This stochastic Parrot has ceased to exist.
Oops! We Automated Bullshit.
AI systems like ChatGPT are trained with text from Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and other huge archives of bullshit, alongside plenty of actual facts (including Wikipedia and text ripped off from professional writers). But there is no algorithm in ChatGPT to check which parts are true. The output is literally bullshit, exactly as defined by philosopher Harry Frankfurt, and as we would expect from Graeber’s study of bullshit jobs.
Relevant: Moral Codes – Designing alternatives to AI.
Lessons from METAFONT.
Metafont’s author, Donald Knuth, is primarily known for his multi-volume masterpiece, the Art of Computer Programming. All Knuth’s work on typesetting and font creation software is, on the face of it, nothing more than an effort to get his book printed to a reasonable standard.
Relevant: Nara – the typeface that never existed.
Like NPM for everything, but using Nix.
Devbox is a command-line tool that lets you easily create isolated shells for development.
You start by defining the list of packages required for your project, and Devbox creates an isolated, reproducible environment with those packages installed.
Update: This is game changer! devbox global add can install almost everything the platform-specific package manger is needed for – up to now. Even on macOS Brew or MacPorts become less important.
Delusional Mandala.
Lu Yang is a multimedia artist driven by the desire to explore her own gender nonconformity alongside big topics such as neuroscience and religion. She often expresses her ideas through playful digital lense resembling video games populated with gaudy, anime-inspired characters.
The artist created a digital nonsexual human simulator in her own shape for the first time to complete an artwork. Because of the powerful curse in the content of the work, the artist has to apply the spell to herself to avoid harming others.
Relevant: 電磁腦神教！腦制御士！.
The Decline of Usability: Revisited.
Auto-hiding scroll bars, shrinking the draggable area of window titles and cramming the bulk of a program's functionality inside a cramped hamburger menu are, as discussed above, blatantly breaking a number of well known UI design principles. Surely - surely - that's because of the incredible amount of meticulous research underpinning those decisions. And surely - surely - considering how prevalent this paradigm is today, any UI designer worth their salt can recite the very good reasons for and many benefits of these concepts in their sleep?
The Economics of Programming Languages.
In the mythology of open source, programming languages are created by people who seemingly have no direct economic function. They are just really good at compilers (somehow) and have a house to live in (somehow) and have a lifetime to devote to creating a useful programming language (somehow!)
Depeche Mod.
This guitar riff was composed a few years ago, now it is time to record it.
Early computer art by Barbara Nessim (1984).
The chunky scan-line gaps in between the rows of pixels are the result of these images being photographs of the monitor on which they were displayed. Screenshots had existed since the 1960s but in the 1980s getting such an image off a mainframe was not yet easy or universal. Instead images were saved by pointing a camera at the screen, in this case a Video Image Recorder, capturing the image on 35mm slide film, and printing them by cibachrome process.
Monaspace – an innovative superfamily of fonts for code.
Texture Healing is a novel technique that evens out the density of monospaced type, bringing it closer to how proportional type has looked for centuries.
Struggling to learn how to do a backflip, Nikita takes on an unusual training regimen.
(…) a wildly original and amusing snapshot of both the potential and current limits of AI.