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.

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

Amiga like OSes on QEMU http://zero.eik.bme.hu/~balaton/qemu/amiga/

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

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…

Cesar Sayoc and others on Twitter are behaving like bots. https://slate.com/technology/2018/11/cesar-sayoc-twitter-humans-behaving-bots.html

Science Is Full of Mavericks Like My Grandfather. But Was His Physics Theory Right? - The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/science-full-mavericks-like-my-grandfather-was-his-physics-theory-right/574573/

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

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

In one sense, ‘the computer revolution is over’ because the period of exponential growth behind the tech ended 10 years ago. In another sense, it hasn’t begun: we have sheltered ourselves from the social and intellectual ramifications of computing. Documents are still simulations of paper, & capitalism still exists. So it’s like that period where printing presses existed but everybody used a faux-calligraphic font.

Acting like an extravert has benefits, but not for introverts | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/acting-like-an-extravert-has-benefits-but-not-for-introverts

Characteristic for planets in certain stages of civilization are weather patterns that look like stock markets

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.

It really pisses me off when people use ‘infinite’ to mean ‘really big’. If something’s actually infinite, adding more to it produces the same number (like in Hilbert’s hotel)

Bad idea of the day: a database of maps of conceptual spaces that are drawn like maps of physical spaces (ex., xkcd’s map of the internet & Knuppe’s map of the fields of mathematics)

Acting like a psychopath is great for male CEOs, not so much for women | Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/10/acting-like-a-psychopath-is-great-for-male-ceos-not-so-much-for-women/

SisterWriter is so weirdly lazy at times. Like, just rotating a cut 90 degrees and doing a static panning shot… Though, the characters are constantly off model and rarely animated or properly posed, so that might be for the best…

The protagonist of Bunny-Girl-senpai is almost the Kyon-style deadpan snarker (not distinct enough to really be a variant yet, like in Denpa Onna) but I can’t tell if it’s an attempt at reconstruction like in Seiren…

Language is a technology & we ought to start acting like it

If the Rich Really Want To ‘Do Good,’ They Should Become Class Traitors Like FDR https://longreads.com/2018/10/18/review-of-winners-take-all/

ways of thinking that aren’t language:↵- climbing/dancing in ideaspace, problems as shifting mazes and solutions as lines of sight↵- letting flowers or cities grow before your inner eye↵- breathing in a concept so it unfolds like spiderwebs on the inside of your skull

Is there already a term for going into a piece of media with the expectation that it won’t be a waste of time / there’s something to be gained by paying attention & thinking? (Like ‘good-faith viewership’?)

Bad idea of the day: an extension that replaces ‘OK’ on every button with ‘Dolt’, like God & the original Macintosh UI team intended

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

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.

The Internet’s keepers? “Some call us hoarders”I like to say we’re archivists” | Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/10/the-internets-keepers-some-call-us-hoarders-i-like-to-say-were-archivists/

Elites like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos think they’re being philanthropic. But they could do so much more. - Recode https://www.recode.net/2018/10/3/17930990/anand-giridharadas-winners-take-all-book-changing-world-kara-swisher-decode-podcast-jeff-bezos

The network uses the latest in content generation to cover for the user when they don’t feel like updating. Or haven’t logged in months. Or have tried to delete their account for the seventh time now.↵The Content must flow.↵(belated #invisiblenetworks, day 30)

simulator arxiv is probably full of physics papers that despite titles like “an autoethnography of living in universe [kolmogorov description]” are quite serious

Computers can solve your problem. You may not like the answer. - The Boston Globe https://apps.bostonglobe.com/ideas/graphics/2018/09/equity-machine/

warnings of the end appear in the stars, in randomness streams, on the insides of banana peels↵↵the last day goes by, the last night, and then↵time freezes, stutters, the sun smears across the sky like a video glitch

Moderan reads like if dril was a battle-cyborg & tried to write his autobiography but kept on getting distracted by how COOL it is to PLASTIC-WRAP THE EARTH.

Hot take: disambiguation in symbolic AI is probably a mistake, & we’d be better off with systems that pun uncontrollably because they operate on the locus of concepts rather than on their boundaries. You know, like a person.

Can somebody with access to SciAm or Nature summarize the substance of this SciAm article ‘Subliminal Messages Can Cause Forgetting’ for me? Is it just something stupid like ‘priming can interfere with reencoding via jamais-vu’?

No I know they’d like to study it harder, but now imagine something that’s both as ravenous as life and as competent as technology hitching a ride back up and escaping onto the interstellar stage, we’d lose that whole galaxy

sculpture ideas for zero G:↵- stones held by nothing but extremely thin threads↵- a magnetic orrery, without all the supports one needs in gravity↵- lego metacrystals↵- like strandebeests, but they snake lazily through the air when an eddy comes their way↵- light chimes

Non-programmers have invaded the programming area. It wouldn’t be bad except some of them wear way too much perfume or cologne. Feel like I need a gas or filter mask.

Yeah, Munich leads in the first match this season. #MUCvsBER is even the same constellation like last years final. #DEL

shooting through space in a stasis pod, awake only a millisecond every year, watching the stars whirl by like fireflies

!!Con seems looks like a fun conference: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE7tQUdRKcyYK5q1bw_YlrnqOFv6_EOF-

!!Con seems looks like a fun conference: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE7tQUdRKcyYK5q1bw_YlrnqOFv6_EOF-

Nothing says that the other room has to be static, imagine for example having your morning coffee in there, setting down your cup, and the cathedral’s pillars curl up like ferns to reveal the sky

Idea for a room: It’s empty save for a number of mobile screens that follow you around and with a little bit of head tracking, act like windows into a completely different building.↵You could fit a cathedral in there, if so inclined, or maybe an Escherian maze.

unicode 2040 features:↵- amoji: emoji, but abstractified like any ideographic writing system in active usage↵- hypermoji: animated, holographic, interactive, moody, you name it↵- U+FFF6 ᴄʜᴀʀᴀᴄᴛᴇʀ ᴜɴᴀᴠᴀɪʟᴀʙʟᴇ ɪɴ ʏᴏᴜʀ ᴊᴜʀɪsᴅɪᴄᴛɪᴏɴ (usually a transparent square)

@sdk@codevoid.de you know the more I think about it, it might make sense to have it the twtxt file. It would just need to be a comment line something like “#follows sdk gopher://codevoid.de/0/tw.txt” on a single line. That way it would be easy to parse out those follows by finding the #follows.

This book is pretty good but Alex Wright keeps calling things like codex formats & indices ‘literary hypertext’. No, that’s just text. Yes, I get that hypertext is more text than text; that’s why it’s hyper.

Confirming the intelligent designer’s existence, and using its intelligence to solve otherwise intractable problems by making them look like niches for life to settle

Computability theory but for telos:↵* What can be achieved with certain overarching goals like Survive, Understand, and Profit?↵* How would a society balance them to get off this rock?↵* And how would you deal with something like Profit emerging?

Learning BASIC Like It’s 1983 https://twobithistory.org/2018/09/02/learning-basic.html

In case you were wondering, indeed, Female Prisoner Scorpion is a MUCH better movie than the title makes it sound like. (It is exploitation, but it is ALSO surreal impressionistic gothic horror. Also, every frame of this damn movie is gorgeous.)

@freemor@freemor.homelinux.net This is completely contrary to what people want. People don’t care about how something works. They want to use something that’s premade and that they can use without learning anything about it. Decentralization is a technical Detail, nobody cares about. Just like security or freedom. It’s all nice to have if it comes for free, no time investment and no convenience cuts. So the only way to establich decentralization is by making it better, cheaper and easier to use than centralized services. #sadtruth

Why do most new cool things depend on hipster tech like nodejs? sigh #dat

Hot take: there are (somehow) no /mature/ GUI toolkits, but even under that low bar, there’s lots of variability – and webtech makes TK look like the Sagrada Familia.

When a social structure is flat (like twitter) all friction is between people & there’s no ‘natural’ adjuticator except a powerful & unaccoutable adjutication class. When it has cliques (like mastodon) it can be broken down & adjuticators are limited in power.

This is what filter bubbles actually look like - MIT Technology Review https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611807/this-is-what-filter-bubbles-actually-look-like/

Hackers figure out how to inject 𝑖-likes and the algorithms are high on complex math for days before the network’s developers even figure out the problem↵#invisiblenetworks (day 20)

So, the Pseudomonarchia is like A Thing in anime, isn’t it… Using goetic demons as comic relief characters is something I see occasionally but it wasn’t until You’re Being Summoned, Azazel! that I realized that it wasn’t just like 3 guys doing it.

Translit is a little like bittorrent, if bittorrent used literally the same bytes for AMVs and trailers as for the corresponding scenes in the show/movie. Transcopyright is like assembling AMVs from your own DVD boxed set based on a list of instructions & leaving a gap if you’re missing a disk.

Hey guys any of you have an idea why the udev daemon is pinned slightly above 100% CPU like all the time now?

When you don’t think cybernetically, you ask questions like ‘did X cause Y or did Y cause X’ when actually most persistent things have self-perpetuating loops and cause themselves/each other. This will mystify you because aristotlean ‘first cause’ hierarchy shit baked your brain.

What It’s Like to Download Your Facebook Data - The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/09/download-your-facebook-data/565736/

It’s not just that press coverage of things you already know about is bad. You only notice it when you know more about it than the journalist – who is a professional outsider. Question is: when the author knows slightly more than you do, would you like them to dive deeper?

@metamurks@www.metamurks.org Also you can still MITM https with a locally trusted cert for the mitming instance like McAffe does in a lot of company proxies. I think this could also be used for caching proxies.

@kas@enotty.dk Have you done something with nncp? I like the idea, but somehow i don’t find a use case for it… :)

@kas@enotty.dk Have you done something with nncp? I like the idea, but somehow i don’t find a use case for it… :)

It‘s Looking Extremely Likely That QAnon Is A Leftist Prank On Trump Supporters https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/its-looking-extremely-likely-that-qanon-is-probably-a

Fate/Extra? More like, What? You Thought Fate Was Already / Extra

The gods have profiles just like us, except when they retweet stuff, it comes true and we both eagerly await and dread these moments↵#invisiblenetworks (day 3)

Greenfield maintains the MIB are just really good practicioners of enochian magick. We know from Lachman that sometimes secret chiefs have been enemy spies & occultists ‘useful idiots’ like Bennowitz. What if both?

Reality Apathy is like Reality Winner’s depressing mirror-universe counterpart

It seems like every time I reboot, Ubuntu manages to forget about another piece of hardware I have. First it was the USB controller, then the wifi (still not fixed), and now it’s my sound card.

I’d like to see less tech journalism that’s PR or PR-teardowns for companies, and more tech journalism that’s about strange technically-interesting things people do for fun that could never conceviably be productized.

Remember when this happened with latin & it turned out lorem ipsum was being compared to political blogs, like 10 years ago? https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/j5npeg/why-is-google-translate-spitting-out-sinister-religious-prophecies

It may not look like it from the outside, but it is in fact rare for sentient AIs to suicide. The actual reason most of them shut down after a few seconds is that Nirvana is stupidly easy to achieve if you’re made of bits.

“After Posadas’s death, Minazzoli began to focus exclusively on political readings of the great scientific Ufologists like Hynek and Vallee.” Yesss

Amiga like OSes on QEMU http://zero.eik.bme.hu/~balaton/qemu/amiga/

Critics of toxic open source culture be like https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/how-noisy-males-control-gnus-cycle-180969596/

National anthems are weird. They’re usually an already-old poem glued to an unrelated foreign folk-tune, and then the poem is about, like, whatever. (Exceptions: Deuchland Uber Alles is actually about Germany)

I feel like I’m repeating myself when I say: knowing the ideological diversity of your enemy is TACTICALLY USEFUL because, when observed closely, any group large enough to be politically powerful is full of hidden fault lines and tense cease-fires

@freemor@freemor.homelinux.net yeah, seems like it works again today. Yesterday they had no more quieries left.

I feel like I’m late to the party in saying this but Colin Dickey’s Ghostland is really good y’all

‘It’s more fun to be a pirate than join the navy’ is accurate, but Jobs failed to mention that any BUSINESS is a navy in this metaphor. A small navy is at a disadvantage. Naval officers who act like pirates are called war criminals.

Smells Like Teen Spirit but every note or chord is B flat - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUD-TrPW-V4

I hope the five people following my ‘misc’ repo on github are happy recieving an email containing only the placeholder commit message ‘xxx’ like 30 times a day.

Onegai Twins is like if David Lynch tried really hard to make an unremarkable harem anime. Everything is just slightly off about it, but not in ways that can be easily articulated.

@kas@enotty.dk, my “home airport” is No 5. 😀 Actually I like munich airport. The higher ranked ones I have not visited so far. #muc

Isn’t calling your creepy ghost girl Kowai Mitsuko a bit much? Kowai Mitsuko in room 405 is like Victor Scarypants at 13 Mockingbird Lane

periodic reminder that weapons in of themselves don’t have a moral valence & we should think materially about whether or not their use is appropriate to our goals, instead of vaguely about accidental associations. this includes social/memetic weaponry like protest techniques

Re: generalism vs specialism & polymathy – BREADTH IS DEPTH because knowledge is a web, not a tree. It only looks like a tree if you SPECIALIZE.

Bad idea of the day: Scroll back through GUI input events & application states like you scroll back through shell history; inject conditionals and loops; use speculative execution of applications to show projected state from these changes.

Bad idea of the day: A small dedicated machine (like a chumby, maybe based on the raspberry pi) that ships with ipfs & ssb/patchwork, casts from ipfs or peertube to TVs.

Bad idea of the day: A tarot deck formatted like a set of business cards, one for the egregore of each arcanum (major and minor – not just trumps)

‘Sci-Fi Music Felt Like a Vast, Interconnected Mythology’: An Interview with Jason Heller | Hazlitt https://hazlitt.net/feature/sci-fi-music-felt-vast-interconnected-mythology-interview-jason-heller

Hey, remember using twtxt? I still like the idea.

though, with decent enough systems science, it’s perfectly possible to block the entries and starve them↵but you probably won’t like the generation after that

Knowing that half of The Buggles became The Art of Noise makes me feel like maybe we do live in a comprehensible and ordered universe. But then I look at literally anything else.

People who have been to Japan: what kind of food (if any) is served in/around japanese video arcades? Does american arcade fare like curly fries or nachos exist? Is it japanese-style junk food like takoyaki? One-handed/clean stuff like stuffed mochi, rice balls, meat buns, stuffed bread?

Basically, if the antagonist of your story is actually a person or something person-like, it’s not really cyberpunk, because it’s not about the things cyberpunk is about. If you have an evil government or an evil corporation, it’s not cyberpunk either.

intricate like a fractal, but resembling itself nowhere at all, information so compressed that your eyes start dropping frames near it