[Easy Chair] | The Wizard of Q, by Walter Kirn | Harper’s Magazine https://harpers.org/archive/2018/06/the-wizard-of-q/
MiniBSD laptop computer | Hackaday.io https://hackaday.io/project/643-minibsd-laptop-computer
Email icon https://www.topic.com/mold-eats-world
Band name of the day: coffin factory
Band name of the day: the death chamber
No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons » The Split-brain Universe https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=8255
No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons » A/Political (and a deferral on Doomsday) https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=8415
Bad idea of the day: Use mechanical turk to do a novel-length exquisite corpse, one sentence at a time.
Mailbag: AI Research on Dialogue and Story Generation | Emily Short’s Interactive Storytelling https://emshort.blog/2018/10/16/mailbag-ai-research-on-dialogue-and-story-generation/
The Magic Leap Con https://gizmodo.com/the-magic-leap-con-1829716266
Do You Struggle to Keep Eye Contact? Here’s What’s Happening in Your Brain https://bigthink.com/philip-perry/researchers-discover-why-its-hard-to-maintain-eye-contact-while-talking-with-someone
What’s the last Rutger Hauer movie that was good?
Vectorized Emulation: Hardware accelerated taint tracking at 2 trillion instructions per second | Gamozo Labs Blog https://gamozolabs.github.io/fuzzing/2018/10/14/vectorized_emulation.html
Band name of the day: the unassigned lands
Bad idea of the day: Multi-cursor and annotation support for vim
What duelling can teach us about taking offence | Aeon Essays https://aeon.co/essays/what-duelling-can-teach-us-about-taking-offence
Ultimate Writer: an Open Digital Typewriter https://alternativebit.fr/posts/ultimate-writer/
Hot take: structural problems don’t excuse individual accountability, but instead merely limit the ways in which that individual will can be effectively exercised to group action. No position is so rare that a group cannot form around it.
Bad idea of the day: An algorithm that creates textual descriptions of images watches TV, creating a description from each frame, which is then used to generate a new image & the video is resynthesized
Band name of the day: strawberry cream disease
“Machine learning failures - for art!” by Janelle Shane - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yneJIxOdMX4
Band name of the day: angry fruit salad
“A Box of Chaos: The Generative Artist’s Toolkit” by Benjamin Kovach - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZNTozzsNqk
“Musical Steganography: Hiding Things in Music” by Scott Fradkin - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLXqZVHrFa4
Neal Stephenson demonstrated that people will read (and love) infodumps so long as they’re funny or fun to read. In other words: infodumps in fiction are fine so long as the author is also an essayist.
Detecting the use of “curl | bash” server side | Application Security https://www.idontplaydarts.com/2016/04/detecting-curl-pipe-bash-server-side/
Can algorithms create true art, or do they only imitate? | Aeon Essays https://aeon.co/essays/can-algorithms-create-true-art-or-do-they-only-imitate
Bruce Sterling: Speculative architecture (September 26, 2018) - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-p4DV80xrm8
Maybe I should start doing writing exercises. You know, write a pastiche of an M.R. James story, and then one in Gibson’s style, a Stephenson version, a Lovecraft, etc. Fiction is pretty hard.
“Mapping Imaginary Cities” by Mouse Reeve - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ic_5gRVTQ_k
How Lisp Became God’s Own Programming Language https://twobithistory.org/2018/10/14/lisp.html
Rethinking AI through the politics of 1968 | openDemocracy https://www.opendemocracy.net/digitaliberties/dan-mcquillan/rethinking-ai-through-politics-of-1968
Band name of the day: vampire burial
Band name of the day: secret infections
Supply-Chain Security - Schneier on Security https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/05/supply-chain_se.html
Bad idea of the day: watching FEWER horror movies in october because you need a break from the rest of the year
The Real in Weird Realism: Notes on ‘The Haunting of Hill House’ – xenogothic https://xenogothic.com/2018/10/14/the-real-in-weird-realism-notes-on-the-haunting-of-hill-house/
Hotter take: ‘ambient computing’, ‘internet of things’, and ‘ubiquitous computing’ all pale in comparison to my favorite goofy term for this tech: ‘everyware’
Hot take: ambient computing is actually a cool & good idea, as long as no for-profit entities are involved in it. It only becomes horrible when you add business.
On mana: why we bestow certain objects with unearthly powers | Aeon Essays https://aeon.co/essays/on-mana-why-we-bestow-certain-objects-with-unearthly-powers
Meet Bill Wurtz, the Internet Musical Genius You’ve Never Heard Of - MEL Magazine https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/meet-bill-wurtz-the-internet-musical-genius-youve-never-heard-of?curator=MusicREDEF
Thread by @morganknutson: “Now that Google+ has been shuttered, I should air my dirty laundry on how awful the project and exec team was. I’m still pissed about the ba […]” https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1049523067506966529.html
Band name of the day: worthless bridge syndrome
The firebreaks — KarlSchroeder.com http://www.kschroeder.com/weblog/archive/2011/10/27/the-firebreaks
Digi on every show: “This would only make sense if but it doesn’t so it sucks”
“Rosie Pattern Language: Improving on 50-Year Old Regular Expression Technology” by Jamie Jennings - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkTiYDrb0zg
If we added up all the time spent in airport security in the past seven years, how many average human lifespans would it be?
Has anybody else noticed that xkcd 2029 is actually just the plot of Twister?
Steve Jobs’ strange obsession with Billie Jean during the leadup to the Mac release makes a lot more sense when you remember that at the time he too was denying the paternity of his child.