Cheats | The Walrus

"I am in a position to know and appreciate what a difference education makes to the quality of your life. The vastness of the world it opens up to you while simultaneously instilling in you the curiosity to explore it. The sense of perspective it offers, enabling you to view the events of your life, and the events of whatever historical moment it is yours to live through, in a much larger context, rather than being resigned to viewing them from a standpoint of uncomprehending ignorance, as if they were all happening for the first time and for no discernible reason."

education pedagogy writing ai

Sondage sur l'obsolescence des smartphones | Limites numériques

"Le remplacement d’un smartphone est ainsi plus souvent motivé par la frustration liée à l’accumulation de dysfonctionnements matériels et logiciels sur l’appareil que par une réelle incapacité d’utilisation." (english: smartphone replacement is more often motivated by frustration linked to accumulating hardware and software problems, not by the phone being actually impossible to use) so... smartphone manufacturers are actually *incentivized* to ship and promote shitty software, because it drives sales of newer models. got it.

hardware software phones consumerism sustainability

Proper decoupling practices, and why you should leave 100nF behind – codeinsecurity

"[G]iven that the cost to use a larger, better capacitor is effectively nil in most cases, you can keep experiencing that exact same level of cognitive load avoidance by just using 1uF or 2.2uF instead, in the smallest capacitor package that is practical for the voltage and assembly constraints you have, and placing it right up against the power pins. It’s free real estate, or something."

electronics pcomp

How Digital Marketing Broke Society

"Digital marketing is a fundamental threat to human flourishing, cognitive autonomy, and democratic governance. The industry has normalized a state of perpetual surveillance and manipulation that would have been unthinkable just decades ago. Its methodologies have created a world where attention is constantly hijacked, emotions are continuously manipulated, and reality itself is customized in pursuit of extraction value."

internet media culture politics marketing

Diligence Jones: "I appreciate all the earnest f…" - SFBA.social

"The fight you're in is about segregation. The government is forcing you to choose segregation -- the obstruction of non white people (and white women) -- as well as queer, trans, and disabled people -- from entering or advancing in your industry." honestly "DEI programs" should have been called "anti-segregation programs" since the beginning

politics culture

The hardest working font in Manhattan – Aresluna

"... the imperfections and bad decisions are what makes Gorton come alive. They don’t feel like a profound misunderstandings of typography, typesetting, or Gorton itself. They don’t feel like abuses or aberrations. No, they feel exactly how Gorton was supposed to be used – haphazardly, without much care, to solve a problem and walk away."

typography history technology

The real problem with the AI hype • Wim Vanderbauwhede

"[E]ven if the growth in AI never materialises, the hype has set in motion a chain of events which, if allowed to go unchecked, can only lead to a rise in emissions.... [G]enerators will want to sell [their excess] electricity and therefore push hard to increase consumption... as they need at least to recoup their investment. Data centre operators also want to make a profit... so even if AI would die an ignoble death, they will try to find new workloads, and again push at consumers to use those new services." extrapolating from this: if it wasn't AI, it would be something else. there's nothing in place to meaningfully stop big oil from selling their product and capitalists from using that oil to power whatever new useless scheme they can come up with to make number go up

ai energy climatechange

The Bishop and the Billionaire

"Convincing everyone isn't the goal; noticing direction is, and noticing who aligns with and against simple declarations of truth and decency will do that. Your practiced indifference to convincing your opponents, meanwhile, will deliver the message that truth and decency are things that will be pursued without first receiving permission from indecent liars."

politics

I Met Paul Graham Once – Phill MV

"[E]ssays like pg’s... create the permission structure for people to discriminate against me. [...] I’m better at my job than most. I’d be a better startup founder today than I was in 2015. None of that will matter. It feels as if people like pg, or at least people he hangs out with, who once upon a time believed in me, who lifted me up, recognized my talent, would now prefer that I be relegated to the sex slave caste."

gender politics technology

AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism // New Socialist

"Talking about AI’s environmental impact or its implications for the workforce will not work - they like that, it makes them feel dangerous. Instead of talking about taking money from artists, talk about how it makes them look cheap. If hurting and offending people is part of the point, then we can take that fun away from them by refusing to express hurt or offence, even if we feel it."

ai aesthetics politics

Voters Were Right About the Economy. The Data Was Wrong. - POLITICO

I would like to see their methodology, but their results ring true. "...since 2001, the cost of living for Americans with modest incomes has risen 35 percent faster than the CPI. Put another way: The resources required simply to maintain the same working-class lifestyle over the last two decades have risen much more dramatically than we’ve been led to believe". file under "you treasure what you measure"

politics economics

GailBot: An Automatic Transcription System for Conversation Analysis | Human Interaction Laboratory

from the annals of wrongheaded misunderstandings of the purpose of a technique: "Jeffersonian transcription is slow going. On one hand, the process of re-listening to the audio to add more and more details helps the researcher understand the mechanisms underlying the interaction. On the other hand, the laborious process limits the amount of data researchers can analyze. For example, it would be close to impossible to generate enough Jeffersonian transcripts to train a deep learning language model" next up: thicken your description with GeertzGPT

ai linguistics conversationanalysis transcription

ZADZMO code

"This is a tarpit intended to catch web crawlers. Specifically, it's targetting crawlers that scrape data for LLM's - but really, like the plants it is named after, it'll eat just about anything that finds it's way inside."

poetics web ai languagemodels

We're getting the social media crisis wrong

"The collective perspectives that emerge from social media - our understanding of what the public is and wants - are similarly shaped by algorithms that select on some aspects of the public, while sidelining others. And we tend to orient ourselves towards that understanding, through a mixture of reflective beliefs, conformity with shibboleths, and revised understandings of coalitional politics." essentially: metrics normalize

politics socialmedia

Utopian Visions Through Art and Design – Syllabus

"...the idea of a utopia, a perfect place, seems naive and hopelessly unattainable—unless we revise our understanding to imagine utopia not as an unreachable destination, but as a flexible foundation for thinking critically about the present."

utopia art design history

No Escape: The Weaponization of Gender for the Purposes of Digital Transnational Repression - The Citizen Lab

"[T]he intersecting identities of those targeted by gender-based digital transnational repression – namely, their gender, race, ethnicity, immigration status, and socio-economic class in the host country, among others – lead to compounded vulnerability. Exiled and diaspora women human rights defenders often lack robust social networks and support structures in their host societies, leaving them further isolated and exposed to state repression"

internet culture gender activism