Notices by datarama (datarama@hachyderm.io)

@inthehands A friend of mine usually calls him a modern Howard Hughes.

@mattly Death is the ultimate anti-nihilist.

@mattly I've gone in the opposite direction: My trackball *is* a moving part! :-)

(I have, because the size is exactly right, replaced the actual ball with an 8-ball.)

@mattly @jenniferplusplus I will never stop singing the praises of CST trackballs (now made by XKeys) - but people who like mice generally don't like trackballs.

@mattly @inconvergent That is the most cyberpunk thing possible to do.

@mattly Isn't endlessly tweaking your config the one thing that unites Vim and Emacs users, though? ;-)

@mattly That's what I mean. I was promised a bicycle for the mind, and what I got was a cybertruck.

@mattly Mercifully I've seen few of those. The terrible metal I like listening to still seems to overwhelmingly go for terrible drawings *or* software renderings that look like they're from 25 years ago.

I think the reason AI-generated book covers repel me so is that they're the main AI artifact I see out in the world outside my screen. This reminds me that there is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide; the garbage tsunami engulfs all.

We're a couple years into this now, but whenever I see a clearly AI-generated cover on a book, I still feel viscerally repelled.

Waterfall. The rock face is loosely based on Svartifoss, Iceland.

The pagan temple (or whatever it is) on top was a bit of an afterthought. After I'd done the rest, it somehow just felt *right* to add that.

#pixelart

@dalias I've used gotos much like this in lexers, and a few other state machines. When what you actually mean is "nonrecoverably transfer control to somewhere else", they're often the best you can do for readability in a langauge that doesn't have tail-call optimization.

@fkinoshita "Computer science is the study of self-inflicted problems."

-- my old theoretical CS prof.

@aral In fairness, I picked that phrase because it's a direct quote from Marc Andreessen - a uniquely reliable source of psychopathic language.

@aral I had a conversation today about how horrible it must be to be a person with a conscience across pretty much every industry. You work in advertising? You're manipulating people for profit. You work in garments? You're creating mountains of pollution heaped onto the Global South. You work in journalism? You're writing manipulative clickbait.

And you're probably a good person, anyway. Your work got turned evil by economic forces outside your control.

@aral Perhaps it's just because software is my own trade, but I think the software industry has been uniquely disgusting in this process. *Why* does that poor journalist have to produce shitty clickbait? *Why* is advertising now synonymous with surveillance? Because of the software industry.

Software did eat the world - and in the process, it unsurprisingly made the world into shit, half-digested by software.

@airshipper @malcircuit @spiegelmama The very short version is that back in the late 50s, John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky wanted to hold an academic conference about computing, but the field of cybernetics (founded and headed by Norbert Wiener) pretty much dominated the area. McCarthy and Minsky couldn't stand Wiener, so they came up with the term "artificial intelligence" instead of "cybernetics" so they could get away with not inviting him.

@Wolven I doubt they're going to walk this one back. I remember Wave and Google+ too, but I don't think they've ever gone as absolutely all-in on anything in their graveyard as they now have on generative AI.

@mattly I used to have "Therefore we must destroy the present politico-economic system" as my personal "ceterum censeo...". ;-P

But I have begun to think that we are probably overdue for a *correction*, or whatever to call it, about computers. If there was one thing being holed up all alone with nothing but digital technologies in 2020-2021 taught me, it is that the fully-digitized utopia fucking sucks.

@mattly I mean, at this point I'm just about ready to get a hammer and hoist the banner of General Ludd.

In seriousness, I think computers are at their best when they do things humans can't do at all. This is why I love old-school genart, but hate AI imagery. Why have computers spew out shoddy imitations of human art, when they could be used to make mathematical art that broadens the scope of what "art" even is?

@mattly I can't remember who wrote it, but someone recently remarked that the 80s-00s was an era where computers were mostly used to empower people. The 00s-10s was one where they were mostly used to surveil and manipulate people. And now we're transitioning into an era where they will be used to replace people.