anarchy, abstraction ... systems, patterns, form.
https://t.co/W6dDzEEQP0
Also at https://t.co/Enwg7ZuD9c
Nov 20, 2023 • 12 tweets • 5 min read
Rather fascinating trying to get DallE to make me a scene from the folk-tale Rapunzel in the style of 8-bit videogames like Donkey Kong.
At first it refused because of "content policy constraints".
I assumed it wouldn't do Donkey Kong because of Nintendo copyright ... \1
bit it turns out it's Rapunzel it doesn't like doing.
So I argued with ChatGPT a bit, explaining that Rapunzel was a public domain folk-tale. And it apologised and said it knew that, but even so there was a risk of violating the IP of recent retellings. (I assume Disney) ... \2
Sep 20, 2022 • 19 tweets • 10 min read
Last night, I paid money to get a 100 more DallE runs. Honestly, I think if you know what you want it's pretty good value.
Particularly getting into to taking ideas generated on Craiyon and varying / improving them.
@AlSweigart Define fan. I think blockchains are "interesting". They're a real thing and they aren't going away just because we don't like them. So we need to take what opportunities we can to try to steer them in a better direction. \1
@AlSweigart For the right-wing libertarians, blockchains offer the fantasy of capital unleashed from its last dependencies on the democratic state. Which will be a terrible thing if it comes to pass.
OTOH ... \2
Apr 30, 2021 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
So ... if I were Basecamp employee, I'd probably be one of the people screaming about not being allowed to have political discussions. But, to be fair, from an outsider perspective, it seems they've been pretty decent about this. \1
Right now, society is being torn apart because we all can't stop getting more and more upset with each other and screaming at each other on social media.
If that was happening inside their company too, and they wanted to try to re-establish some kind of quiet stability ... \2
Feb 17, 2021 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Yes. The more I think of it, the more this point, the "not cumulative" nature of Quora (or any social media posting) is the crucial question. We are sharecroppers on these platforms if they don't give us the tools to build something bigger ... \1
As way for our work to "add up" to something more than the fleeting attention that it buys us (and buys the platform)
That's what's "evil" about the attention farming platforms. Of course attention is always fleeting. But they could have been set up in a different way ... \2
Jan 30, 2021 • 12 tweets • 5 min read
@6loss I think Stallman's politics is left and libertarian (where libertarian is "extreme liberal"). The intuition most of us had originally is that with enough freedom, the good drives out the bad. As you know, I think we might be discovering that that is "wrong" in some sense ... \1
@6loss But it's still a viable and attractive intuition.
And, yes, the GPL etc. is built on that. So freedom is more important than trying to constrain people to do good.
\2
Jan 2, 2021 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
The Great Software Stagnation is real, but we have to understand it to fight it. The CAUSE of the TGSS is not "teh interwebs". The cause is the "direct manipulation" paradigm : the "worst idea in computer science" \1
Progress in CS comes from discovering ever more abstract and expressive languages to tell the computer to do something. But replacing "tell the computer to do something in language" with "do it yourself using these gestures" halts that progress. \2
Aug 28, 2020 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
@wokal_distance This is a good thread but you miss the point about the post-modernists. The PoMos were not ADVOCATING we abandon truth. They were diagnosing and WARNING US, that the media and language were like this. That no cultural institution or language could guarantee objective truth \1
@wokal_distance Neither media nor our langauge etc. could play the role of a kind of a court to give us a definitive verdict.
People complain about PoMo as though PoMos inflicted this problem on us. But that's shooting the messenger.\2
Aug 24, 2020 • 9 tweets • 6 min read
@AnneOgborn@rzeta0 After a bit of playing with SWI so far I was impressed with many aspects of it. Running web server and web interface was remarkably simple. More or less the same as doing it in Python / Flask etc.
But there were things in Prolog which seemed inconvenient / counter-intuitive. \1
@AnneOgborn@rzeta0 These are conceptual things, and I guess you could argue that fixing them would mean it isn't Prolog any more. But they managed to stop me going further.
Some examples ... \2
Jul 10, 2020 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
@msimoni@coreload I think the tablet COULD be a perfectly good device for content creation if people would just do the damned UI design work to make it good. Right now, we haven't figured it out. This is where graphical input could be very useful. \1
@msimoni@coreload This is a whole other story.
It seems that social apps have figured out ways to get users to put a lot of data into their systems. Problem is that the data is just being used for social media type things. \2
Jul 10, 2020 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
@msimoni@coreload You can have graphical ways of representing lambdas. But then you move away from DM and your graphical objects are now symbols.
AFAIK no one has come up with a very elegant or efficient graphical language. Alphabets typically beat ideograms.
\1
@msimoni@coreload And recursion is particularly hard to represent graphically
If you mean supplement a graphical desktop with extra linguistic scripting. Then sure, I'm all for that. But desktop becomes diminishing vestigial part of the whole. \end
Jul 10, 2020 • 7 tweets • 5 min read
@coreload@msimoni Complicated for Twitter. Here's what I think in summary.
Computing is about using language to tell computers to do things. Language enables grammatical composition and ever increasing levels of abstraction and expressivity \1
@coreload@msimoni The great mistake and delusion in computer history, of which the desktop metaphor is just one major example, is "direct manipulation".
People seem to love it and always fantasize about more of it ... \2
Jun 2, 2020 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Twitter wants to know what's happening? What's happening is #anonymousbrasil just dropped a fuck-tonne of dox about Bolsonaro and his family and inner-circle's financial records, including properties they own, dozens of telephone numbers they have etc. \1
If this stuff is real :
a) their security sucked big time. Seems like Anonymous only decided to attack them a couple of days ago
b) there is so much information for the police who are (or should be) investigating Bolsonaro to get their teeth into \2
