Notices by Allison Parrish (aparrish@friend.camp)

this is probably my only twitter bot that I actually want to port to mastodon: https://twitter.com/needsref

Elisabeth of Poland's first invention, Hungary water, was an international hit. However, critical response to her follow up, Thirsty food, was somewhat muted https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungary_water

of course there is no neutral writing interface and even—especially?—the qwerty keyboard is a *kind* of language model, expecting particular intents and producing particular kinds of text. and I do want to see a larger variety of writing interfaces serving creative, expressive, accessibility-oriented needs. but the ultimate teleology of tech like smart compose seems to be a world where "language" doesn't exist (only its statistical properties), and that feels gross to me

predictive language models have two actual applications: (1) non-deterministic sampling in poetry composition in order to suggest unusual juxtapositions; (2) creating text that resembles but is not language, in order to fill spaces that require or reward language-shaped things (earnings reports, blog spam, product reviews). smart compose is not doing (1), so its existence implies that my e-mail communication is among the language varieties described in (2), which it isn't

(a) a predictive language model by definition can only have output whose statistical properties regress toward the mean—that's the purpose of a language model in the first place, to determine how statistically likely a sequence of words is. (b) a language model is based on *text*, i.e., language ripped from context—so the output of a predictive language model (by definition) can't address shared emergent contexts between interlocutors

I really need to figure out how to articulate why "smart compose" in gmail fills me with visceral literally nauseating disgust

when you think about it, the idea that software should scale is actually really weird. "sure this garden is nice, but how nice can it be if it doesn't grow to cover the entire surface of the earth?"

Paul told the Corinthians that "the letter kills, but the Spirit (pneuma) gives life" (2 Cor 3:6); or, as better stated by Carly Rae Jepson, "I don't think I can breathe / With the way you let me down [...] / I don't need the words / I want the sound, sound, sound"

when scanning chapters from academic books it is very important to set the scanner to one-bit so that all of the PDFs you make look like they're photocopies of in-class handouts from the late nineties. very, very important

a form of divination consisting of only the leftover words from duolingo exercises

"The whole of _Tender Buttons_ may be said to take place in an indeterminate room without 'centre,' in which food and dressing and love rituals are occurring interchangeably" Perloff, _Poetics of Indeterminacy_, p. 107. add in "linux" and we're basically talking about mastodon here

in my experience there was definitely a feedback loop that happened in education around the time that facebook etc gained popularity: classes that had been about learning how to make web pages suddenly became about how to use existing platforms; when github came out, the parts of programming classes that had been about learning how to share/upload/collaborate on code were replaced with "sign up for a github account" etc. (and as an educator i'm guilty of all of this too)

reading this article on how metastasizing corporate social media suffocated community on the internet (in particular art communities like deviantart) https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-rise-fall-internet-art-communities makes me think that—like learning html and css—learning how to set up and administer and customize your own installation of forum/community software should be considered a basic part of internet literacy

I wish I could find a therapist who would try to solve my emotional problems with the same thoroughness and alacrity as a research librarian solving my research problems