Notices by Allison Parrish (aparrish@mastodon.social), page 19

I asked for a random walk through a word embedding space starting with a random word and I got a transcript from a tailgate party? https://mastodon.social/media/gHZWX_0z5nkM733G6gA

today: speculative letterforms made from stitching together top/bottom halves of randomly rotated letters (I have more ambitious ideas for this, just trying to do some foundation work today) https://mastodon.social/media/IqrbvTrThNYXQkt8jrs

again building off the same code, a matrix showing all possible halfway-interpolations between points in the letters (i.e., top row is (A+A)/2, (A+B)/2, (A+C)/2, etc.) (matrix is not symmetric because letters have different numbers of points)

I wish more web pages still looked and worked like this http://www.uvm.edu/whale/

the diagrams in this ssh tunneling tutorial are very good http://www.augustcouncil.com/~tgibson/tutorial/tunneling_tutorial.html https://mastodon.social/media/crvU_-GhszPZx4besSQ

me before being in academia: oh e-mail, how delightful, I get order confirmations and occasionally hear from my friends

me after being in academia: [switches to gmail tab, face melts off]

aw francis tseng talking about mastodon in the past tense at #cybercon 😞 ("it was kind of a flash in the pan") (don't worry i spoke up and told the crowd that mastodon is alive and well and very good)

so etymologically “horseless carriage” is like... a runnerless run-thing

til i learned that “horse” and “equus” (latin for “horse”) aren’t cognate (the latter from PIE *h₁éḱwos “horse”) but “horse” and “car” are cognate (both ultimately from PIE *ḱers- “run”)

"procedurally-generated" here in the broadest possible understanding (i.e., produced according to a system of rules to fit a constraint)—the artifacts themselves aren't necessarily computer-generated in the strictest sense.

it's becoming very clear that it's a privilege to have the literacy and time needed to distinguish between meaningful, genuine content and spam/troll trash—a privilege being systematically denied to some people for political reasons

excellent piece on feedback loops between recommendation engines and procedurally-generated content, specifically with regard to videos targeted to children on youtube: https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2 (content warnings in article)

reminds me of cathy o'neil's concept of "weapons of math destruction" in which data-driven algorithms feed back on data from the society that they create http://time.com/4471451/cathy-oneil-math-destruction/

trained word2vec on every novel in project gutenberg, here are the words considered most similar to "fucked" https://mastodon.social/media/kCXZCxlxi2AADch1RuU

this whole line of reasoning explains why recent advances in creative computation with AI/ML are always framed as tools to augment or replace artists: it's an attempt to (further) reframe art as a kind of knowledge work which (like a bookkeeper or a secretary) can ultimately be replaced with automation.

oh wait I gave a whole talk about this didn't I http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/programming-forgetting-new-hacker-ethic/