[Easy Chair] | The Wizard of Q, by Walter Kirn | Harper’s Magazine https://harpers.org/archive/2018/06/the-wizard-of-q/

MiniBSD laptop computer | Hackaday.io https://hackaday.io/project/643-minibsd-laptop-computer

Google Groups https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/comp.unix.wizards/QX_dxElrVNs

Email icon https://www.topic.com/mold-eats-world

Band name of the day: coffin factory

Band name of the day: the death chamber

No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons » The Split-brain Universe https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=8255

No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons » A/Political (and a deferral on Doomsday) https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=8415

Bad idea of the day: Use mechanical turk to do a novel-length exquisite corpse, one sentence at a time.

Mailbag: AI Research on Dialogue and Story Generation | Emily Short’s Interactive Storytelling https://emshort.blog/2018/10/16/mailbag-ai-research-on-dialogue-and-story-generation/

The Magic Leap Con https://gizmodo.com/the-magic-leap-con-1829716266

Do You Struggle to Keep Eye Contact? Here’s What’s Happening in Your Brain https://bigthink.com/philip-perry/researchers-discover-why-its-hard-to-maintain-eye-contact-while-talking-with-someone

What’s the last Rutger Hauer movie that was good?

Vectorized Emulation: Hardware accelerated taint tracking at 2 trillion instructions per second | Gamozo Labs Blog https://gamozolabs.github.io/fuzzing/2018/10/14/vectorized_emulation.html

Band name of the day: the unassigned lands

Bad idea of the day: Multi-cursor and annotation support for vim

What duelling can teach us about taking offence | Aeon Essays https://aeon.co/essays/what-duelling-can-teach-us-about-taking-offence

Ultimate Writer: an Open Digital Typewriter https://alternativebit.fr/posts/ultimate-writer/

Hot take: structural problems don’t excuse individual accountability, but instead merely limit the ways in which that individual will can be effectively exercised to group action. No position is so rare that a group cannot form around it.

Bad idea of the day: An algorithm that creates textual descriptions of images watches TV, creating a description from each frame, which is then used to generate a new image & the video is resynthesized

Band name of the day: strawberry cream disease

“Machine learning failures - for art!” by Janelle Shane - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yneJIxOdMX4

Band name of the day: angry fruit salad

“A Box of Chaos: The Generative Artist’s Toolkit” by Benjamin Kovach - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZNTozzsNqk

“Musical Steganography: Hiding Things in Music” by Scott Fradkin - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLXqZVHrFa4

Neal Stephenson demonstrated that people will read (and love) infodumps so long as they’re funny or fun to read. In other words: infodumps in fiction are fine so long as the author is also an essayist.

Detecting the use of “curl | bash” server side | Application Security https://www.idontplaydarts.com/2016/04/detecting-curl-pipe-bash-server-side/

Can algorithms create true art, or do they only imitate? | Aeon Essays https://aeon.co/essays/can-algorithms-create-true-art-or-do-they-only-imitate

Bruce Sterling: Speculative architecture (September 26, 2018) - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-p4DV80xrm8

Maybe I should start doing writing exercises. You know, write a pastiche of an M.R. James story, and then one in Gibson’s style, a Stephenson version, a Lovecraft, etc. Fiction is pretty hard.

“Mapping Imaginary Cities” by Mouse Reeve - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ic_5gRVTQ_k

How Lisp Became God’s Own Programming Language https://twobithistory.org/2018/10/14/lisp.html

Rethinking AI through the politics of 1968 | openDemocracy https://www.opendemocracy.net/digitaliberties/dan-mcquillan/rethinking-ai-through-politics-of-1968

Band name of the day: vampire burial

Band name of the day: secret infections

Supply-Chain Security - Schneier on Security https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/05/supply-chain_se.html

Bad idea of the day: watching FEWER horror movies in october because you need a break from the rest of the year

The Real in Weird Realism: Notes on ‘The Haunting of Hill House’ – xenogothic https://xenogothic.com/2018/10/14/the-real-in-weird-realism-notes-on-the-haunting-of-hill-house/

Hotter take: ‘ambient computing’, ‘internet of things’, and ‘ubiquitous computing’ all pale in comparison to my favorite goofy term for this tech: ‘everyware’

Hot take: ambient computing is actually a cool & good idea, as long as no for-profit entities are involved in it. It only becomes horrible when you add business.

On mana: why we bestow certain objects with unearthly powers | Aeon Essays https://aeon.co/essays/on-mana-why-we-bestow-certain-objects-with-unearthly-powers

Meet Bill Wurtz, the Internet Musical Genius You’ve Never Heard Of - MEL Magazine https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/meet-bill-wurtz-the-internet-musical-genius-youve-never-heard-of?curator=MusicREDEF

Thread by @morganknutson: “Now that Google+ has been shuttered, I should air my dirty laundry on how awful the project and exec team was. I’m still pissed about the ba […]” https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1049523067506966529.html

Band name of the day: worthless bridge syndrome

The firebreaks — KarlSchroeder.com http://www.kschroeder.com/weblog/archive/2011/10/27/the-firebreaks

Digi on every show: “This would only make sense if but it doesn’t so it sucks”

“Rosie Pattern Language: Improving on 50-Year Old Regular Expression Technology” by Jamie Jennings - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkTiYDrb0zg

If we added up all the time spent in airport security in the past seven years, how many average human lifespans would it be?

Has anybody else noticed that xkcd 2029 is actually just the plot of Twister?

Steve Jobs’ strange obsession with Billie Jean during the leadup to the Mac release makes a lot more sense when you remember that at the time he too was denying the paternity of his child.

Edward Snowden Reconsidered | by Tamsin Shaw | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/09/13/edward-snowden-reconsidered/

Reality TV: Anatomy of a Genre | Video Essay - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS90rgLsb24

“Running With Scissors: Live Coding With Data” by Stuart Halloway - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx0-pViyIDU

Band name of the day: radical doubt

Yossi Appleboum Disagrees with How Bloomberg is Positioning His Research Against Supermicro https://www.servethehome.com/yossi-appleboum-disagrees-bloomberg-is-positioning-his-research-against-supermicro/

The Other Secret Twist: On the Political Philosophy of The Good Place - Los Angeles Review of Books https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/secret-twist-political-philosophy-good-place/

Bad idea of the day: turn music into text by substituting note frequency with word frequency

Scientific Research Into Pair Programming https://tuple.app/pair-programming-guide/scientific-research-into-pair-programming

Hot take: weasel words are not a form of obfuscation but a signal about confidence level. Misrepresenting your level of confidence in a proposition is tantamount to lying.

Band name of the day: baltic sea anomaly

Bad idea of the day: A video game adaptation of Lethem’s Gun With Occasional Music in the style of the Monkey Island series, with a mechanic involving mixing custom blends of forgetol/regretol/etc & replacing people’s stashes with them.

A house is a machine for living in, & a haunted house (after Jackson) is a machine for dreaming in. Hill House is architectural LSD: it reflects psychic energy inward, causing people to haunt themselves.

How Does a Film Become Lost? https://tedium.co/2018/10/11/lost-and-found-film-history/

Intro to Generative Art - DEV Community ‘‍”‍’ https://dev.to/aspittel/intro-to-generative-art-2hi7

Supermicro boards were so bug ridden, why would hackers ever need implants? | Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/10/supermicro-boards-were-so-bug-ridden-why-would-hackers-ever-need-implants/

“Towards Language Support for Distributed Systems” by Heather Miller - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeBbiQZYmuY

“Generating Music From Emotion (and other experiments)” by Hannah Davis - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpiN2DZxU_4

Halloween III is the best Halloween movie. fite me

Postmodernism is not identity politics - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26fIBA7O5Ag

prim9 - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7XoW2qiFUA

Dotted Canonical S-expressions - DCSexps · GitHub https://gist.github.com/rain-1/a253e47b939fc0769524d8716541c96e

Preliminary Poetics of Procedural Generation in Games by @ikarth http://www.digra.org/wp-content/uploads/digital-library/DIGRA_2018_paper_166.pdf

A Python Script that Writes 800-page Children’s Books – Zach Whalen http://www.zachwhalen.net/posts/a-python-script-that-writes-800-page-childrens-books/

Emic Automata & Thematic Automata | maetl https://maetl.net/notes/storyboard/generative-writing-with-cellular-automata

Computers Reading Computers’ Writing http://zachwhalen.net/pg/pres/elo18/

Seminars on Long-Term Thinking are hit-or-miss (like TED talks) but the latest with Julia Galef is pretty good.

Bad idea of the day: a d20 where every face is labeled 1

Band name of the day: how to deter bears

What’s a CPU to do when it has nothing to do? [LWN.net] https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/767630/594421f913c3d00a/

Band name of the day: crepuscular forces

Supporting Fast Payments for All “ and Economic Freedom | MetaFilter https://www.metafilter.com/176954/supporting-fast-payments-for-all-and-economic-freedom

Band name of the day: we are the asteroid

Announcing a Competition for Ethics in Computer Science, with up to $3.5 Million in Prizes - The Mozilla Blog https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/10/10/announcing-a-competition-for-ethics-in-computer-science-with-up-to-3-5-million-in-prizes/

Protobuffers Are Wrong :: Reasonably Polymorphic http://reasonablypolymorphic.com/blog/protos-are-wrong/index.html

GitHub - jimkang/random-internet-archive: Gets a random Internet Archive resource, in URL form with some metadata. https://github.com/jimkang/random-internet-archive

You Get What You Give: Why the New Radicals Broke Up https://tedium.co/2018/10/09/new-radicals-gregg-alexander-history/

Mary Shelley’s Obsession with the Cemetery | JSTOR Daily https://daily.jstor.org/mary-shelleys-obsession-with-the-cemetery/

Andrew W.K.: Investigating The Mystery Of Steev Mike - Stereogum https://www.stereogum.com/2015589/andrew-wk-steev-mike/franchises/sounding-board/

Sorry, but we can’t fantasize our way out of this mess https://amp.fastcompany.com/90247038/sorry-but-we-cant-fantasize-our-way-out-of-this-mess

Band name of the day: lush rot

Band name of the day: body genres

Bad idea of the day: a bot that posts random joke punchlines but not the actual joke

Cheezball Rising: Opening a dialogue / fuzzy notepad https://eev.ee/blog/2018/10/09/cheezball-rising-opening-a-dialogue/

GitHub - mit-pdos/biscuit: Biscuit research OS https://github.com/mit-pdos/biscuit

Band name of the day: the pyrotechnics of a new autumn

Hey what’s the likelyhood that the world we live in now is a punishment from the Basilisk?

Apparently hot take: automation tools don’t obviate abstract discussions about how best to think about decisions (like ‘should translations be precise or should they be accurate’ or ‘what is the good’) but make them more important.

Do people sell Superman t-shirts with the integral symbol in the place of the S?

Programming as interaction: A new perspective for programming language research - Tomas Petricek http://tomasp.net/blog/2018/programming-interaction/

You’d think that somebody writing for NME would know that ‘Daddy’s Car’ isn’t the first AI-written song. (Even if the earliest example they can think of is from Songsmith & they don’t recognize that Bach was doing generative music.)