by Durrell Bishop via Matt Webb's Filtered for that which motivates form. Described as the seed for the tangible user interface movement. I'd love to make some stuff like this.

Wikimedia concepts embedded and then mapped to a sphere with UMAP. Trying out topic clusters as continents. Not sure where it's all going.

More sphere work

by N.K. Jemisin

I'm trying to spread out the series I read so it is a testament to how good The Fifth Season is that I jumped into this immediately.

The dedication is "For those who have no choice but to prepare their children for the battlefield" and you feel that all the way through the book. The relationship between Essun and Nassun is so well developed on both sides. Clear-eyed in the pain caused eac hother but also the reasons for it. It always feels like it is reporting, rather than pleading any one character's case.

Putting together a personal RSS reader that shows the original articles. With vim-style navigation.

I saw the bowls (clinamen v.11 by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot). A perfect generative piece because you can immediately understand how it operates but the results are no less magical. It feels very like something from nature in that way.

It was nice to be around a bunch of other people who decided it was something worth making the effort to see.

by N.K. Jemisin

The first time I read this I hadn't read much fantasy. Having read and enjoyed a bunch now this still stands out. I also hadn't read The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. Having that context - that the conversation about "who are you willing to sacrifice" has this history of being explored through sci-fi - added another layer.

The standout things for me are the world-building and the main character.

Experimenting more with tiling at different levels-of-detail on a sphere. Trying to make a little world.

Testing

Trying out the small Modos Paper Monitor dev kit on an overcast day at the park. The high refresh rate is impressive and seems great for writing and coding. Screen is glossy though.

I've held off on writerdeck builds for a while but it's really tempting to try and put something together with this.

Working on a branch concept

Thinking about how our computers can support intentional work

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by Jordan Ellenberg

I always feel mixed about reading popular surveys of a topic. They're never as exciting as reading something more targeted and idiosyncratic. It's a lot like listening to a greatest hits album - you sort of miss the rhythm and groundedness of living with an album or targeted investigation.

But it does give you a big picture that can help orient and bridge future reading. This book helped me connect graphs (of topics, of ideas) to the origins of geometry - and to think about how it's built on spatial intuition that we abstract out of the physical world. That is fun to think about in terms of how to represent knowledge in a spatial interface.

Video preview

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My computer - featuring gruvbox light theme - in the rock garden.

Slanted Magazine put together a great collection of digital tools including several of my Constraint Systems projects. It's really fun to see these in print!

Collapse, Push, Stamp, and Tri. Stamp remains one of my favorites.

CSS Paint

From https://solander38.com/stories/solander-38

I thought this, on why they didn't retrofit their old boat, was an interesting point about design:

A couple of my Constraint Systems tools (Mosaic and Pal) are featured along with a bunch of other open source design tools on mod.lab.

by becky chambers

After feeling like Light was too mean I went back to the second book in this series which gets called (and is) cozy sci-fi. For most of the book, I thought it was pleasant if not gripping, then I got pretty drawn in and emotional toward the end. I still like chambers' Monk and Robot series better, but I'm definitely going to return to the other books in this series.

I liked the treatment of AI in this - though maybe surprisingly I didn't feel like it was too connected to current AI stuff. I think the portrayal of the AI characters was more about examining our own relationship to our bodies, boundaries, and psychology. That's true of the alien portrayals as well. I thought Sidra (the AI) feeling most comfortable high up in the corner of the room (like a security camera) was a nice, funny touch.

The pathology of generative AI is that it too easily allows substantial form without discernible intent. That mistake is harder to make when creating by hand.

Well put by caleb gross, and:

A human can show up to a task with an unclear mental model of what they mean to accomplish, and an AI can generate something anyway. “Write a letter of resignation for me to send to my boss.” “Hmm…I guess that looks good.”