Notices by Alex McLean (yaxu@post.lurk.org)

When you ask someone to respect your GPL free/open source license, sometimes they act offended and say you are threatening them with state violence. The thinking seems to be that copyright law comes down to threats to put people in prison. I've only seen this from privileged white men in tech. Where does this come from? It's it a right wing libertarian ideology?

Really, the GPL (and AGPL) is all about undermining copyright law, by creating a communal utopia of 'copyleft' where anyone can do whatever they want with the code, as long as it stays in that GPL utopia. It has to build on existing copyright law, because, well, that's the law. But it creates a world 'inside' intellectual property where essentially there is no property. That's why companies like google are so absolutely terrified of it getting it into their systems!

@neauoire Seriously though the rest character in tidal's mininotation was ~, and noone pointed out how terrible/impossible that is to type on non-gb keyboards for years, and just suffered. pretty strange really

@neauoire oh google

I became disillusioned with generative AI in 1995.

"Wrote some c code that read in a text file, constructed a frequency table showing how often each letter came after each letter then randomly generated words using the frequency table to determine probabilities.

If you give it a german file, it comes up with german-like words. Feed it it's own source code, and it comes out with crap, unfortunately.. I was hoping it would write some new programs for me :)"

https://magi2.samiam.org/alt.hackers.1995/303603906wnr@forestbk.demon.co.uk.html

An incomplete list of people excluded from 'international' conferences that are in-person only and aren't streamed or recorded
- People with caring responsibilities
- People with disabilities
- People with health vulnerabilities
- People who don't fly in recognition of climate emergencies
- People who work for orgs with ethical no-fly policies
- People who have their travel disrupted due to climate chaos
- People who only engage with fully open access scholarship (if you have to travel+pay to watch a talk, it's not at all open access, even if a related publication is)
- People who can't leave their country for fear of not being let back in
- People who can't get visas
- Unfunded/underfunded people
- People with unfavourable exchange rates
- People who have limited holidays off work
- People who can't afford it
- etc..

I guess you end up with rooms mostly of academics with travel budgets who are too senior to really do research any more, and research students with stipends. That's fine but the perspectives can feel limited, ungrounded and underinformed.. with a huge environmental cost.

I'm no expert, but some UK-oriented suggestions for things to do in response to ongoing genocide and famine in Palestine:

- Change your bank account, there's a UK list of complicit and non-complicit banks here: https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/money-finance/israel-deadly-investments - e.g. it seems Barclays, HSBC, JP Morgan, Lloyds, NatWest, and Santander are using your money to finance the military and settlements
- E-mail your MP https://www.map.org.uk/campaigns/stop-uks-complicity-to-end-israels-atrocities-a
- Donate, I'm not sure what's best but maybe to a mutual aid organisation like the Sameer project https://chuffed.org/project/113222-tent-campaign-the-sameer-project or Dahnoun https://chuffed.org/project/115245-dahnoun-mutual-aid
- Boycott e.g. Google, Amazon, Booking.com, Airbnb, Expedia, Teva, Chevron, Intel, Dell, Siemens, HP, Microsoft, Carrefour, AXA, Reebok, Disney+, Sodastream, Re/max https://bdsmovement.net/Guide-to-BDS-Boycott

"Today is a beautiful day to embrace being cringe."
https://letter.visualgrowth.com/p/cringe

It's really tricky to spread the word about events these days! I don't support corporate social media and you don't get read attention there anyway, mailing lists aren't what they once were, and this event wants to reach people across many patterny disciplines..

Any help spreading the word across all the strange pattern-obsessed communities much appreciated!

--

Algorithmic Pattern is a new festival and conference for people curious about the practice and culture of algorithmic pattern-making, across algorithmic music, arts and craft. The first edition will take place both in Sheffield UK and online, during September 2025.
The call for talks/papers is now open, please see our website for details: https://2025.algorithmicpattern.org/call/

What individual comes to mind when someone starts talking about silence in music?
Who do you think about on the topic of clapping rhythms?
About chance operations?
About phasing patterns?
About gamelan?

If it's a single old white man in all cases then we have a problem. Music discussions ossify as soon as the work of a single individual stands for huge topics, or appropriated music traditions. If you just avoid talking about those individuals completely, then the discussion becomes much wider.

Referencing prior art is great, but standardised referencing that gets in the way of a far wider history of work are incredibly limiting. Imagine a book on one of these topics that didn't mention the person you had in mind once.

Turing: 'The ... question "Can machines think?" I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion.'

Every computer scientist ever since: "Turing said we can prove that machines think by making them trick people."

Sure, it's not good to worship tech figureheads and furnish them with narcissistic supply. For similar reasons it's also not good to abandon free/open source tech just because someone associated with it has done something bad.
I'm still going to be self-hosting wordpress, even though someone I've never heard of is suing someone else. I'm also going to be continuing to use the GPL/AGPL license despite one of the authors saying questionable things about paedophilia etc.
I just think it's best to stop associating works placed in the commons with individuals.

I travelled down to Cambridge University to give a free talk a few weeks ago. Their procedure to reclaim travel expenses is an absolute joke, involving reading and processing three different documents with overlapping info, then sending information they already have to another email address manne which turned out to be manned by the same person who asked me to send it, to register with their system. Two weeks later nothing has happened so I can't even start the actual claim process which looks awful. I feel completely ripped off and disrespected by one of the poshest institutions in the world.

@pettter Yes I'm thinking of the mother of all demos, and projects like Dynamicland that have followed it. Personally I'm a live coder writing code to make live music to make people dance. I'm not really sure where I'm going with it but it just seems to me like there must be interesting unexplored territory between natural and programming languages, or explored territory that I don't know about (which is why I asked ;) )

@pettter I think you're talking to a straw man there, I not arguing that programming-as-we-know-it should go away necessarily (maybe it should, but that's an entirely different argument).
I don't think programming-as-we-know-it was the 'original' use of programming languages though. Have a look at early work of Douglas Englebart for example.

@pettter That's a bit like saying that speech is primarily intended and used to create air pressure waves. It's true but is totally missing the point I think. Programming languages are primarily used to explore ideas, and interact with and ask questions about world in which we live.

@pettter I've come across the 'category error' argument a lot, but it just makes no sense to me. There is no single 'entire point' of programming languages, people use them for all sorts of things.

I'm not really interested in LLM approaches to this question as like you say, they don't really work, and natural language is fundamentally embodied and LLMs don't have bodies.

What research work is there comparing / blurring the lines between computer languages and natural languages?
I guess there is inform7 as the most famous and maybe successful attempt https://ganelson.github.io/inform-website/
but what about trying to make programming languages that are _really_ natural? I.e. change through use, change through being learned, have prosody or other analogue carrier of information/emotion, have dialects, sarcasm etc..

Is there a fairly cheap and quick way to get a cv signal to control synths out of a computer?
It seems a hifiberry stuck to a raspberry pi is one way (as they're 'dc-coupled' audio DACs), but I'd love an easy way to use teensy or arduinos for it that doesn't involve too much soldering.. I need a few for a workshop and am time-poor.

I've been thinking a lot about what a friend pointed out - that mixed gendered spaces often quickly become male-exclusive because men tend to have much higher tolerance for arsehole behaviour than women, so it only takes one dodgy person to destroy a community as all the women basically leave. Once such a community has heavy male bias it can hardly recover, and its lack of representation means it can hardly succeed in any social, cultural or technical aims. Rings true for the extraordinarily bad gender balance in free/open source software in the context of the Stallman report.

This is a trend.. People with a lot of 'X' followers desperately encouraging them not to leave, despite admitting that the platform is an intolerable cesspit. Why don't they at least post to multiple platforms instead of being obsessed with the most toxic one?