Why Tool AIs Want to Be Agent AIs: The Power of Agency - Gwern.net https://www.gwern.net/Tool-AI

Where to begin with Japanese cyberpunk | BFI https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/where-begin-japanese-cyberpunk

How to self-publish your novel as an ebook - The Verge https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/1/18285875/self-publishing-ebook-amazon-kindle-epub-book-how-to-editing-art-sales-strategy

The most effective april fool’s day joke is now to say things you mean without sounding sarcastic.

April Fool’s Joke Recalled After Accidentally Causing Reader To Question Consumer Culture – Point & Clickbait https://www.pointandclickbait.com/2016/04/april-fools-joke-recalled/

I art-directed a website. The end boss was finding out how to make the black parts of a black-on-transparent image a light gray after finding out that CSS can’t do this itself yet.

People whose dating profile consists entirely of their nationality are incomprehensible to me, but not quite as incomprehensible as the ones that are blank or have some useless placeholder like ‘ask’. The point of a dating site is that you get to see compatibility before starting a convo, y’know

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.

i think my personal wellbeing is starting to slip… piles of laundry need to be done and dishes crowd my desk

Milk Crate History: Too Well-Made Not to Steal https://tedium.co/2019/03/19/milk-crate-theft-history/

Casino Screwup Royale: A tale of “ethical hacking” gone awry | Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/03/50-shades-of-greyhat-a-study-in-how-not-to-handle-security-disclosures/

Everybody keeps talking about ‘Apple Card’ & I kept thinking they were talking about that thing you stuck in your Apple II to simulate an IBM PC clone.

@freemor@freemor.homelinux.net Ok, switched to txtnish, and I can see your posts :)

my no-laptop experiment is still going alright… although i’m kind of just excited to start messing around with my new one when it comes

Rebooting UUCP to redecentralize the net / Boing Boing https://boingboing.net/2019/03/25/tilde-servers-r-us.html

to make the world worth living in requires conspiracy

Sort of unexpectedly, DC’s Captain Marvel movie ended up being substantially better than Marvel’s Captain Marvel movie, because DC decided to make a PG-13 Deadpool movie while Marvel tried to make a Superman movie.

Ghost stories are about return of the repressed, & to have the return you need the repression, so ghost stories are actually about trauma & reintegration. (Again, probably obvious, but shit feels more original when you’ve been awake for 30 hours)

The function of genre tropes is to provide a promise of certain kinds of things – enjoyable to genre fans – happening to make the thing enjoyable even if there’s no other engagement. (Y’all probably know this but everything feels more original when you’ve been awake for 30 hours.)

Dusk Maiden of Amnesia managed to be both a satisfying school harem comedy & a satisfying gothic ghost story. Highly recommend. Why the heck don’t people talk more about this show?

I wasn’t expecting Dusk Maiden of Amnesia to be this similar to Yuuna and the Haunted Onsen. I approve.

TFW you give yourself low-grade caffeine toxicity expecting to be productive at work but instead end up writing long twitter threads about strategic subculture destablization

I tried really hard to give The Amityville Horror another chance but all I can think is: how the hell is a movie starring Margot Kidder this bad and this boring? Steven King came around on it but I guess I won’t.

Never mistake your inability to richly imagine the outgroup for an actual general consensus among them. No matter how wrong they might be about the things they agree on, they define themselves by their minor internal schisms.

I want to like exa, but its default color choices are hot garbage. Don’t these people who use purple ever try using a terminal with a black background?

i was less productive today. i’m trying not to internalize it as “i’m not doing good enough today”

This, except unironically: https://makefrontendshitagain.party/ ; interfaces ought to be rich & individual representations of the underlying models, unless people are required/forced to use them, in which case all formatting should be able to be stripped automatically.

One thing the DomeKano manga has over the anime is that it plays up how much of a lovable dork Hina is. Anime Hina comes off to me as somebody you’d want to stay away from on the grounds of emotional instability, & is only shallowly charming.

@kas@enotty.dk now that I understand fish enough to port over the contents of my .bashrc and .bash_profile, I’m starting to get used to it. How’s having different shell preferences for login/interactive treating you?

I wanted to feel productive this evening, but I didn’t want to do any useful work. In related news, I’ve switched to https://fishshell.com/ from GPLv2 bash.

today was the day of the triennual trying of the fish shell only to go back to bash within an hour or two

A lot of disagreements seem to come down to a gap wherein, when commercial success and apparent human flourishing conflict, some folks privilege the former over the latter. I’m wondering how much of this is about legibility / discounting self-reporting in favor of numbers.

Ok, everything is back on my tilde.town homepage. Thanks to web.archive.org ^^ I’m just sad I couldn’t retrieve my twtxt.txt file :/

“Great repository names are short and memorable. Need inspiration? How about supreme-couscous?” — I hadn’t heard about this particular Supreme collab, but then again I haven’t been subscribed to Hypebeast in a while…

so far i’ve devoted a lot more time to reading…

A generalised solution to distributed consensus | the morning paper https://blog.acolyer.org/2019/03/08/a-generalised-solution-to-distributed-consensus/

How the nineties are coming back to haunt us - The Globe and Mail https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-how-the-nineties-are-coming-back-to-haunt-us/

modern mobile development cons: the absence of hardware keyboards leads to a culture of passivity. modern mobile dev pros: nobody assumes you are running a supercomputer with a fiber connection directly to the data center no more than 5 ft long

Is there a convenient way to make your desktop browser pretend to be a mobile browser so sites don’t try to allocate twenty gigs of memory for goddamned css animations?

Is a mission to Mars morally defensible given today’s real needs? | Aeon Essays https://aeon.co/essays/is-a-mission-to-mars-morally-defensible-given-todays-real-needs

We ought to be suspicious of business plans that resemble manifest destiny: expansion into supposedly-unclaimed regions, turning inhabitants into tools & discarding the resistant (who now have nowhere to go) or worse.

Hill House has stood for 80 years and might for 80 more. Inside, floors lay straight, doors sensibly shut, but why is there a dormer window RIGHT NEXT TO a stained glass one, and why don’t the bottoms line up??

Trendism is the logic of financialized speculative capitalism extended to the realm of takes: information about information about information (even if it’s false) exceeds the value of the baseline information.

invention is the discovery of a path through possibility space. it doesn’t have to be a good path.

I can’t believe I have to say this, but ‘polarization’ and ‘diversity’ are not synonyms.

Bighorn-Sheep Migration Routes Form Ancestral Knowledge - The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/09/to-save-animals-we-need-to-save-their-knowledge-too/569503/

Stick To The Script!!! [SORRY TO BOTHER YOU film analysis] - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGnQLgpaupU

It’s a cliche to say that technical advances are making the world change faster, but the more the products of time binding become available & silos collapsed the more obviously slow everything is.

Welcome to ‘Zombieland’: A former US Army base rots in the hands of overwhelmed Afghans - Stripes https://www.stripes.com/welcome-to-zombieland-a-former-us-army-base-rots-in-the-hands-of-overwhelmed-afghans-1.570893

Why It’s Important to Consider Whether Dune Is a White Savior Narrative | Tor.com https://www.tor.com/2019/03/06/why-its-important-to-consider-whether-dune-is-a-white-savior-narrative/

This Is What It’s Like To Wake Up During Surgery - Digg http://digg.com/2019/waking-up-from-anesthsia

How to Take a Nap When You Suck at Taking Naps - MEL Magazine https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/how-to-take-a-nap-when-you-suck-at-taking-naps

It’s time to celebrate the humanity of the communal snooze | Aeon Essays https://aeon.co/essays/its-time-to-celebrate-the-humanity-of-the-communal-snooze

A Beginner’s Guide to Music Theory - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2z02J4fJwg

@kas@enotty.dk I wanted to like Kakoune but I liked having my option key not be an alt key more. Shame, really.

People love to talk about the potential security impact of exotic state-of-the-art shit like GPT-2 and deepfakes, but they’re neither convincing nor the lowest-effort effective way to create disinfo. Spinners scale better than GPT-2.

That previous post took the total font load for Safari users from 23 MB to a mere 9 MB. Progress!

I was too lazy to look up how to write a for-loop in bash so I just ran “find . -name *.ttf -exec woff2_compress {} \;”

Collins’ Crypt: Bad Movies Used To Be So Much Better | Birth.Movies.Death. https://birthmoviesdeath.com/2019/03/06/collins-crypt-bad-movies-used-to-be-so-much-better

Antitrust Enforcement Needs to Evolve for the 21st Century | Electronic Frontier Foundation https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/02/antitrust-enforcement-needs-evolve-21st-century

Sail to Shizuoka, Japan | https://wiki.xxiivv.com/shizuoka

Douglas Engelbart’s Symposium - Bootstrapping the future: Doug’s call to action - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZfQiskDj_w

Esquire’s March Cover Is a Monument to Whiteness and Toxic Masculinity - Pacific Standard https://psmag.com/ideas/why-esquires-march-cover-is-sort-of-dangerous

So glad to see some fresh, new, good-looking folk-horror with Midsommar. Judging by previous work on Hereditary, it should be fantastic.

A community can be classified by whether the primary goal of community members is to increase the total value of the community to its members or increase their value with respect to their peers.

The People’s Republic of Walmart: how late-stage capitalism gives way to early-stage fully automated luxury communism / Boing Boing https://boingboing.net/2019/03/05/walmart-without-capitalism.html

Why intuition leaves us vulnerable to conspiracy theories - The Verge https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/4/18250292/facebook-moderation-conspiracy-theory-mike-wood-psychology-interview

Update: if you buy the paperback version of my book, now you’ll be able to get the ebook for free. (Dunno why anybody would want that.) Also, the ebook now has wikipedia links for various terms via X-Ray, in case you didn’t know who Thad Starner was or something.

Setup Syncthing to mirror buku bookmark database

“Don’t Get In The Damn Robot Mob!” (Evangelion, Mob Psycho 100, & learning to run away) - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZsD-j8JFR8

Live on April 19th: the professor you’re glad you don’t have and the professor you wish you had debate about something basically tangential to either’s appeal or focus, and one of them will be entertaining.

April 19th: Shitty Campbell vs Cocaine Lacan. (It’s obvious who will win, but it’s equally obvious that the loser will just claim to have won & his fans will believe him, just like they did every other time.)

Conspiracy theory: the Titanic didn’t sink because it was swapped with a replica of the Titanic from the future in order to hide evidence from the Philidelphia experiment

Pistol Opera is fucking wild. I understood just enough of the symbolism to recognize that I understood almost none of the symbolism.

There’s a tendency, when we don’t have a rational understanding of something, to classify it as only capable of IRrational understanding – i.e. pattern matching. Occasionally, this is the only practical solution in the short term.

Whatever happened to that film adaptation of E. H. Hoffman’s The Sandman starring Iggy Pop that Dario Argento was gonna direct? Is it still happening? Is it in production hell? (Do italian pulp flicks have production hell?)

at-work-editions https://qz.com/work/1560079/maximizing-shareholder-profits-is-a-great-way-to-destroy-humanity/

How to Retire Early - VICE https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/gya8bx/i-tested-the-saving-technique-that-promises-retirement-at-40

What It’s Like To Write About Race And Video Games https://kotaku.com/what-its-like-to-write-about-race-and-video-games-1832886047

It absolutely shocked me when, in a documentary about their history, Kurt refered to Information Society as ‘disco’, but in retrospect it makes perfect sense: the early 80s was right next to the late 70s, literally.

A lot of people are going to start watching Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka, and then say ‘this looks like trash’ and stop watching it. They’re right, and it’s a shame. Higurashi had the same problem.

ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL (Escape to the Movies) - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PNDmUO760w

i feel like i’ve been getting a lot more done with the radio station than i ever have been able to do…

Scott Alexander is clearly not a neo-nazi. The fact that he considers democratic socialists to be as far to the left as neoreactionaries are to the right, however, indicates he’s in a right-wing bubble.

4 lessons from a post-graduate course in omelettes https://thetakeout.com/4-lessons-tips-in-how-to-make-omelettes-1832765134

The Big Data Revolution Will Be Sampled: How ‘Big Data’ Has Come To Mean ‘Small Sampled Data’ https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2019/02/17/the-big-data-revolution-will-be-sampled-how-big-data-has-come-to-mean-small-sampled-data/

Gender-swapped and race-flipped remakes aren’t living up to their potential - The Verge https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/12/18220797/what-men-want-ghostbusters-the-hustle-remakes-gender-race-flipped?curator=MediaREDEF

BEYOND HIGH WEIRDNESS: AN APPROACH TO THE LIMINAL – Liminal Seattle http://www.liminalseattle.com/2019/02/20/beyond-high-weirdness/

Who the fuck decided to call it The Moon is a Harsh Mistress instead of Fourth Generation Warfare With Fourth Generation Languages

The ‘paradox of tolerance’ is not a paradox, any moreso than “my car requires gas to run but if I drive too much I run out of gas” is a paradox. Abstract machines are still machines. Society is a machine for living in, & if you break it living gets harder.

Media mix is interesting. You can optimize a work for adaptation but that keeps you from taking advantage of features of your medium. The best adaptations are sometimes difficult-to-adapt medium-specific forms that forced creativity (ex. Bakemonogatari)

Mutually Assured Destruction: When The Only Winning Move is Not to Play https://fs.blog/2017/06/mutually-assured-destruction/

How David Lynch brings his imagination to life - Huck Magazine https://www.huckmag.com/shorthand_story/david-lynch-interview-creative-process/

Richard Stallman: Talking to the Mailman. New Left Review 113, September-October 2018. https://newleftreview.org/II/113/richard-stallman-talking-to-the-mailman

I have sold zero copies of my game since the launch sale ended. I’m not sure if I need to cut the original price in half or if people literally just only buy games when they are on sale.

A Green New Deal to Win Back Our Future https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/02/green-new-deal-climate-change-policy

Parallax scrolling effects are bad design. Here’s why https://www.fastcompany.com/90309395/why-parallax-scrolling-needs-to-die

Medium has changed their policy. Now, recommendations are controlled by curators, & anything paywalled gets submitted to them. This probably means fewer but higher-quality recommendations…

The sample they chose to highlight here resembles the kind of paper a 14 year old would try & fail to bullshit after staying up all night partying right before the due date: https://blog.openai.com/better-language-models/#sample1

GitHub - alhassy/ElispCheatSheet: Quick reference to the core language of Emacs —Editor MACroS. https://github.com/alhassy/ElispCheatSheet