Four links I'm thinking about:

The Role of the Human Brain in Programming by Steve Krouse - I am super sympathetic to all of these points and arguments. Particularly the point that working on something 'from the bottom-up' informs and changes what you're thinking about. See also Max's slide: the goal informs the work, the work informs the goal.

God is a Parasite by Jason Yuan - I disagree with most (all?) of this one which I think makes it a good counterpoint to look at. Jason also has done a lot of work that I admire, and it's clear to me he's really wrestling with this stuff. He argues what AI's we're building are not tools but minds, and that their agency should be respected. I think they are tools - namely sophisticated interpolation and autocomplete - and that treating them as things with agency has potential to lead us to bad places. Seeing signs where there are none and following it down damaging paths.

Starting to add layers to the scrape experiment.

I got something more like a displacement effect working, but I don't like the feel of the kind of smooth circle erase versus the crunchiness of everything else. Think I'm going to cut it.

Not quite the effect I'm after. But enjoying the stops along the way.

I think this is actually on the right track.

read on scrawl

More progress on the GIF player / frame downloader.

Trying out overview mode with the Niri window manager.

Implemented rough cache in the GIF viewer, since GIFs mainly work by applying patches on top of the starting image. I run through the whole thing caching evenly spaced frames at the start, then use them as shortcut base when seeking to frames further in.

Figuring out how to render a GIF frame-by-frame.

John Carmack talk notes

Fun to see how he thinks about this stuff - lots of notes about what would be 'cheating' and trying to sort out what the fundamental, interesting challenges are from the incidental challengs.