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.”

"the lazy brown fox jumps over the quick dog."

glitching the embedding values and recovering

vector mix

Hermit WIP

Another pass

Now with active window

by M. John Harrison

I had to push to get through this, mostly because the present-day story felt mean to me without purpose. It opened up towards the end, as I was hoping it would, and maybe it will continue to open up as I sit with it, but I don't think it will ever morph into a favorite.

It touched a bunch of themes I was hoping it would: making decisions through randomness (dice rolls) and how that might match with quantum theory; a multi-threaded narrative that weaves together.

New on Constraint Systems: Sphere Paint. Multi-player painting without edge.

A sphere surface is interesting because all points are continuous on all sides. You can respond, extend, or connect in any direction.

Trying out EVōC (https://evoc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) to hierarchically cluster all my embedded blog posts. A lot of my posts are over roughly similar looking material - it's cool how much nuance it can split out of them.

Another view of it as a radial tree form d3.

I have different plans for drawing on this sphere but the effect of rotating (with arrow keys) while drawing is fun. Spherical etch-a-sketch.

From Wikipedia via André's agent coordination project:

Stigmergy is a form of self-organization. It produces complex, seemingly intelligent structures, without need for any planning, control, or even direct communication between the agents. [...] By offloading memory to the environment (as stigmergic traces), and computation to interaction between agents and traces, complex distributed cognition is performed by remarkably simple organisms.

Thinking about the aliens in Blindsight.

by Peter Watts

This was my second time reading Blindsight, the first was as an audiobook. I'm not sure what drew me back - I think I saw someone mention the vampire-thing online, which I remembered. And I remembered it being somehow about consciousness in general, but I couldn't remember the specifics. I've been enjoying rereading fiction I read a long time ago lately so I picked it up.

I definitely feel some connection with Siri Keaton. I can remember at times trying to decipher middle school social behavior and adjust my own actions to fit. And somewhere in that was the sense that "I'm smart. This is a puzzle I can figure out". But having that layer of analysis running all the time can be a hindrance, and can pull you out of sync with yourself. I had totally forgotten that some of Siri's relation stuff hit emotionally close to home for me. The trap of getting caught up trying to understand and enact the social rules of a situation rather than showing up genuinely definitely resonated.

Early experiments with a couple of prototypes trying to bring agents and space together thoughtfully.

I've got a new small, single-purpose screen section in my office area and wanted to document what's running, practical lessons learned, and some questions still unanswered.

Custom clock (not a screen), time-block visualizer, and camera-linked photo slideshow.

Camera and slideshow

A few months ago I built a large bookcase for the guest room + office. Then I decided that the lower half would be better utilized as a dresser.

The final (for now)

I partially disassembled the dresser and then replaced the front and the knob. This saved me from needing to make and fit drawer boxes. The old sides are still visible (that's how the dimensions happened to work out).

• AI-native research environments with and for scientists. A continuation of a lot of the visualization and system work I've done but with closer collaboration with the people who would use those systems.

• New primitives the foundations of customizable software (and even operating systems). I want to use the flexibility but find ways to provide continuity and stability for the user. Mental models that ground things.

• New hardware that use new AI capabilities to be more humane, calm, tactile and collaborative.

Embedding search now active on this very blog:

• Home woodworking DIY
• Embeddings
• Maps