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.
A "artistic operating system" made up of printers and a barcode scanner. http://screenl.es/
Looks like a barcode scan amounts to clicking into an article - probably feels satisfying to do
Receipt printers seem to be in use as well
Apparently a set of folks are working on IDEs for visualizing base model completions as trees. I love that people are experimenting with this.
From https://x.com/transkatgirl/status/1997846030369562794/photo/3
Thinking about ways to combine this with some of my tabletop experiments. From Yancy Strickler.
Computer emulator that shows data and code at multiple levels. From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_6pZ_sT3y0
The Dirtywave M8 seems really interesting. I like the gamepad feel. Maybe a way to make controls feel more visceral and rhythmic. I also like this camera/streaming setup. With the full device showing on the right and the screen on the left.
A great resource complete with video excerpts by Kristen Roos
Projections on all sides of a room. From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9uVf65bNgo
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.
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.
Niri (scrollable window manager) keeps adding features. They just released an impressive overlay mode - and one of my longtime faves: windowed fullscreen mode.
