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.

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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.”

"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.