it seems very possible that we are now exiting the brief window where a good fraction of all of human knowledge was searchable & instantly available. a window that starts with the invention of the search engine & ends with the invention of large language models.
the goldilocks period between too hard to access & too hard to discern from bullshit
Dec 4, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
the AI code generation stuff i've seen doesn't seem like it's much beyond what github copilot could do? just with a different interface. and i tried using copilot for a bit but turned it off because it had the same keybindings as regular autocomplete
and regular autocomplete was more limited but also told me things that were almost always true, rather than 80% true. and it turns out the problem isn't coding, but instead understanding the problem & understanding how the current code works.
Sep 4, 2022 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
what colour is the Sun?
(no, not white, for the purposes of this tweet that is not a colour)
Sep 13, 2020 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
two forms of media I see a lot of are:
- discussions of big nerd media, focused around canon & representation & absolutes
- tiktoks & memes which are all about evoking a vibe, a mood, juxtaposition, fragmentary worldbuilding, not even staking a claim on fiction
against which it's kind of interesting to think about David Lynch, who has been around since before the turn to puzzlebox narrative, and is now in vogue again
Sep 13, 2020 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
microbes on Venus?!!
(leak of an embargoed announcement for tomorrow says they've found phosphine in the upper atmosphere, and they can't think of any good processes to produce that that aren't microbes)
Sep 5, 2020 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
have been enjoying Good Sudoku - the way I play it is I play on Pro and solve most of it and then I hit the hint button so it'll tell me where the Y Wing is
I went off sudoku in university when a class assignment was to write a sudoku solver using a constraint satisfaction solver. something about being able to know how to mechanically resolve it took away the joy of doing it by hand.
Sep 3, 2020 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
i'm starting a thread to collect tweets where people express frustration that there's no good term for a variable that can take a value from 0 to 1
here's me
discovered a new found videogame called "booking a blood test with the Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust Community Phlebotomy Services"
a found videogame is a system in the world that fulfils the formal properties of a videogame but was not designed to be a videogame
Aug 6, 2020 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
here's two takes on grant funding (prompted by that good @netgal_emi post, here it is: emreed.net/VGArtsFunding.…)
the skills & approach needed to successfully get funding and the skills & approach needed to do a good art can be quite different! & that that's often a shame?
Aug 5, 2020 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
goddamnit (from Harrow The Ninth, a perfectly serious novel about space necromancers)
there was a none pizza with left beef reference
Jul 24, 2020 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I've spent a while working as a professional game designer, and the thing I now appreciate most about a game...
is it being well-scoped.
call me Goldilocks, I guess
Jul 19, 2020 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
rn @manygradients is having a moment: loads of people are asking for gradients, appreciating it's gradients, but also having fun hating it's gradients. cool to see. a project making it's own way in the world.
Jul 12, 2020 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
lots of people try to make light up dice, but the issue of cramming a battery & charging setup in there makes them super pricey. powering them entirely from an inductive ring is very interesting indeed!
as noted in the thread, there's stuff to solve to make sure there's an inductive ring at the right orientation... I'd be curious if you could put smarts on them so they could report back what they've rolled... but seems plausible to get a set of dice + mat under $100 retail?
Jul 10, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
On the one hand, I make a point to say "player" rather than "user", and I think this is important…
On the other, as Olia Lialina outlines here, this attitude embeds a sense that the user ideally does not notice and has no agency over the software contemporary-home-computing.org/turing-complet…
which, y'know, is probably the place that Uber wants to be. but it might not be the place that you want to be.
Jul 5, 2020 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
three things on queer happiness that i've been thinking about:
this essay on queer happiness, and the prevalence of autobiographical fiction that talks about how hard it can be to be queer granta.com/whatever-happe…
Jul 2, 2020 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
think i'm going to stream some videogames! in about an hour, gonna be playing @radiatoryang's Hard Lads and @ghaoyuxin's Out For Delivery.
alright! going live in like 10 mins, link is here: twitch.tv/vtwentyone
Jun 16, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
til that IBM has a service where you can run code on actual quantum computers for free ibm.com/quantum-comput…
they have a visual editor. or you can spec it out by connecting from a Jupyter notebook
May 27, 2020 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
seeing some welcome pushback against the "wholesome games" label, and it's reminding me of this @JFriedhoff essay, which was pushing back against the idea that all personal games have to be glum & melancholy medium.com/@jfriedhoff/pl…
my take is that: "positive vibes only!!" people are just as likely to do shitty things as other people, and are often worse because they won't talk about their shitty behaviour or deal with it. you can draw the parallel to games p easily.
May 26, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
having fun playing with Looom
one that might have more luck with twitter’s compression
May 21, 2020 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
here are my not especially controversial opinions about remote work
it's good when the company culture and processes support it
the company probably isn't set up for it if most people aren't remote
what does it mean for the culture to support it? mainly, that decisions and discussions happen in a place where remote people can see them. if you're not constantly on calls with each other, that probably means a bunch of writing things down. probably a good thing anyway?
May 21, 2020 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
"The old saying is "graft when the leaves are the size of a squirrels ear"."
This morning I'm learning about apples. The way you grow apples is:
- you plant apple seeds
- you wait for the tree to grow
- you chop off the top of the tree
- and attach a branch from an existing apple tree
- which then fuses together, to make a hybrid that grows nice apples!
