Microblog

# Jan 31, 2025
Severance is a show that dares to ask the question: what if everyone got their own personal Omelas child?

# Jan 27, 2025 22:36 EST
Defamiliarization is the most powerful tool in art.

# Oct 20, 2024 22:13 PDT
Tech as in technician, not technology.

# Sep 30, 2024 23:05 EDT
End-user programming is dead. Long live end-user programming!

# Sep 22, 2024 03:05 EDT
Perhaps you’ve noticed that a lot of social interaction has moved online, which means the technology that facilitates and governs social relation is the application layer of the internet. This technology is constantly evolving. To grip it in our hands, to mold it like clay with the intentional hands of a maker, is to architect social interaction and the dynamics of community. The status quo—the algorithmic feed as the dominant mode of engagement—delegates this task to the gods of linear algebra. Do not be confused by the common wisdom that people are irrational and computers cold and calculating; the models’ dataset consists of the daily activity of hundreds of millions of irrational humans. What would it look like for a rational agent to carefully design the substrate on which all online interactions occur? What would such a rational agent even be?

“Anthropologists hitherto have sought to understand societies. The point is to change them.”

Perhaps the embarrassment of the field of anthropology is that its adherents never learned JavaScript.

# Aug 25, 2024 16:18 PDT
I wish I could explore the latent space of algorithmic feeds. That I could pretend to be someone else for a day. Modulo privacy, I wish I could temporarily take on the algorithm my friends have, and experience the digital world through their eyes for a day. Or if I’m curious about something, to skip the arduous process of articulating my interest through search and engagement with that thing, and just go right to the area. There is so much good that can be done with algorithmic feeds, and we’re not doing any of it.

# Aug 22, 2024 18:27 PDT
I find it moderately hilarious that we commonly copy-paste passages from Wikipedia, but because hypertext is not ubiquitous, it ends up looking like this:

Harris attended Vanier College in Montreal in 1981–82,[29] and then attended Howard University, a historically black university in Washington, D.C.[30][31] She graduated in 1986 with a degree in political science and economics.[32] Harris then attended the University of California, Hastings College of the Law,[33] where she served as president of its chapter of the Black Law Students Association.[34] She graduated with a Juris Doctor in 1989.[35]

The <a>s are gone but those unadorned references remain. When hyperlinks are attached to phrases rather than explicit superscripted footnote references, the effect is less obvious. Here, the absence of the link is made frustratedly ironic by the lingering footnote number—a number separated from its context, useless. An imperfect perfect copy: all of the syntax and none of the richer semantics. An apt metaphor for the uncautious user who may hastily copy-paste a passage to defend a point, thinking this plaintext will corroborate, but the method of citation betrays this unscrupulous act. In a passage copied with the intention of using it to prove a claim, an unlinked footnote emphasizes the absence of evidence. Even more tantalizing, consider if it was a screenshot. The links remain blue, but inaccessible.

Or they were careful to verify their point, and there is no other way to responsibly quote the article, because removing the footnotes would be busiwork that detracts from the strength of the evidence, because the syntax of copy-pasted Wikipedia passages are so familiar in online spaces like Twitter that they function satisfactorily as evidence in a web-browser enabled environment where readers can just, once again, copy the quoted passage and search it to retrieve the article. You can even do it from a screenshot with modern OCR capabilities.

Either way, there is so much more that can be done with copy-paste.

# Aug 06, 2024 16:22 PDT
“house all in order” includes house of macbook pro, no?

# Jun 23, 2024 23:20 EDT
What would it look like to design an operating system around deep linking, where every object was persistent and could be referenced (e.g. by a hash)?

How far can hypermedia go?

Can I link to any character in a document, anywhere on my computer? Can I link to the result of a completed shell command from 2 days ago? Can I link to a subset of user configurations (wouldn’t that help with troubleshooting!)?

Can I link to an arbitrary set of pixels in a specific layer of a Photoshop file, as if using the lasso tool?

Consider the implications of that last question: a proprietary format, a low-level object of reference, and a domain-specific selection query.

Perhaps more interesting than the implementation question, though, is the impact: what would it mean for the way we use computers if practically everything we can conceptualize digitally is able to referenced?

# Jun 16, 2024 00:54 EDT
I often hear this:

“I like [math | computer science | science | engineering] because there’s a Right Answer.”

The implication is there is no right answer in humanities. I can’t say much about humanities, but I believe this “Right” in STEM is less about the experience of arriving at the one correct answer, and more about the feeling of reaching a solution that feels right, according to a vague but useful intuition. In this way, the Right in a mathematics problem set or program implementation is not dissimilar to the creative sense of a writer or artist or designer. When writing a story or poem and I come upon a way of expressing myself that feels Right, I recognize the feeling from arriving at a satisfying way to prove a mathematical theorem or an elegant piece of code that solves my problem. Knowing you are Right in these cases is more a matter of taste and experience than it is about logically knowing you cannot be wrong.

# Jun 6, 2024 22:03 EDT
Nakatomi Tower is a NaissanceE.