Many buildings have wings but after millennia of domestication, they’ve lost the ability to fly. However, in remote mountain valleys, some wild buildings survive, tended to by monks and occasionally traveling the world disguised as clouds

Remember: if a family member asks about your politics this thanksgiving, tell them you’re an anarchist & would like to abolish the concept of money. It’ll shut them up and it’s probably even true.

Today is thanksgiving. Celebrate by determining who you don’t owe a debt to – who, in the total scheme of things, has had a net negative effect on your life – writing them a nasty letter, and setting it on fire.

GitHub - aurelg/ipfs-wormhole: Get things from one computer to another, safely. Over IPFS (which not even required to receive those things). https://github.com/aurelg/ipfs-wormhole

Guide to Tom Hanks - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQOf_WaaJfE

Today is thanksgiving. Celebrate by writing apology letters to everyone you have ever wronged.

Hot take: Cyberpunk only seems ‘prophetic’ because not enough has changed since the 80s to make it seem irrelevant, and this basically means that cyberpunk failed in its critical project by spawning insufficient praxis

“Eco Grime” Artists Blend Natural Sounds & Electronics to Depict a Polluted World « Bandcamp Daily https://daily.bandcamp.com/2018/11/13/eco-grime-music-history/

Hot take: things aren’t changing more quickly than they used to; it’s just that it is easier to become aware of distant events before they have been aggregated and summarized into the status of ‘non-event’.

Bad idea of the day: furniture modeled on cray equipment, with spaces to put your own computers in

The Little Regulation That Will Make a Big Change in How You Do Business: Department of Commerce to Establish New Export Controls on Emerging Technologies - Lexology https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=205f4c5f-17c7-4d18-9967-a01983883706

Is it gauche to name the hero of a show Yuta or does it only become gauche once a different character makes a Yuta / Yusha pun? Asking for a friend. (Gridman / Chuu2byo)

Jonestown’s Victims Have a Lesson to Teach Us, So I Listened – Mother Jones https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/11/jonestowns-victims-have-a-lesson-to-teach-us-so-i-listened-peoples-temple-anniversary-40/

From Satori to Silicon Valley https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/primary/docs/satori/taste.html

From Satori to Silicon Valley https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/primary/docs/satori/organic.html

Welcome to the witch capital of Norway | The Outline https://theoutline.com/post/6613/vardo-norway-halloween-steilneset-memorial

Structural typing (and its integration with prototype OO) might be one way to address the platypus… https://medium.com/@/structural-typing-and-its-integration-with-prototype-oo-might-be-one-way-to-address-the-platypus-c9663c362c26

How to Internet “ World Wide WTF ” Medium https://medium.com/s/world-wide-wtf/how-to-internet-6c379e75c8e0

TFW people post rhetorical questions to quora

Wait wait is AKB48 supposed to be a pun on AK 47?

Bad idea of the day: Sieze the amazon.com domain and point it to the wikipedia article for the Amazon river

I don’t agree with this at all, but I’ve gotta respect this level of trolling: https://wordsandbuttons.online/if_i_were_to_invent_a_programming_language_for_the_21st_century.html

Rare but dangerous are spells that compel the caster to cast them again and again, burning all their mana if a counterspell is not found quickly

Beware parasitic spells: Drawn to conduits of mana like practitioners, they attach themselves to larger spells to hitch a free ride, force themselves into invocations as intrusive thoughts

Tech Workers Need to Keep Organizing https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/11/tech-worker-organizing-google-union-walkout

Also found that adding sorting = ascending to the config file shows the most recent post last better for simple terminal viewing.

Discovered how to set use_abs_time to show absolute times in a timeline.

Bad idea of the day: transpose Pretty Hate Machine into a major key, shift every word in the lyrics to the least semantically distant word with a more positive sentiment score, and call the result Pretty Great Machine

‘Worse is better’ is not a justification – it is a tragedy, and one that folks who code in their free time are thankfully immune from needing to contribute to. So, y’know, don’t. You’re not on a deadline, so make something good, instead of something you regret.

@kas@enotty.dk to (1) he explained that phone numbers are too predictable to have any advantage by hashing and I don’t understand (2) as this might be a step to increase the xmpp user base.

Tutorials That Don’t Talk Down To You - Context Sensitive Design - Extra Credits - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFdEEzgc7pg

We will never know what it’s like to be the person the K-Mart PA system’s 1994 holiday playlist wants us to be.

off to finish writing my dnd campaign fanfic

you pretend to sleep and not to notice your guests while they climb into your bowl and greedily drink from it, its light pulsing through their veins and painting maps onto their skins

you sit at the bottom of the well as the noon sun peeks in, hold your bowl into the ray to fill it with light, a liter of photons usually enough for the night

Oh no… The Alita movie is going to try to cover the rollerball arc in addition to the first arc.

How To Become A Centaur https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/issue3-case

What It’s Like to Be a Bot “ Real Life https://reallifemag.com/what-its-like-to-be-a-bot/

Moved Temporarily http://allendowney.blogspot.co.nz/2018/02/learning-to-program-is-getting-harder.html

I’ve got a 1993 printing of the 1985 edition of SICP and it feels really nice to hold – solid and compact and un-awkward.

How to make your own Xanadu demo · GitHub https://gist.github.com/ldodds/a7f901c7f0118e83a645

GitHub - uliwitness/Stacksmith: An intuitive software erector kit targeted at people new to programming, but with enough potential to stay useful once they’ve learned, inspired by HyperCard. https://github.com/uliwitness/stacksmith/

Loper OS » Why Hypercard Had to Die http://www.loper-os.org/?p=568

Translating HyperTalk to JavaScript http://lexnet.bravepages.com/HTMLJS.htm

We talk to the developers behind MenuetOS: an operating system written entirely in assembly language - Good Gear Guide Australia https://www.goodgearguide.com.au/article/315421/we_talk_developers_behind_menuetos_an_operating_system_written_entirely_assembly_language/?

GitHub - marciot/retroweb-salto-simulator-js: Modifications to the SALTO Simulator to allow for compilation to JavaScript via Emscripten https://github.com/marciot/retroweb-salto-simulator-js

How To Be a Systems Thinker | Edge.org https://www.edge.org/conversation/mary_catherine_bateson-how-to-be-a-systems-thinker

The Animated Guide to Paredit http://danmidwood.com/content/2014/11/21/animated-paredit.html

Welcome to SICP Distilled http://www.sicpdistilled.com/

So, what I normally call ‘command line’ (as opposed to ‘console’) Pike in the Acme paper called ‘typescript’, and I think it might be worth adopting that terminology. The way he defines it would also apply to notebook interfaces.

Bad idea of the day: to combat writer’s block, use automatic writing as a divinatory method to predict what you would have written if you didn’t have writer’s block

Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System - The Donella Meadows Project http://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/#one

The trick to making biospheres small is to increase their topological genus to set lower bounds on the number of feedback loops and reduce internal interaction surface, e.g. cycle through temperature/light/moisture conditions and let inhabitants timeshare through hibernation,

Slower-than-light biosphere arks start out large but become smaller with tech level, some of the most advanced interstellar ships look like bottle gardens that just happen to travel at 0.1c

A radical pessimist’s guide to the next 10 years - The Globe and Mail https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/a-radical-pessimists-guide-to-the-next-10-years/article1321040/

One of those cult cinema distribution companies owns an actual video store – and it’s only like an hour or two from my house. I’ll have to make a trip out there at some point…

I wonder if the reason why the average quality of writing-advice articles is so much lower than other types is that it’s dominated by folks who are trying to write a certain number of words every day & have decided to publish all of them…

GitHub - daviddao/awful-ai: 😈Awful AI is a curated list to track current scary usages of AI - hoping to raise awareness https://github.com/daviddao/awful-ai

Search https://qz.com/1454785/a-millionaire-couple-is-threatening-to-create-a-magic-mushroom-monopoly/

The ‘As you know, Bob’ technique for infodumps gets a lot of flak, but all my internal corporate emails from upper management begin with ‘As you know,’, so I think there might be room to make it verisimilitudinous.

Bad idea of the day: A full performance of Smoke on the Water built by remixing clips of people at Guitar Center failing to perform Smoke on the Water & random words spoken by people in Guitar Center

Hot take: social constructs are notoriously difficult to build universal theories about, because belief is fickle and eldrich. Talking or thinking about social constructs is liable to make them change

I’m going to be periodically posting research resources for the new book here, as I find them: http://www.lord-enki.net/resources-survey-of-alternatives.html

I’m in this weird situation with the new book where, of the systems I’m planning to cover, the one I’m most familiar with is menuet. Imagine being in a position where, for any set of things, the most familiar item is menuet.

Apparently, the Bell Labs ‘squeak’ UI language is unrelated to the Smalltalk dialect of the same name, despite both being message-passing systems with strong GUI support http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/squeak/squeak.pdf

@mdosch@mdosch.de: Hmm fgallery relies on javascript, which is something I try to avoid.

dra := number of angles on a dragon (not to be confused with the drahedron, its dual)

It’s weird as I get older, I find I have less and less people I actually want to talk to.

On the path to improvement, follow the jester, not the sage | Aeon Classics https://aeon.co/classics/on-the-path-to-improvement-follow-the-jester-not-the-sage

Bad idea of the day: run deOldify on manga pages, consider the new color schemes canon, move to a surreal universe of floating pastels

The ‘Loss of Confidence Project’ Offers Scientists a Place to Confess https://undark.org/article/loss-of-confidence-project-replication-crisis/

@71m@timmorgan.org: why web when it is local? I use sxiv for local browsing and llgal to generate a static gallery from a directory: https://github.com/bgoglin/llgal. If you want something more CGI-ish, you could build it with a few lines of perl: https://metacpan.org/pod/CGI::Application::PhotoGallery

Waiting for Goroutines to Finish with a WaitGroup ⌘ Read more…

helloooo @mox@tilde.town! welcome to the party

How to Do Cyberpunk Right - The Yuri You Need - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfSuUicLdcg

Proposed data privacy law could send company execs to prison for 20 years | Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/11/proposed-data-privacy-law-could-send-company-execs-to-prison-for-20-years/

Bad idea of the day: style transfer every frame of the new suspiria to look like the old suspiria

My goal in life is to create the perfect bowl of ramen https://thetakeout.com/ramen-lord-perfect-bowl-of-ramen-mike-satinover-1830128673

You’ve heard about ghost kanji, but what about yokai kanji – hapax legomemna that, if they don’t occur enough times in the modern corpus, come to life and play tricks on us, drinking lamp oil & jumping backwards over corpses to ressurect them.

For #NaNoGenMo I converted two of Stravinsky’s ballets to tone-poems by converting note frequencies to word frequencies. I dare somebody to do a dramatic reading of these; it’ll sound like an Underworld track: https://github.com/enkiv2/misc/blob/master/nanogenmo-2018/stravinsky.md https://github.com/enkiv2/misc/blob/master/nanogenmo-2018/stravinsky_pg.md

How to Teach Computer Ethics through Science Fiction | August 2018 | Communications of the ACM https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2018/8/229765-how-to-teach-computer-ethics-through-science-fiction/fulltext

Band name of the day: conspiracy to riot

Hot take: the primary function of a horror movie is not to be scary, but to be /creepy/. If you don’t know the difference, watch better horror movies.

When you die, your homunculus dies with you, and so does its homunculus and so on. What stays behind are nested skeletons, matryoshka skulls down to nanometer scales if the conditions are right

Bunny-Girl Senpai is an interesting show. It seems to be going for a theme with the various arcs: each one seems to be about how communications media change our behavior & self-image by exerting social pressure with expectations.

So, watching Halloween (1978) is free on shudder today, in case you want to. Not really sure why they only told current subscribers…

There be monsters: from cabinets of curiosity to demons within | Aeon Essays https://aeon.co/essays/there-be-monsters-from-cabinets-of-curiosity-to-demons-within

Botnik presents Goosebumps: Welcome to Sand Hands! https://botnik.org/goosebumps/

further uses include:↵* psychoforensics: finding out which of your experiences are the bad ones, and editing them out↵* forcing subpersonalities: maybe you want to share a brain with that artist whose mind you found on a torrent site↵* mind tattoos

being somewhat low-dimensional and interpretable (unlike sets of network weights), it’s also a popular mind interchange format among AIs and post-humans, who need to be extra careful about what or who they empathize with lest the thought turn out to be a logic bomb

a set of inputs that when played back to a fresh brain, will make it hallucinate a full-qualia world forever with no further input required - a popular infodrug even among already-formed minds, though it often leaves you with new subpersonalities

A possible future: SSSS.Gridman’s popularity causes a bunch of mecha-inspired toku adaptations to be greenlit & ‘tokusatsu remake’ becomes the new ‘isekai light novel adaptation’ for about 5 years.

Hot take: any command that a user might want to use regularly should be short, memorable, and built-in; any command that a user might really NEED to use should be documented & included in the examples in built-in documentation.

I sort of can’t believe this, considering Maven’s bloat, but there appears to be no build-in command for taking a package name specified on the command line, searching maven-central for it, & installing the latest version from the command line…

Five Star Songs https://5-star-songs.tumblr.com/post/179554319224/take-me-to-the-river-talking-heads-warning

How to get rich quick, apparently: rephrase the obvious as though it is the revolutionary for the benefit of the stupid, and pepper it with the wrong to drum up ‘controversy’. (Worked for Peterson)

The time between “good weather models” and “weather models good enough to make weather manipulation cheap” is the only time there will be accurate weather forecasts, after that it’s up to the highest bidder

Isn’t it great that outlook just prevents people from emailing jar files to each other? Like, it’s not as though people occasionally need to send each other internal proprietary jars that aren’t conveniently hosted.

Love it we have a “contract” developer but he is not in the right group to push commits to the code repo. When I suggested that he be added to the right group one of the other developers was like that will give him access to everything. I’m sorry but what is everything? It’s not like he can pull from any of the repos as it is. Right now he just can’t commit.

i’ve been thinking of starting some kind of a minecraft journal on my public_html but then I figure I should just post to shi