Random link from the archives: "Uncomfortable ASMR — Real Life" https://web.archive.org/web/20180511072402/http://reallifemag.com/uncomfortable-asmr/ originally retrieved Fri May 11 07:24:02 EDT 2018
Why so many Steam games have weirdly similar (and forgettable) names | PC Gamer https://www.pcgamer.com/games/why-so-many-steam-games-have-weirdly-similar-and-forgettable-names/
Random link from the archives: "A Flower for Your Thoughts | Lapham’s Quarterly" https://web.archive.org/web/20190118092621/https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/flower-your-thoughts originally retrieved Fri Jan 18 09:26:21 EST 2019
Notable Sandwiches #140: Sloppy Joe • Buttondown https://buttondown.com/theswordandthesandwich/archive/notable-sandwiches-140-sloppy-joe/
Random link from the archives: "Tabletop Storygaming: A Penny For My Thoughts – Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling" https://web.archive.org/web/20260707142607/https://emshort.blog/2012/02/18/tabletop-storygaming-a-penny-for-my-thoughts/ originally retrieved Tue 07 Jul 2026 02:26:07 PM EDT
Only Maybe: The Periodic Table of Energy - Leary & Wilson [RECOVERED!] https://maybelogic.blogspot.com/2026/07/the-periodic-table-of-energy-leary.html
Tabletop Storygaming: A Penny For My Thoughts – Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling https://emshort.blog/2012/02/18/tabletop-storygaming-a-penny-for-my-thoughts/
seeing as how twitter & DOGE are unambiguous disasters in a way that's obvious across political affiliations, i'd honestly consider any investor who encourages putting money into spacex as suspect. you don't promote a business that's doomed by leadership to inevitable failure except as a pump-and-dump
Random link from the archives: "Wobbly Tables and the Problem with Futurism" https://web.archive.org/web/20211015193200/https://scribe.rip/p/wobbly-tables-and-the-problem-with-futurism-934468d2308 originally retrieved Fri 15 Oct 2021 07:32:00 PM EDT
Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200611011942/https://scribe.rip/p/intractable-evil-and-cope-thereof-45e994ee9bfb originally retrieved Thu Jun 11 01:19:42 EDT 2020
Random link from the archives: "How did usury stop being a sin and become respectable finance? | Aeon Essays" https://web.archive.org/web/20170713083255/https://aeon.co/essays/how-did-usury-stop-being-a-sin-and-become-respectable-finance?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=bdfe024e86-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_07_04&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-bdfe024e86-68693017
Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20190123100452/https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/01/17/massive-new-study-traces-how-corporations-use-charitable-donations-tilt-regulations-their-favor/ originally retrieved Wed Jan 23 10:04:52 EST 2019
Random link from the archives: "What to write with? Styli for clay tablets in the ancient Aegean and eastern Mediterranean" https://web.archive.org/web/20181224083054/https://crewsproject.wordpress.com/2018/11/25/what-to-write-with-styli-for-clay-tablets/
Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20201009080925/https://scribe.rip/p/why-trump-was-inevitable-but-recovery-isnt-76a413ac1bda originally retrieved Fri Oct 9 08:09:25 EDT 2020
write portable reliable software that minimizes external dependencies? nah, let's just make everybody work 5 layers of virtualization deep, reboot the server automatically if any error occurs, and make a local mirror of NPM to supply uninterrupted access to left-pad :(
Random link from the archives: "on the usability of editable software" https://web.archive.org/web/20200820120734/https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/on-the-usability-of-editable-software originally retrieved Thu Aug 20 12:07:34 EDT 2020
Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200611011942/https://scribe.rip/p/intractable-evil-and-cope-thereof-45e994ee9bfb originally retrieved Thu Jun 11 01:19:42 EDT 2020
Random link from the archives: "Lab-grown meat is supposed to be inevitable. The science tells a different story." https://web.archive.org/web/20211015211909/https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-scale/ originally retrieved Fri 15 Oct 2021 09:19:09 PM EDT
Random link from the archives: "Error 406 - Not Acceptable" https://web.archive.org/web/20200309121431/http://michaelgood.info/publications/text-editing/the-use-of-logging-data-in-the-design-of-a-new-text-editor/ originally retrieved Mon Mar 9 12:14:31 EDT 2020
Random link from the archives: "ISOTYPE, Machines which seem to think, 1953, Marie Neurath" https://web.archive.org/web/20220326200755/http://www.fulltable.com/iso/mw.htm originally retrieved Sat 26 Mar 2022 08:07:55 PM EDT
Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20181113121456/https://nationalpost.com/entertainment/books/book-reviews/televangelist-of-technology-kevin-kellys-divinely-guided-the-inevitable-is-irresponsible-at-best originally retrieved Tue Nov 13 12:14:56 EST 2018
Random link from the archives: "Web Typography: Designing Tables to be Read, Not Looked At · An A List Apart Article" https://web.archive.org/web/20171101105627/https://alistapart.com/article/web-typography-tables originally retrieved Wed Nov 1 10:56:27 EDT 2017
Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20220209105451/https://scribe.rip/p/on-adaptable-modes-of-thought-79306c7eec04 originally retrieved Wed 09 Feb 2022 10:54:51 AM EST
if you haven't already, now would be a good time to start going by at least one fake name online that isn't obviously fake. if somebody doesn't legally need your government name they should be provided with one of the acceptable substitutes.
first world problems: my tumblr posts keep escaping containment so i get flooded with absolutely deranged and/or inane shit in the notes. tumblr does not have a 'see only notifications from mutuals' option, which makes it very unsuitable for conversation or community.
Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20220209110548/https://scribe.rip/p/hash-table-attack-8e4371fc5261 originally retrieved Wed 09 Feb 2022 11:05:48 AM EST
Random link from the archives: "GitHub - altryne/awesome-ai-art-image-synthesis: A list of awesome tools, ideas, prompt engineering tools, colabs, models, and helpers for the prompt designer playing with aiArt and image synthesis. Covers Dalle2, MidJourney, StableDiffusion, and open source tools." https://web.archive.org/web/20220919123849/https://github.com/altryne/awesome-ai-art-image-synthesis
Random link from the archives: "Bring Back the Big, Comfortable Bookstore Reading Chair ‹ Literary Hub" https://web.archive.org/web/20240221093047/https://lithub.com/bring-back-the-big-comfortable-bookstore-reading-chair/ originally retrieved Wed 21 Feb 2024 09:30:47 AM EST
is professor-dom a thing? like, can i get paid by people who feel sexual satisfaction when i assign them reading lists and engage them in round-table discussions? or do i have to spit on them or something too
honestly, anybody who gets on television and doesn't respond by dancing in a strange, uncomfortable, and upsetting way then writing an academic article about it is somebody i can't relate to
hot take: Keanu Reeves' terrible fake british accent is the the most interesting thing about any depiction of Jonathan Harker, the human equivalent of one of those books that just have logorithm tables in them
Take a seat: the long table is an antidote to loneliness | Psyche Ideas https://psyche.co/ideas/take-a-seat-the-long-table-is-an-antidote-to-loneliness
Random link from the archives: "Infectious Executable Stacks « null program" https://web.archive.org/web/20191115073218/https://nullprogram.com/blog/2019/11/15/ originally retrieved Fri Nov 15 07:32:18 EST 2019
No, Victorians Didn't Cover Up Table Legs Because They Were Too 'Sexy' - Atlas Obscura https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/victorian-table-legs-covering-myth
dress (inflatable) for the job you want (blow)
a recurring problem: pointing out that something is a conservative strawman version of an actual left-wing position is complicted by the inevitable existence of a bunch of kids who legitimately subscribe to the strawman version bc it's the only version they've ever heard
good decision-making is really draining because it involves basically never having any cognitive closure. literally everything is unknowable, strictly speaking, & occasionally that unknowability impacts decisions (in a-priori unpredictable ways)
Random link from the archives: "The Prehistory of Music | Lapham’s Quarterly" https://web.archive.org/web/20171106090718/https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/prehistory-music originally retrieved Mon Nov 6 09:07:18 EST 2017
Random link from the archives: "How did usury stop being a sin and become respectable finance? | Aeon Essays" https://web.archive.org/web/20170713083255/https://aeon.co/essays/how-did-usury-stop-being-a-sin-and-become-respectable-finance?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=bdfe024e86-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_07_04&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-bdfe024e86-68693017
Random link from the archives: "Are CRDTs suitable for shared editing?" https://web.archive.org/web/20200825101906/https://blog.kevinjahns.de/are-crdts-suitable-for-shared-editing/ originally retrieved Tue Aug 25 10:19:06 EDT 2020
we desperately need an adaptation of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde that makes the subtext (that this is about a rich 'respectable' white guy putting on blackface to commit crimes & trying to convince people it's shadow work) explicit
Bring Back the Big, Comfortable Bookstore Reading Chair ‹ Literary Hub https://lithub.com/bring-back-the-big-comfortable-bookstore-reading-chair/
we live in a world where, for any kind of non-trivial project that requires multiple people or substantial resources, permission to start on that project is based on its expected profitability. enormous expensive fringe boondoggles exist, but they are failures to be a normal and profitable thing, not successful avant-garde artistic statements: DCU movies are allowed to lose hundreds of millions of dollars over and over and still get produced, but i'd have to work for years to build up enough capital to (say) paint the eiffel tower black or fill a shopping mall with goats.
is there a way to get all the URLs of open tabs from chrome without actually starting chrome? it's gotten so unstable that it usually doesn't stay up for long enough for all the open tabs to load before crashing...
idea for some future tabletop campaign: your party is being chased by some large slow beast and comes across a field of abandoned port-o-potties. these would be great places to hide, but it turns out that two species of air-cephalopod have evolved to use these portopotties as shells, using their camoflage ability to mimic the door. one species uses the port-o-potty purely as protection and pretends to be an in-use/locked potty; the other is a mimic that pretends to be a vacant one to lure in prey. the cephalopods are imperfect mimics but the port-o-potty manufacturers were cutting corners.
i think i figured out the reason why these steamboat willy memes aren't hitting the spot. it's that mickey mouse, as a character, is not interesting or amusing. he's iconic because he's literally a logo -- and thus, acts as a cypher for everything the disney corporation puts out, preventing him from being able to have any personality or attributes aside from 'marketable', which in this case just means 'recognizable'.
Random link from the archives: "Unix is not an acceptable Unix | Affording Play" https://web.archive.org/web/20181113095225/https://mkremins.github.io/blog/unix-not-acceptable-unix/ originally retrieved Tue Nov 13 09:52:25 EST 2018
maybe if i analyze all the possible implications of every word anyone is saying, i can prevent this social interaction from becoming awkward and uncomfortable
do we find the staticness of static personality constructs (ex., pretrained LLMs, the dixie flatline) more acceptable because of the cartesian insistence, still common in our culture, in the existence of a permanent 'true' personality / soul? to learn is sometimes to become unrecognizable
Random link from the archives: "Portable Computer Pre-History: Portable Before Laptops" https://web.archive.org/web/20180316081647/https://tedium.co/2018/03/15/early-portable-computer-history/ originally retrieved Fri Mar 16 08:16:47 EDT 2018
noir has always been about corruption at the margins of socially-acceptable business. why aren't we seeing solid neo-noir about camgirls & crypto scams the way we saw so much of neo-noir (and original hardboiled & crimi stuff) about strippers & lottery scams?
i'm not a particularly confident person, yet overconfidence constantly bites me in the ass and underconfidence has never led me to make a poor decision. people around me, who are much more confident than i am, must be making many more mistakes (and, well, not noticing them because they are confident that there is nothing to notice). so my general advice: always assume that it's impossible & you're not good enough to do it, and then if it's worth doing even in the face of near-inevitable failure, do it anyway. lots of things are worth failing at, but some things will really ruin your life if you fail at them while not affecting anybody at all if you don't try, and confident people fail to distinguish between the two.
an idea i don't totally believe, but also don't totally disbelieve: will is pointless because planning at a human scale with merely human agency is impossible. in other words, we as humans are totally incapable of predicting how the kinds of actions we are capable of taking will influence the kinds of events and situations in the world that we care the most about, because we care about fairly broad social-scale things but can only do small-scale, easily-cancelled-out actions as a part of a complex and rapidly-changing environment whose interactions with our own actions cannot be understood, so we never have a justified belief that anything we do will be more likely to have a noticable positive effect than a negative one. even those things that are predictable (like eating when you're hungry) are entangled in systems that add invisible baggage (how many child slaves were involved in your meal?)
it is unethical for a piece of art to fail to make me, personally, uncomfortable
Taxi Driver and King of Comedy both represent worlds where people are trapped in shitty circumstances they can't imagine real alternatives to, and poorly-adjusted dudes working off naive-bordering-on-delusional models of the world consisting largely of contextless marketing slogans that give them no way to understand their own trauma, who then perform the only type of action they can imagine that's outside of their daily life: violence-as-spectacle. A smart viewer would recognize that these protagonists are deeply flawed, that they do not properly understand the nature of the system keeping them down, that their atomization and alienation is in a dysfunctional feedback loop with their individualism and self-aggrandizement, and that the fact that this spectacular violence worked is another terrible irony. But I am sure that my fifteen year old self would fundamentally misunderstand these movies as being in favor of 'heroic' big public gestures, the same way that a lot of teenagers misunderstood Fight Club, and the same way that my 5 year old self fundamentally misunderstood Weird Science. As somebody who as a general rule supports and enjoys 'extreme' media that represents undesirable behavior honestly, these movies are kind of an exception for me -- I wish they had more directly 'downer' endings, because the kinds of guys who identify with De Niro's beaten-down possibly-autistic protagonists are the least likely to understand the subtext of these movies and the most likely to actually perform public violence. I might recommend these movies to people, but only after specifically talking about this. (More likely, I wouldn't: these movies, despite their gritty reputation, are fundamentally cringe comedies -- michael scott with a gun -- and so they're really uncomfortable to sit through despite their artistry & all the social issues they touch on are better handled by books.)
you know how some witty stock phrases come from shakespeare? a great prank is to reply with one of those in its appropriate context, theatrically, but then keep going, reciting more and more of the play while looking progressively more uncomfortable, as though quoting the play has made you vulnerable to an obsessive shakespeare-loving ghost
Merch Table / Hype Machine https://hypem.com/merch-table
somehow i was under the impression that flatpack was one of those overly elaborate mechanisms for putting a web page into a zip file and giving it to users like it's a real executable, but people are mentioning it in the context of gnome and distro packaging, so i guess it's like RPM (i.e., an overly elaborate way of putting executables in a tarball so you know what files to delete when uninstalling). but that just makes me further wonder: why? why are we talking about this? source tarballs are still the primary way that packages are distributed by package maintainers, and any other format is at the whims of distro maintainers.
the funny thing about using statistical models as an art partner is that the better the model it is, the worse the model is for art purposes. humans are great at pattern matching (way better than our best 'AI' tech), and we're especially good at identifying cliches (i.e., messages whose information level -- computed as quantity of surprise with respect to the human's mental model -- is below salience threshold), but our curse is that we have a hard time thinking outside of habitual modes, and so there's a long history of using drugs, machines, and social arrangements to scramble the WIP, forcing a piece of art that is shaping up to be uninteresting to instead shift to a more interesting path. (some of these tend to introduce too much information: you rarely get a compelling story out of exquisite corpse because it increases entropy on the paragraph level while eliminating normal forms of story-level coordination, for instance.) early LLMs fit this use-case well: so long as the suggestions, completions, or responses are sufficiently unexpected, they are interesting and can support an interesting large-scale structure. but LLMs try to accurately represent their corpus, and with extremely large corpora like GPT-3, they are essentially trying to accurately represent the most common features of already-existing literature. unlike markov models, which can have word frequency statistics intentionally manipulated by the user to give pretty straightforward effects (downrank the top quartile of 2-grams so that they are less likely to be picked than the 2-grams that show up only once and you'll get very diverse and unpredictable output, for instance), LLMs can't be reasoned about and manipulated in ways that dramatically decrease the likelihood of cliches without also scrambling less-frequent patterns. LLMs want to be boring, and using them to be interesting necessarily involves discovering the parts of the model that are poorly filled in and forcing the LLM into those areas -- to simulate a smaller language model, basically. so why not just use a tiny language model? because the style of language models used by GPT literally can't work without an enormous corpus.
Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20190123100452/https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/01/17/massive-new-study-traces-how-corporations-use-charitable-donations-tilt-regulations-their-favor/ originally retrieved Wed Jan 23 10:04:52 EST 2019
everybody complains about the superhero movies but what about the other currently dominant types of movies: the mid-budget high-concept horror movie by blumhouse or somebody where the monster is a metaphor for grief, the wacky comedy that dumps all its points into character development so that it can make you cry as soon as it invokes some relatable and realistic trauma, the four hour long tarkovsky-inspired sci-fi epics with sun o))) scores, and the cg-animated toy commercial gag supercuts
adobe & getty & whoever trying to train their GAN models on your work is a problem, but the problem is not 'they are stealing my intellectual property' (which is practically worthless from their POV -- think how hard you have to work to get any money at all from it, and then think how much effort that much money would be worth to a multinational corporation); the problem is that they correctly see themselves competing with large open models, and so they would like to own their own closed models, lock people into them, and strengthen IP law so that they can FUD open models out of existence. getty is competing with large open models, but no individual person uploading to getty is competing with GANs in any meaningful way, and artist commissions will never have serious competition from GANs because GANs require an artist's trained eye (and typically an artist's trained hand to fix in photoshop later) in order to produce acceptable-quality work.
just got a company-wide email, outlining a policy that you need to get express permission to use LLMs or GANs for work. (honestly, they should just say you can't: a bunch of non-technical managers have been trying to use chatgpt / copilot to write code & documentation for months with predictable results)
the framing of 'human rights' is unfortunately still useful -- i say unfortunately because it embeds within itself a defeatist framing. we live in a world where people are treated so horribly by states that we made a list of the especially horrible things and said that states should be embarased to do those anymore. it's a list of specific ways states aren't allowed to hurt us -- the implication being that every other possible way is okay. instead, why not admit an imagined-to-be-unpredictable inherently-chaotic human subject given the absolute minimum constraints necessary to prevent harm in communities, guided under the knowledge that people do tend to help each other when given the opportunity?
AGI probably won't happen, not because brains are magic or whatever other bullshit, but because AGI can't be profitable until it's cheaper than slave labor, and nothing is cheaper than slave labor. In a global labor market, as a business owner, you don't even need to worry about keeping the slaves alive, because there are plenty more. So the hardware cost of running an AGI needs to be cheaper than allowing your slaves to starve.
pet peeve: folks who, rather than spending 5 minutes to clearly formulate their question in an email & waiting 5 minutes for a response, want to have a 20 minute voice chat meeting where we can't understand each others' accents & constantly end up talking over each other because of the 3-5 second variable latency. i know that a lot of people are more comfortable thinking through things in a conversational format, but doing that feels sort of like throwing your trash on the ground because the trash can is too far away -- ultimately, it's inconsiderate because you're making somebody else pick up after you out of laziness.
nagatoro & kaguya-sama are both organized around playing intimacy-chicken and i actually like this as an improvement on the format you used to see in rom-coms in the 90s & naughts, where the characters are genuinely conflicted about their relationship & are either extremely accident-prone or literally just go into a fugue state where they don't care about consent. rom-coms of this breed need to extend the will-they-won't-they state as long as possible while also providing fanservice, so stuff needs to happen that normally would seem couple-y without the protagonists actually being a couple. the intimacy-chicken model gives these characters agency, ensures that every interaction is mutually consensual, and structures things so that the eventual payoff is inherently the result of character growth: these characters are only kept apart by their own internal hangups, and as they grow into a state where they feel comfortable loving and being loved, they naturally transition from this kind of plausibly-deniable mutual teasing into a comfortable intimacy based on familiarity and care. whereas in love hina (to pick probably the most egregious example not to involve a literal aspiring-rapist) basically just has god-the-author reach down and deus ex machina keitaro into boob grabs and panty flashes multiple times an episode so he can get his ass beat until these women get stockholm-syndromed somehow into thinking he's admirable. when there's a boob grab in nagatoro, it may be accidental but it's the direct result of an activity both people entered into specifically because of the risk of accidental boob-grabbing. there's room for overlap here: rent-a-girlfriend (which i like a bit better than most, not despite but because of the way that the main character's character flaws are highlighted -- they are pretty typical flaws for the kind of guy whose romantic frustrations & lack of perspective could easily lead him down an incel pipeline but who also could develop into a functional human being) has characters who like the MC despite their better judgement, or who like the MC for reasons that are not based on his character, and who deal with the ramifications of being involved with somebody who has a lot of growing to do before he's actual boyfriend material -- something that i think every straight girl has experience with, and that every guy who has grown out of early patriarchal conditioning remembers from the other side with a generous helping of cringe.
Random link from the archives: "GitHub - xyproto/battlestar: A different take on assembly, with the goal of creating tiny executables" https://web.archive.org/web/20190624154159/https://github.com/xyproto/battlestar originally retrieved Mon Jun 24 15:41:59 EDT 2019
Random link from the archives: "Error 406 - Not Acceptable" https://web.archive.org/web/20220108153702/https://contrarymagazine.com/2021/the-myth-of-change/ originally retrieved Sat 08 Jan 2022 03:37:02 PM EST
Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20201009080925/https://scribe.rip/p/why-trump-was-inevitable-but-recovery-isnt-76a413ac1bda originally retrieved Fri Oct 9 08:09:25 EDT 2020
the next episode previews in arrested development don't consist of scenes that are actually in the next episode, but instead lighly comedic tableaux of ambiguous canonicity, making them technically omake
Mastodon Is Using Rel Noreferrer On Outbound Links Causing Visits To Appear As Direct Traffic In Google Analytics https://www.seroundtable.com/mastodon-rel-noferrer-tracking-34391.html
Caffeine-Free Diet Coke Is for Psychos https://www.gawker.com/celebrity/caffeine-free-diet-coke-psychos-elon-musk-bedside-table-twitter
Random link from the archives: "The CIA made a Magic: The Gathering-style card game for training agents, and we played it - The Verge" https://web.archive.org/web/20180522091254/https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/21/17374054/cia-collect-it-all-declassified-training-tabletop-card-game originally retrieved Tue May 22 09:12:54 EDT 2018
The Illustrated Stable Diffusion " Jay Alammar " Visualizing machine learning one concept at a time. https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-stable-diffusion/
hot take: modals shouldn't exist, and are a relic of a time when displays were too small. changing the position of things on the screen (or changing the meaning of interacting with particular screen locations) in a way not predictable from the immediate previous user input is a horrible antipattern, because GUIs are slow enough that users mostly interact with their predicted display contents rather than actual display contents, and showing a modal (especially one with important information or meaningful buttons) is a great way to trick the user into accidentally clicking something they didn't intend.
Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200308203256/https://scribe.rip/p/we-need-to-hold-people-accountable-for-designing-systems-that-fail-b78f9c94f3a0 originally retrieved Sun Mar 8 20:32:56 EDT 2020
MagicPrompt Stable Diffusion - a Hugging Face Space by Gustavosta https://huggingface.co/spaces/Gustavosta/MagicPrompt-Stable-Diffusion
GitHub - sharonzhou/long_stable_diffusion: Long-form text-to-images generation, using a pipeline of deep generative models (GPT-3 and Stable Diffusion) https://github.com/sharonzhou/long_stable_diffusion
Anyone can use this AI art generator " that’s the risk - The Verge https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/15/23340673/ai-image-generation-stable-diffusion-explained-ethics-copyright-data
The five-minute feedback fix · GitHub https://github.com/readme/guides/testable-requirements-feedback
Exploring 12 Million of the 2.3 Billion Images Used to Train Stable Diffusion's Image Generator - Waxy.org https://waxy.org/2022/08/exploring-12-million-of-the-images-used-to-train-stable-diffusions-image-generator/
10 Executable File Formats That Didn’t Make It https://tedium.co/2022/09/09/10-forgotten-executable-file-formats/
Bad idea of the day: Friend Of The Pod: a buddy comedy where a wacky loser makes friends with an extraterrestrial vegetable hive mind (straight man)
one of the reasons that there's such a big overlap between practicing magicians and computer programmers is that computer programmers are very comfortable with studying, creating, and using unholy abominations whose existence proves the sublunar realm damned
Tiny Mining, a Handbook for Internal Extraction — V2_Lab for the Unstable Media https://v2.nl/publishing/tiny-mining-a-handbook-for-internal-extraction
Eating Like an Explorer Once Called for Plenty of ‘Portable Soup’ - Gastro Obscura https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/portable-soup
Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20220209123358/https://scribe.rip/p/decolonization-and-alienation-why-i-find-my-peers-politics-unrelatable-6de743a7471f originally retrieved Wed 09 Feb 2022 12:33:58 PM EST
Random link from the archives: "JSTOR: Access Check" https://web.archive.org/web/20181119152317/https://www.jstor.org/stable/40969483?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents originally retrieved Mon Nov 19 15:23:17 EST 2018
Random link from the archives: "Error 406 - Not Acceptable" https://web.archive.org/web/20190722141838/http://www.vernianera.com/Nautilus/Catalog/index.html originally retrieved Mon Jul 22 14:18:38 EDT 2019
Random link from the archives: "406 Not Acceptable" https://web.archive.org/web/20190604095609/https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/innis-minerva/innis-minerva-00-h.html originally retrieved Tue Jun 4 09:56:09 EDT 2019
Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200308203256/https://scribe.rip/p/we-need-to-hold-people-accountable-for-designing-systems-that-fail-b78f9c94f3a0 originally retrieved Sun Mar 8 20:32:56 EDT 2020
Aggressive Retsuko's Relatable Flaws - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJ316cNf_lI
realizing that even if you've been drawing on paper you can skill be 'rusty' at drawing on the tablet, and that a lot of the skills for drawing architecture don't transfer to people, and that a lot of the skills for drawing people from the front don't transfer to drawing from the side.
Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20201009080925/https://scribe.rip/p/why-trump-was-inevitable-but-recovery-isnt-76a413ac1bda originally retrieved Fri Oct 9 08:09:25 EDT 2020
ISOTYPE, Machines which seem to think, 1953, Marie Neurath http://www.fulltable.com/iso/mw.htm
There's this current in horror media, most prevalent from the publication of The Haunting of Hill House in the 1950s to the release of the final Poltergeist movie in the 1980s, where the haunted house is a metaphor for the abusive husband/father, and I think it's a pretty interesting current with many variations. In Haunting, Elanor basically reproduces her dysfunctional relationship with her mother at the house (one where she martyrs herself for the happiness of another who has promised her shelter), and despite lesbian subtext I think we can recognize that the house is at least sometimes characterized as masculine -- and at the very least, Elanor at least sometimes describes the house as a lover. Both Matheson's Hell House & King's The Shining are conscious responses to The Haunting of Hill House, and where most film adaptations of Haunting treat the house as female & re-focus the haunting on a stereotyped desire for children, Matheson & King's work in this space brings out the implicit subtext of an abusive and sexualized male figure -- as though the sinister intelligence of Hill House was literally that of Hugh Crain. In Hell House, Matheson finally exorcises this sinister masculine figure by having another masculine figure open himself up to emotional influences and recognize that the evil in the house is a twisted form of fear of inadequacy. In The Shining, the Overlook's long history of vice created a magnetic field to bring out the dark aspects of Jack Torrance (and in Kubrick's adaptation of the book, Jack is made out to be an abusive husband and father from the start, with the Overlook merely making that evil so pervasive as to be impossible to ignore). Meanwhile, we got The Amityville Horror, which was basically a monetized version of a cover story for an actual abusive husband and (step)father (which got its own film and about a million sequels, and which arguably was as much of an influence on Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining as King's book was). On the other side of the world, we got Hausu, which treats the haunted house not as an avatar of an abusive husband but as a sink for the complicated feelings of attachment that a war widow had, when she took the house as a substitute for her officially-MIA husband -- feelings that were programmed by Japan's massive propaganda apparatus for her whole life, and that once she finally died turned her and the house into a hungry ghost that eats womens' youth and transforms them into sanitized automata that serve to lure in more young women. Anne Rivers Siddons' The House Next Door features a completely new house, born out of a nexus of complicated desires for independence and worth on the part of the people who were involved in making it, that first develops a taste for blood even before it has been completed and that eventually learns to attract vulnerable women, charm them, and torture them with horrors specially tailored to their traumas. All of these versions are really interesting (even Amityville, which became extremely popular despite the absolute incompetence with which the original story & most if not all direct adaptations were told), but with Poltergeist we start to lose the plot a little due to the unnecessary introduction of a 'good' father figure (Craig T. Nelson, who is a kind of re-insertion of the Jack Torrance of the original Shining) who only really becomes a vector for evil in the second film. Poltergeist echoes tropes from the haunted-house-as-abusive-father current without actually properly contextualizing it, and the house's fatherliness never outshines Nelson's own, to the massive detriment of the films as horror (but this probably made them more palatable & was thereby involved in their success).
Band name of the day: unregrettable attrition
worst, most heinous take i've heard thus far today: 'we need to allow users to cover their ass in court by letting them avoid knowing about patents they think might exist, so that they can get a slightly lower penalty for infringement, and therefore we should never show recommendations'. imo, it's never acceptable to incentivize someone whose job is to invent new things to be willfully ignorant of their field.
Error 406 - Not Acceptable https://contrarymagazine.com/2021/the-myth-of-change/
Random link from the archives: "Error 406 - Not Acceptable" https://web.archive.org/web/20180727110059/http://www.notechmagazine.com/2018/07/fermentation-and-daily-life.html originally retrieved Fri Jul 27 11:00:59 EDT 2018
Random link from the archives: "Error 406 - Not Acceptable" https://web.archive.org/web/20200309121431/http://michaelgood.info/publications/text-editing/the-use-of-logging-data-in-the-design-of-a-new-text-editor/ originally retrieved Mon Mar 9 12:14:31 EDT 2020
all this web3 nonsense bothers me because actual really-real decentralization is inherently unprofitable -- it makes it difficult to track or meter usage, even for the sake of avoiding double-spending, and (to survive) is actively & consistently de-centralizing, in order to counteract all the forces (like capital and economies-of-scale) that push systems toward re-centralization. anything profitable is inherently re-centralizing because it benefits people who already have capital with more capital.
The interface should be predictable, but that is not the same as uniform. https://scribe.rip/@enkiv2/the-interface-should-be-predictable-but-that-is-not-the-same-as-uniform-fef9254bf90f
“Predictable” means that the user, before performing an action, can imagine the results of that… https://scribe.rip/@enkiv2/predictable-means-that-the-user-before-performing-an-action-can-imagine-the-results-of-that-f743eb251e40
For Tech to be equitable, the people must control it https://scribe.rip/p/for-tech-to-be-equitable-the-people-must-control-it-58e34d1bc242
Why ContentEditable is Terrible https://scribe.rip/p/why-contenteditable-is-terrible-122d8a40e480
If you’ve got a head-mounted (or head-mountable) HDMI display and portable keyboard, the pi zero… https://scribe.rip/@enkiv2/if-youve-got-a-head-mounted-or-head-mountable-hdmi-display-and-portable-keyboard-the-pi-zero-e0c60eb1d47c
Random link from the archives: "How did usury stop being a sin and become respectable finance? | Aeon Essays" https://web.archive.org/web/20170713083255/https://aeon.co/essays/how-did-usury-stop-being-a-sin-and-become-respectable-finance?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=bdfe024e86-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_07_04&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-bdfe024e86-68693017 originally retrieved Thu Jul 13 08:32:55 EDT 2017
Lab-grown meat is supposed to be inevitable. The science tells a different story. https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-scale/
Wobbly Tables and the Problem with Futurism https://scribe.rip/p/wobbly-tables-and-the-problem-with-futurism-934468d2308
Nearly two years after writing https://enkiv2.medium.com/i-do-not-see-myself-represented-in-essays-on-dating-78488462efa6?sk=705f8e1a535edbecb948fb7f9fd59034 I now know why this perspective is underrepresented. Reactions to this article are split cleanly in three: redpill-bros who call me a cuck, incels who think I'm a poor naive soul who hasn't seen the light & decided to blame women, and anti-incels who think I'm an incel. All three groups think this post is some kind of cannily performative bad-faith attempt to get a mercy-fuck -- as though I didn't know that mercy fucks are not worth the time, and as though I didn't know that this kind of essay wouldn't get me one anyway. I still think I can't be the only one in this specific situation, but despite a lot of readers, this essay doesn't seem to have produced new conversation about how to make women feel more comfortable with taking the initiative or how to discourage men from spamming unwanted advances.
Random link from the archives: "The CIA made a Magic: The Gathering-style card game for training agents, and we played it - The Verge" https://web.archive.org/web/20180522091254/https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/21/17374054/cia-collect-it-all-declassified-training-tabletop-card-game originally retrieved Tue May 22 09:12:54 EDT 2018
ERIS: Encoding for Robust Immutable Storage - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fo4eEFELL2Q
live in such a way as to prank generations of future scholars. be so notable as to be impossible to ignore yet also entirely illegible. make it unclear whether or not you are, in fact, a folkloric figure to which strangers have attributed reams of unrelated work.
it's current year and yet the only 'documentation' for the table layout of our very important database is an xsl script and a set of oracle procedures, spread out across dozens of files with names like 'b100000f', full of variable names like 'b000'. i'm supposed to add pseudo-fields into some higher layer by the end of the week. fml
Random link from the archives: "Error 406 - Not Acceptable" https://web.archive.org/web/20180921132742/http://www.iedu.com/Solar/Panels/index.html originally retrieved Fri Sep 21 13:27:42 EDT 2018
Reading 'Passages' in 2021 is wild. There will be a bunch of relatable stuff, and then it'll be like 'Of course, only one third of one percent of men have not been married by age 25'. Was that actually true in the 70s?
Error 406 - Not Acceptable https://what-the-robot-saw.com/
Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20201003032543/https://medium.com/p/the-surprisingly-technical-process-of-designing-a-tabletop-game-fee64ba88611 originally retrieved Sat Oct 3 03:25:43 EDT 2020
The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus - Origins History and Meaning of the Famed Text of Alchemy - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qa4woIz_Ag
Random link from the archives: "Error 406 - Not Acceptable" https://web.archive.org/web/20180921132742/http://www.iedu.com/Solar/Panels/index.html originally retrieved Fri Sep 21 13:27:42 EDT 2018
Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200313145920/https://medium.com/@enkiv2/the-interface-should-be-predictable-but-that-is-not-the-same-as-uniform-fef9254bf90f originally retrieved Fri Mar 13 14:59:20 EDT 2020
Bad idea of the day: a signed collectable statuette of Jim Davis pissing on Garfield
Random link from the archives: "406 Not Acceptable" https://web.archive.org/web/20190609104740/https://blog.etemetaphysical.com/seedoflife/ originally retrieved Sun Jun 9 10:47:40 EDT 2019
Actually Portable Executables · Blog Needs a Name https://ahgamut.github.io/c/2021/02/27/ape-cosmo/
Random link from the archives: "How did usury stop being a sin and become respectable finance? | Aeon Essays" https://web.archive.org/web/20170713083255/https://aeon.co/essays/how-did-usury-stop-being-a-sin-and-become-respectable-finance?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=bdfe024e86-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_07_04&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-bdfe024e86-68693017 originally retrieved Thu Jul 13 08:32:55 EDT 2017
Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200928220612/https://medium.com/p/user-expectations-software-design-and-when-breaking-these-rules-of-interaction-can-be-acceptable-565e677d6f43 originally retrieved Mon Sep 28 22:06:12 EDT 2020
GitHub - kokke/tiny-regex-c: Small portable regex in C https://github.com/kokke/tiny-regex-c
Random link from the archives: "Some Notable Women in AECO (& beyond) Design Computation - Google Sheets" https://web.archive.org/web/20190918133558/https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DayNF6ejFCU45LAUo10-eFTDQ2MCwXWer3JSVWIFWCE/edit?mc_cid=9d7a89a1f6&mc_eid=c92bddb137#gid=0 originally retrieved Wed Sep 18 13:35:58 EDT 2019
Why Phoenix may be uninhabitable by the end of this century | Salon.com https://www.salon.com/2021/01/31/why-phoenix-may-be-uninhabitable-by-the-end-of-this-century/
Random link from the archives: "302 Found" https://web.archive.org/web/20180620103712/https://worldwritable.com/https-worldwritable-com-natural-language-processing-for-programmers-world-models-b01943959830 originally retrieved Wed Jun 20 10:37:12 EDT 2018
Random link from the archives: "GitHub - paulfitz/mlsql: inferring sql queries from plain-text questions about tables" https://web.archive.org/web/20190607135236/https://github.com/paulfitz/mlsql originally retrieved Fri Jun 7 13:52:36 EDT 2019
A Seat at the Table: The State of International Horror in 2020 | Features | Roger Ebert https://www.rogerebert.com/features/a-seat-at-the-table-the-state-of-international-horror-in-2020
Random link from the archives: "Error 406 - Not Acceptable" https://web.archive.org/web/20181024123441/https://www.board-db.org/ originally retrieved Wed Oct 24 12:34:41 EDT 2018
Random link from the archives: "How did usury stop being a sin and become respectable finance? | Aeon Essays" https://web.archive.org/web/20170713083255/https://aeon.co/essays/how-did-usury-stop-being-a-sin-and-become-respectable-finance?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=bdfe024e86-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_07_04&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-bdfe024e86-68693017 originally retrieved Thu Jul 13 08:32:55 EDT 2017
It's hilarious to see William Gibson dunking on Cyberpunk 2077 because he comes off as pretty charitable & evenhanded about basically everything else, but it's even more hilarious to see people who have no idea who he is replying with weak defenses.
Random link from the archives: "Error 406 - Not Acceptable" https://web.archive.org/web/20200810103146/https://25yearslatersite.com/2018/01/02/the-fractured-self-shattered-identity-and-twin-peaks/ originally posted Mon Aug 10 10:31:46 EDT 2020
Random link from the archives: "Gurjieff's hydrogen table explained - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20201117183749/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOoDponEFe8&t=2s&ab_channel=FredderichMercurial originally posted Tue 17 Nov 2020 06:37:49 PM EST
Random link from the archives: "Error 406 - Not Acceptable" https://web.archive.org/web/20181024123441/https://www.board-db.org/ originally posted Wed Oct 24 12:34:41 EDT 2018
Random link from the archives: "Error 406 - Not Acceptable" https://web.archive.org/web/20200309121431/http://michaelgood.info/publications/text-editing/the-use-of-logging-data-in-the-design-of-a-new-text-editor/ originally posted Mon Mar 9 12:14:31 EDT 2020
Random link from the archives: "Guns tend to empower white, financially unstable men—who oppose gun control | Ars Technica" https://web.archive.org/web/20171129083738/https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/11/study-white-men-facing-money-trouble-tend-to-cling-to-guns-for-power-identity/ originally posted Wed Nov 29 08:37:38 EST 2017
Gurjieff's hydrogen table explained - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOoDponEFe8&t=2s&ab_channel=FredderichMercurial
I will definitely watch and enjoy the inevitable netflix Haunting of Manderly where angry bisexual ghost Rebecca is basically the hero and there's time travel for some reason.
Random link from the archives: "Electric Velomobiles: as Fast and Comfortable as Automobiles, but 80 times more Efficient | LOW←TECH MAGAZINE" https://web.archive.org/web/20190409125834/https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2012/10/electric-velomobiles.html originally posted Tue Apr 9 12:58:34 EDT 2019
Random link from the archives: "In an unstable economy, I found freedom and security in sex work | Psyche Ideas" https://web.archive.org/web/20200818121806/https://psyche.co/ideas/in-an-unstable-economy-i-found-freedom-and-security-in-sex-work originally posted Tue Aug 18 12:18:06 EDT 2020
Random link from the archives: "Uncomfortable by Design: A Series of Deliberately Inconvenient Everyday Objects - 99% Invisible" https://web.archive.org/web/20171026123916/https://99percentinvisible.org/article/uncomfortable-by-design-a-series-of-deliberately-inconvenient-everyday-objects/ originally posted Thu Oct 26 12:39:16 EDT 2017
Random link from the archives: "Predictable Identities: A Ribbonfarm Blogchain – Put A Number On It!" https://web.archive.org/web/20190418082244/https://putanumonit.com/2019/02/20/predictable-identities/ originally posted Thu Apr 18 08:22:44 EDT 2019
Random link from the archives: "Error 406 - Not Acceptable" https://web.archive.org/web/20200109081429/https://philemonfoundation.org/alchemy/ originally posted Thu Jan 9 08:14:29 EST 2020
Fed study: Wage growth an “illusion” that’s “almost entirely attributable” to low-wage job losses | Salon.com https://www.salon.com/2020/09/05/fed-study-wage-growth-an-illusion-thats-almost-entirely-attributable-to-low-wage-job-losses/
Random link from the archives: "Our behaviour in bulk is more predictable than we like to imagine | Aeon Essays" https://web.archive.org/web/20190709103411/https://aeon.co/essays/our-behaviour-in-bulk-is-more-predictable-than-we-like-to-imagine originally posted Tue Jul 9 10:34:11 EDT 2019
Are CRDTs suitable for shared editing? https://blog.kevinjahns.de/are-crdts-suitable-for-shared-editing/
on the usability of editable software https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/on-the-usability-of-editable-software
Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20190123100452/https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/01/17/massive-new-study-traces-how-corporations-use-charitable-donations-tilt-regulations-their-favor/ originally posted Wed Jan 23 10:04:52 EST 2019
In an unstable economy, I found freedom and security in sex work | Psyche Ideas https://psyche.co/ideas/in-an-unstable-economy-i-found-freedom-and-security-in-sex-work
Random link from the archives: "Some Notable Women in AECO (& beyond) Design Computation - Google Sheets" https://web.archive.org/web/20190918133558/https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DayNF6ejFCU45LAUo10-eFTDQ2MCwXWer3JSVWIFWCE/edit?mc_cid=9d7a89a1f6&mc_eid=c92bddb137#gid=0 originally posted Wed Sep 18 13:35:58 EDT 2019
Random link from the archives: "Electric Velomobiles: as Fast and Comfortable as Automobiles, but 80 times more Efficient | LOW←TECH MAGAZINE" https://web.archive.org/web/20190409125834/https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2012/10/electric-velomobiles.html originally posted Tue Apr 9 12:58:34 EDT 2019
Random link from the archives: "Japan’s Cynical Romantics, Precursors to the Alt-Right – Tablet Magazine" https://web.archive.org/web/20190809123231/https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/288999/japans-cynical-romantics originally posted Fri Aug 9 12:32:31 EDT 2019
Random link from the archives: "A Flower for Your Thoughts | Lapham’s Quarterly" https://web.archive.org/web/20190118092621/https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/flower-your-thoughts originally posted Fri Jan 18 09:26:21 EST 2019
OK, until somebody makes a full-featured desktop SSB client that doesn't involve nodejs, I'm done with it. I tried to install the new binary patchfoo & it broke half my npm packages (including all the ssb-related ones). Spent 2 days & couldn't get any npm packages working again. Node packaging simply isn't acceptably stable & IMO shouldn't be used.
Random link from the archives: "Archiving C64 Tapes Correctly | pagetable.com" https://web.archive.org/web/20181212100842/https://www.pagetable.com/?p=1002 originally posted Wed Dec 12 10:08:42 EST 2018
Random link from the archives: " » Lovecraft on the Tabletop The Digital Antiquarian" https://web.archive.org/web/20190814122724/https://www.filfre.net/2015/09/lovecraft-on-the-tabletop/ originally posted Wed Aug 14 12:27:24 EDT 2019
Random link from the archives: "How TV Became Respectable Without Getting Better | Current Affairs" https://web.archive.org/web/20200702181710/https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/05/how-tv-became-respectable-without-getting-better originally posted Thu Jul 2 18:17:10 EDT 2020
Random link from the archives: "deadspin-quote-topleft
Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200617063747/https://medium.com/p/it-might-be-time-to-start-flipping-tables-bdae147f7cb originally posted Wed Jun 17 06:37:47 EDT 2020
Random link from the archives: "JSTOR: Access Check" https://web.archive.org/web/20181119152317/https://www.jstor.org/stable/40969483?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents originally posted Mon Nov 19 15:23:17 EST 2018
Random link from the archives: "Uncomfortable ASMR — Real Life" https://web.archive.org/web/20180511072402/http://reallifemag.com/uncomfortable-asmr/ originally posted Fri May 11 07:24:02 EDT 2018
Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20190123100452/https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/01/17/massive-new-study-traces-how-corporations-use-charitable-donations-tilt-regulations-their-favor/ originally posted Wed Jan 23 10:04:52 EST 2019
How TV Became Respectable Without Getting Better | Current Affairs https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/05/how-tv-became-respectable-without-getting-better
Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20171020131358/https://tedium.co/2017/09/21/wacom-tablet-history originally posted Fri Oct 20 13:13:58 EDT 2017
Random link from the archives: "Error 406 - Not Acceptable" https://web.archive.org/web/20180921132742/http://www.iedu.com/Solar/Panels/index.html originally posted Fri Sep 21 13:27:42 EDT 2018
Random link from the archives: https://web.archive.org/web/20180620103712/https://worldwritable.com/https-worldwritable-com-natural-language-processing-for-programmers-world-models-b01943959830 originally posted Wed Jun 20 10:37:12 EDT 2018/
Random link from the archives: https://web.archive.org/web/20190515104727/https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/mankind-unite originally posted Wed May 15 10:47:27 EDT 2019/
Random link from the archives: https://web.archive.org/web/20181119152317/https://www.jstor.org/stable/40969483?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents originally posted Mon Nov 19 15:23:17 EST 2018/
Predictable Identities 27: Craving and the Pill https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/04/15/predictable-identities-27-craving-and-the-pill/
Random link from the archives: https://web.archive.org/web/20170713083255/https://aeon.co/essays/how-did-usury-stop-being-a-sin-and-become-respectable-finance?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=bdfe024e86-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_07_04&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-bdfe024e86-68693017 originally posted Thu Jul 13 08:32:55 EDT 2017/
The Coming Gentrification of YouTube – Tablet Magazine https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/286651/gentrification-of-youtube
https://medium.com/@enkiv2/the-interface-should-be-predictable-but-that-is-not-the-same-as-uniform-fef9254bf90f
https://medium.com/@enkiv2/predictable-means-that-the-user-before-performing-an-action-can-imagine-the-results-of-that-f743eb251e40
Timeline of Hypertext Systems http://jakobvoss.de/hypertext-timeline/#table
I will basically always post articles about how computers can & maybe should be different than they currently are in broad and far-reaching ways, even if I disagree with the specific suggestions being made, because tech people seem to have exceptionally strong tunnel vision when it comes to path dependence & need to be reminded that nodejs & CSS are not the inevitable product of natural law.
Band name of the day: a principled and socially acceptable mutiny
Error 406 - Not Acceptable http://justine-haupt.com/rotarycellphone/
https://medium.com/@enkiv2/portable-identity-is-useful-only-insomuch-as-single-stable-identity-is-useful-d5e3a58ec3
Current norms around meaning-making cannot survive the slow collision with widespread private ownership of duplication & broadcast technologies. Attempts to deal with this through 'trust in institutions' are doomed -- institutions in general have never been trustworthy enough to justify the kind of power we have given them out of necessity, & are prone to exactly the same problems as individual meaning-making is now encountering (though this was less detectable because fewer centers of meaning-making were involved in the age of three TV networks and two newspapers). When we double down on the kind of media literacy that served us well during that era, we get conspiracy culture. What actually could pull us through to a new stable state? Norms about research. Not adequately considering alternative explanations for some piece of information is inconsiderate in exactly the same way as being late for an appointment is -- it means you've wasted someone else's time by considering yours more valuable. We should treat overconfidence -- i.e., a failure to second-guess yourself -- as at least as rude, since it wastes other people's time on an even larger scale.
https://medium.com/@enkiv2/if-youve-got-a-head-mounted-or-head-mountable-hdmi-display-and-portable-keyboard-the-pi-zero-e0c60eb1d47c
GitHub - ipld/specs: Content-addressed, authenticated, immutable data structures https://github.com/ipld/specs
Random link from the archives: https://web.archive.org/web/20171115125241/https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/reach-out-and-touch-faith originally posted Wed Nov 15 12:52:41 EST 2017/
Error 406 - Not Acceptable https://philemonfoundation.org/alchemy/
why are koren helmet kits so expensive? a shakti is just fuckin' eight coils and an oscillator, right? that sounds like a suitable project for a ten year old.
Technical writing tip: examples are no substitute for tables of possible operations or the explanations thereof. Examples are great when they happen to exactly match what the user already wants to do or when modifying them to match user need is trivial & obvious, but they don't work outside the happy path. If your tool is flexible, you MUST provide enough information for users to understand how to use your tool to do things you haven't imagined yet.
https://medium.com/@enkiv2/the-interface-should-be-predictable-but-that-is-not-the-same-as-uniform-fef9254bf90f
Infectious Executable Stacks « null program https://nullprogram.com/blog/2019/11/15/
for a while my most popular post on medium has been a comment on somebody else's article where i talk about trends in how often hentai is set in explicitly high-fantasy settings & how that relates to trends in explicitly unacceptable or impossible behavior in it...
Periodic reminder that Ken Akamatsu, author of Love Hina, popularized (and maybe introduced) the trope of "what if we make the harem protagonist relatable by making him a sadsack who deserves violence against him not because of his actions -- which are completely accidental -- but because of some essential internal flaw that makes him useless".
Random link from the archives: https://web.archive.org/web/20180316081647/https://tedium.co/2018/03/15/early-portable-computer-history/ originally posted Fri Mar 16 08:16:47 EDT 2018/
i'm starting to wonder (after only making one itch sale at a twenty three cent price point despite lots of promotion) if maybe anime-style-horror-mystery-VN-about-fortean-philosophy is too fringe to be profitable & it's a mistake to hang a trilogy of games on that category
Bad idea of the day: a story where a new (quirky/remarkable) girl transfers to an all-girls school & disrupts the existing love DAGs/polygons -- i.e., a harem show where the focus lies in discovering the complex previously-existing social arrangements in this space that were obscured until the harem protagonist caused them to become unstable and progress.
Random link from the archives: https://web.archive.org/web/20190123100452/https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/01/17/massive-new-study-traces-how-corporations-use-charitable-donations-tilt-regulations-their-favor/ originally posted Wed Jan 23 10:04:52 EST 2019/
Tech issues: The myth of inevitable technological progress - Vox https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/10/1/20887003/tech-technology-evolution-natural-inevitable-ethics
Some Notable Women in AECO (& beyond) Design Computation - Google Sheets https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DayNF6ejFCU45LAUo10-eFTDQ2MCwXWer3JSVWIFWCE/edit?mc_cid=9d7a89a1f6&mc_eid=c92bddb137#gid=0
hot take: the response time for anything interactive ought to be less than a third of a second, and it's absurd that we find it acceptable for web pages to take minutes to display
Error 406 - Not Acceptable https://www.philosophersmag.com/essays/76-the-meaning-of-asshole
Random link from the archives: https://web.archive.org/web/20180816113209/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Distributed_Objects originally posted Thu Aug 16 11:32:09 EDT 2018/
Truth-telling is aggression in zero-sum frames – Unstable Ontology https://unstableontology.com/2019/09/10/truth-telling-is-aggression-in-zero-sum-frames/
Bad idea of the day: a service that takes money sent to it & distributes it randomly to some pre-formed list of 'charitable causes'
Rebecca Solnit: How Change Happens | Literary Hub https://lithub.com/rebecca-solnit-progress-is-not-inevitable-it-takes-work/
The charitable deduction is mostly for the rich. A new study argues that’s by design. - Vox https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/9/3/20840955/charitable-deduction-tax-rich-billionaire-philanthropy
Random link from the archives: https://web.archive.org/web/20181224121517/http://strugglers.net/~andy/blog/2018/12/24/the-internet-of-unprofitable-things/ originally posted Mon Dec 24 12:15:17 EST 2018/
» Lovecraft on the Tabletop The Digital Antiquarian https://www.filfre.net/2015/09/lovecraft-on-the-tabletop/
Band name of the day: vegetable television
Japan’s Cynical Romantics, Precursors to the Alt-Right – Tablet Magazine https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/288999/japans-cynical-romantics
Random link from the archives: https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/how-think-medieval-monk originally posted Mon Jan 15 08:34:18 EST 2018
Something that becomes more and more obvious as you read about the history of cybernetics but lots of people have a hard time wrapping their heads around: the fundamentals of 'intelligence' -- memory and adaptation -- are hard to avoid in stable systems, and basically everything where a positive feedback loop exists between past use & future use ends up acting in an 'intelligent' way.
Error 406 - Not Acceptable http://www.vernianera.com/Nautilus/Catalog/index.html
Error 406 - Not Acceptable http://photorequestsfromsolitary.org/
Our behaviour in bulk is more predictable than we like to imagine | Aeon Essays https://aeon.co/essays/our-behaviour-in-bulk-is-more-predictable-than-we-like-to-imagine
Random link from the archives: https://www.pagetable.com/?p=1002 originally posted Wed Dec 12 10:08:42 EST 2018
Why Most Marketing Emails Still Use HTML Tables https://tedium.co/2019/06/25/html-email-limitations-design/
Random link from the archives: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/01/17/massive-new-study-traces-how-corporations-use-charitable-donations-tilt-regulations-their-favor/ originally posted Wed Jan 23 10:04:52 EST 2019
GitHub - xyproto/battlestar: A different take on assembly, with the goal of creating tiny executables https://github.com/xyproto/battlestar
The Making of a Millennial Woman - Another Gaze: A Feminist Film Journal http://www.anothergaze.com/making-millennial-woman-feminist-capitalist-fleabag-girls-sally-rooney-lena-dunham-unlikeable-female-character-relatable/
Random link from the archives: https://popula.com/2019/02/20/vegetables-dont-exist/ originally posted Wed Feb 27 06:29:16 EST 2019
Why say "irritable bowel syndrome" when you can just say "bad ass"?
MFW I realized that Taleb's 'antifragile' is just a reinvention of Ashby's 'ultrastable'
if it doesn't make you deeply uncomfortable in ways that you need a lot of time to try to articulate, does it even really count as science fiction?
GitHub - paulfitz/mlsql: inferring sql queries from plain-text questions about tables https://github.com/paulfitz/mlsql
Empirical analysis of behavioral advertising finds that surveillance makes ads only 4% more profitable for media companies / Boing Boing https://boingboing.net/2019/06/04/all-that-for-4-pct.html
Hot take: circular logic is cool and good actually, so long as it's used properly. By this I mean: we often look for hierarchies of causes, & we inherit this from Aristotle, who was looking for the primary cause, but history is longer than Aristotle realized & stable systems cause themselves (that's what makes 'em stable)
The Stuff is at least the most quotable Cohen film. "No one is as dumb as I appear to be." #TheLastDriveIn
Mankind, Unite! | Lapham’s Quarterly https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/mankind-unite
Predictable Identities: A Ribbonfarm Blogchain – Put A Number On It! https://putanumonit.com/2019/02/20/predictable-identities/
Random link from the archives: https://worldwritable.com/https-worldwritable-com-natural-language-processing-for-programmers-world-models-b01943959830 originally archived Wed Jun 20 10:37:12 EDT 2018
An immutable operating system (August Lilleaas' blog) https://augustl.com/blog/2014/an_immutable_operating_system/
Electric Velomobiles: as Fast and Comfortable as Automobiles, but 80 times more Efficient | LOW←TECH MAGAZINE https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2012/10/electric-velomobiles.html
CS programs encourage the idea (already common among students) that software engineers are professionals. First contact with the industry demonstrates that to the extent that folks have grown since graduation, its in their ability to delay the inevitable collapse of ugly hacks.
Lazyweb: do japanese buildings have basements? If not, why not? (For instance, water table, or soil quality?)
I fixed my now-year-long semi-intermittent sound problem, & the explanation is compellingly stupid: sometimes when ubuntu upgrades sound driver modules it doesn't make the /dev/snd tree user-writable, & pulse runs as the logged-in user.
nothing is irrefutable for the sufficiently motivated
Author discovers the recentralization phenomenon, and concludes that centralization is inevitable (rather than that recentralization must be carefully avoided): https://rosenzweig.io/blog/the-federation-fallacy.html
GitHub - pcyin/tranX: A general-purpose neural semantic parser for mapping natural language queries into machine executable code https://github.com/pcyin/tranX
Why Is Customer Service So Bad? Because It’s Profitable. https://hbr.org/2019/02/why-is-customer-service-so-bad-because-its-profitable
Vegetables Don’t Exist – Popula https://popula.com/2019/02/20/vegetables-dont-exist/
An anime being 'big in america' is like a punk band being 'big in japan': a common but rarely intentional side effect of globalization, notable mostly as trivia.
Band name of the day: vegetables were shunned and feared
If your website is not static, it is not a website: it is an application, & should be distributed as an executable. If your website contains javascript, it is not a website: it is an application & should be distributed as an executable.
Monday is Data Privacy Day. Celebrate by legally changing your name to ";drop table users;
A Flower for Your Thoughts | Lapham’s Quarterly https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/flower-your-thoughts
Band name of the day: experiments upon vegetables
Life hack: for your 'best articles of the year' list, just post all the articles that had the least traffic. People are gonna disagree with your ranking anyway so just flatten that curve. Finding gems in that dross is inevitable.
Kieron Gillen's Comic 'Die' Is About A Tabletop RPG Gone Wrong https://kotaku.com/kieron-gillens-new-comic-is-about-the-sad-mess-of-rpgs-1831441119
The Internet of Unprofitable Things – The ongoing struggle http://strugglers.net/~andy/blog/2018/12/24/the-internet-of-unprofitable-things/
What to write with? Styli for clay tablets in the ancient Aegean and eastern Mediterranean https://crewsproject.wordpress.com/2018/11/25/what-to-write-with-styli-for-clay-tablets/
Facebook workers are the only people who can hold the company accountable. https://slate.com/technology/2018/12/facebook-workers-privacy-violation.html
GXemul - Documentation (0.6.1) http://gavare.se/gxemul/gxemul-stable/doc/guestoses.html#sprite
View of Roundtable: Should library workers learn to code? https://journal.lib.uoguelph.ca/index.php/perj/article/view/4121/4134
Archiving C64 Tapes Correctly | pagetable.com https://www.pagetable.com/?p=1002
To a reserve a table for my new hyper-exclusive resturant, cut a potato in half, put a twenty dollar bill inside, and bury it in your back yard during a new moon; if your application is accepted, we will contact you.
Beating hash tables with trees? The ART-ful radix trie https://www.the-paper-trail.org/post/art-paper-notes/
Unix is not an acceptable Unix | Affording Play https://mkremins.github.io/blog/unix-not-acceptable-unix/
GitHub - jvburnes/node9: A portable hybrid distributed OS based on Inferno, LuaJIT and Libuv https://github.com/jvburnes/node9
'Do you prefer horror movies or comedy movies' is a good way of phrasing 'with what degree of intensity are you comfortable having your mental constructs challenged'. 'Hausu is my favorite movie' is a valid & illuminating response.
Band name of the day: acceptable meat creaminess
Error 406 - Not Acceptable https://www.board-db.org/
Error 406 - Not Acceptable http://www.iedu.com/Solar/Panels/index.html
Unix is not an acceptable Unix | Affording Play http://mkremins.github.io/blog/unix-not-acceptable-unix/
When a social structure is flat (like twitter) all friction is between people & there's no 'natural' adjuticator except a powerful & unaccoutable adjutication class. When it has cliques (like mastodon) it can be broken down & adjuticators are limited in power.
Portable Distributed Objects - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Distributed_Objects
Band name of the day: exodus to an uninhabitable earth
Hot take: almost all ACTUAL statements encountered in daily life are untestable except in an ad-hoc & ambiguous way, because their referents don't map well to physical reality.
Javascript is a just-OK language saddled with the world's worst graphics toolkit: three distinct languages, each with specs so large that nobody has written a new implementation in 20 years, for live-editing a rich tech document to make it resemble a canvas, in ways that are not portable between the 3 implementations or minor revisions of the same implementation.
Revolutionary ideas always are masked as a return to older ideas or appeal to common sense ONLY because they can't be expressed without the intellectual groundwork that makes them seem inevitable once fully comprehended.
GitHub - jvburnes/node9: A portable hybrid distributed OS based on Inferno, LuaJIT and Libuv https://github.com/jvburnes/node9
Hot take: if you can't write a feature-complete proof of concept implementation of it in 100 lines, then there will never be a stable implementation, but if you can, then even 10k line implementations can be made stable.
Survivorship bias spicy take: if someone is successful enough to be notable for their success, they are rare enough that no lessons from their experience apply generally enough to make someone else successful beyond the 50% mark.
Bad idea of the day: edit executable files by removing any bytes that are not numberwang
A new fast hash table in response to Google’s new fast hash table | Probably Dance https://probablydance.com/2018/05/28/a-new-fast-hash-table-in-response-to-googles-new-fast-hash-table/
The CIA made a Magic: The Gathering-style card game for training agents, and we played it - The Verge https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/21/17374054/cia-collect-it-all-declassified-training-tabletop-card-game
Bad idea of the day: A browser extension that links everything in your browser cache with a fake file whose name is a hash of that item, serves those fake files over bittorrent, and, for all URLs whose expiration date is in the future, keeps a distributed table of URL to hash & attempts to fetch from bittorrent before from http
Uncomfortable ASMR â Real Life http://reallifemag.com/uncomfortable-asmr/
In the future when people tell me the web stack is an acceptable GUI layer I should just show them this: https://www.vox.com/2018/5/3/17309078/digital-art-diana-a-smith-francine-coded-browser-art ; if drawing a picture is impressive with your tools, your tools are shit
An interesting correspondence table: http://viznut.fi/texts-en/ancient_binary_symbolism.html
When coding style survives compilation: de-anonymizing programmers from executable binaries | the morning paper https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/03/16/when-coding-style-survives-compilation-de-anonymizing-programmers-from-executable-binaries/
Portable Computer Pre-History: Portable Before Laptops https://tedium.co/2018/03/15/early-portable-computer-history/
In an equitable society, social problems are a matter of individual choice. We don't live in such a society, and never have. If we want to, we should be honest about this. Pretending to have achieved equity is a good way to amplify shitty power relations.
Bad idea of the day: Cryptocurrency but the proof of work is computing a giant-ass rainbow table
How to Think Like a Medieval Monk | Lapham’s Quarterly https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/how-think-medieval-monk
Guns tend to empower white, financially unstable men—who oppose gun control | Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/11/study-white-men-facing-money-trouble-tend-to-cling-to-guns-for-power-identity/
Reach Out and Touch Faith | Lapham’s Quarterly https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/reach-out-and-touch-faith
The Prehistory of Music | Lapham’s Quarterly https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/prehistory-music
Web Typography: Designing Tables to be Read, Not Looked At · An A List Apart Article https://alistapart.com/article/web-typography-tables
Uncomfortable by Design: A Series of Deliberately Inconvenient Everyday Objects - 99% Invisible https://99percentinvisible.org/article/uncomfortable-by-design-a-series-of-deliberately-inconvenient-everyday-objects/
MNT Reform: DIY Portable Computer http://mntmn.com/reform/
How disreputable rehabs game Google to profit off patients - The Verge https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/7/16257412/rehabs-near-me-google-search-scam-florida-treatment-centers
How did usury stop being a sin and become respectable finance? | Aeon Essays https://aeon.co/essays/how-did-usury-stop-being-a-sin-and-become-respectable-finance?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=bdfe024e86-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_07_04&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-bdfe024e86-68693017
Timeline Sandbox