Hello everyone. I'm Viznut from Northwestern Eurasia. I'm known for things such as VIC-20 demos, bytebeat music synthesis, Skrolli magazine and some texts about how capitalism and wasteful technology suck.
I recently wrote a few lines about a vision I call "permacomputing" and it inspired me to check out the current status of the Fediverse. So far I'm not disappointed. #introductions
@boycott all software I've never before considered putting a license on something that resembles a blog post, but I think it actually makes sense here. The text is now under CC-BY.
My relationship with "artificial intelligence" has been quite complicated. I've had a strong scientific and hacker-like curiosity towards machine-learning models for many years, and I feel there's a lot of positive potential to them. However, I dislike how they're being adopted by the civilization.
- The video shows execution of a computer program that is total 256 characters long (this comment alone is multiple times longer!). All the visuals on screen are produced by this program in real time.
- The video shows execution of a computer program that is total 256 characters long (this comment alone is multiple times longer!). All the visuals on screen are produced by this program in real time.
- #Demoparty is (typically) annual gathering of demosceners. There are multiple different parties, of which "Revision" in Saarbrücken, Germany is considered the "main event" by most. During demoparties there are competitions in various categories (music, graphics, video, realtime executed presentations called demos and smaller demos called "intros", other categories are often included as well). This small program "Remnants" competed in 256-byte intro category (the executable program can be maximum 256 bytes long).
- Even more in-depth explanation can be found from this documentary: "Moleman 2 - Demoscene - The Art of the Algorithms" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRkZcTg1JWU (enable subtitles!)
For the name of demos and music: Choose settings - subtitles - English - Name of demos and music.http://www.molemanfilm.comPlease rate the film on IMDb:http:...
@endrift The algorithm used to render the 3d scene is "raymarching", which is sort of realtime raytracing. The actual geometry being marched on likely is a fractal of some sort. Finally, a collection of seeds producing nice scenes and camera movement were picked, and these are fed through the system to produce the presentation. The transition effect is a sneaky result of only updating some selection of pixels on each render pass (and thus is "free").
This is my (poor) understanding of the thing without actually looking inside it. It probably is somewhat off, but the broad picture likely is quite close.
Oh yes, I totally forgot, they also managed to fit this all to mere 256 bytes...
oh yeah I just meant an actual assembly-level analysis of how it works. I'm familiar with raymarching (I implemented a not-very-well-researched version of it when I wrote a Mandelbulb rendered in 2010), I'm just not sure how you could implement that, AND the scene generation, AND the camera pan, AND the scene switching in 256 bytes.
My x86 sizecoding skills are way too feeble to perform any real analysis of it, and it for sure is thick full of some really sneaky code and algos, so I'll wait for some kind of a writeup - hopefully there will be one later.
The competition target machine was specified to be an Intel Core i9 10900K with 32GB of RAM. It is highly likely that it runs quite fine with even slower systems. The readme file mentions it runs fine in a VM, too. *edit* PC competition rules here: https://2024.revision-party.net/competitions/pc/
@xtof just tried it off-the-cuff in DOSBox 0.74 and it doesn't resolve the fractal in the raymarching part, I'm out of my depth but I'd guess it uses more modern instruction than DOSBox can interpret?
@IceWolf Yeah. All DOS sizecoding entries are .com files. This is because .com has no overhead at all while any other executable file format adds overhead.
If you want to see a longer run of different scenes, you can alter the bytes 80 01 near the end to something like FF FF. That's the operand of the CMP instruction that checks if the last frame has been reached. There's far more to be seen besides what is shown in the default run.
If the demo runs slowly (e.g. no acceleration), you can change the 3F near the beginning into something like 03 or 07. That's part of the TEST instruction that checks whether to jump to the next scene.
The jump to the next scene seems to be a simple const addition to the camera coordinates. On frames 256..511 the formula is slightly different.
@fredix Well yeah, you could optimize it a lot, sure. I just did full FreeDOS install and slapped the intro on top. I think it would work with pretty much just "SYS C:" alone, but I wasn't bored enough to spend more time on it.
Many stories unpack worlds that feel much bigger than the pages they come from.
And then there are books that make you stop and think before continuing. And textbooks that make you do assignments to ensure that the compact theory uncompresses properly.
Right, but I was thinking more along the lines of how in lossless compression like LZ78 or prediction-by-partial-matching the bit stream gets "denser" because it refers to earlier parts of the bit stream. I'm trying to think of whether I have ever read a story that used fewer and fewer words to say more and more as I kept reading it.
Watt-Wise Game Jam started yesterday, and the submission deadline will be on April 22nd.
Interestingly, the introductory text has been written from the point of view that the entire frame would be recalculated on every screen refresh. This is actually an approach that sometimes annoys me a lot. Especially in turn-based games that waste CPU cycles even when waiting or paused.
Build delightful games that use as little energy per second as possible in order to make games and computing more sustainable, and to discover new directions for software aesthetics.
where do you read this? It encourages people to do the opposite and target a lower frame-rate, in the optimizations section. I suppose it's for people thinking about using engines with a tick update to run timers like in unity or godot.
I'm referring to the idea of rerendering the entire frame, regardless of the framerate. This idea is something that became prominent in game development in the nineties, I think. Games written for older platforms generally update only what is necessary.
@neauoire it is also style adopted by various plugin systems like audio plugins (VST, AU etc.) where you need immediate mode GUI that is driven by the plugin callbacks (most of operating system UI framework are incompatible how plugins behave).
Every now and then I think about writing a book. Either fiction or non-fiction. Then I start evaluating my strengths and preferences and come to the conclusion that it might be a better idea to express myself with something algorithmic instead.
In my fiction projects, I always tend to focus a lot on world-building and internal consistency. I think about the lives of the characters via some kind of RPG-like rules without even noticing it. I feel sad about exploring only a single possible timeline in the overall possibility space. So, it always seems to boil down to algorithmic storytelling, i.e. games.
Even when I think about how an ideal human society should work, it again boils down to something that would be far easier to express as a simulator than as convincing prose.
knowing a bit (and appreciating) your vision of society and considering how bloated are current games (considerably helped by modern engines like Unity), I would be very interested to see what technical choices you would be making.
Ideally it would perhaps be "generativity and parametrization all the way down". Even on 8-bit target platforms I would probably try at least some generator concepts. In practice, however, there would be some need for non-generative elements.
I’d love to see you try a hand in gamedev again, Ultima-like perhaps with some interesting world and concept exploration mechanics? Caves of Qud had me thinking along the lines of ”something like this by viznut would probably be quite interesting”
I think I've missed Caves of Qud, so I guess I'll have to try it out.
My last gamedev project (Bouldercraft) was primarily an experiment whether C compilers are finally mature enough for 8-bit targets, but also an important psychological step for starting to make games once again. The whole thing took only 5 days to make. There'll be another Zooparty this year, with gamedev compo, so I might release something new there.
@visy on that note, this was interesting development https://llvm-mos.org/wiki/Welcome - and yes, Caves of Qud is wonderful, definitely an interesting development in this style of RPG
I've been using Vbcc for 6502 code. I've also compiled llvm-mos but haven't yet made a proper comparison to Vbcc. I'd also like to find the best Z80 compiler because I want to support things like Spectrum as well. (I've already succesfully packaged SDCC output to the TAP format)
Last year, I looked into Rimworld and spent far too many hours with it. It gave me some new ideas for my "world/ecology simulator" project that has already lasted like an eternity.
I've seen those benchmarks. Also noticed that their main compiler just consists of patches to an older version of SDCC, and there's a new version of SDCC released after it. The latest SDCC still does some superfluous register reassignments. Need to do some more research, I think.
Three months ago, I moved to the middle of a forest in Central Finland. In order to ease up the operation and to help myself adjust, I temporarily abandoned all sources of monetary income.
Now it's the time to start doing something for money once again. My material needs are quite low and I like my freedom, so I don't desire long-term full-time jobs (unless they happen to perfectly align with my overall life interests).
If someone happens to know an interesting software project that needs paid contributors but doesn't contribute to the undergoing global disasters, I'll be happy to hear about it.
I particularly appreciate difficult, low-level and weird things that have a purpose. I have about 39 years of programming experience, including many feats of outlandish wizardry on the demoscene.
I am not sure what the development needs are currently, but #Zonation software developed at the University of Helsinki and Finnish Natural History Museum is actively developed currently. It is a software used to perform spatial conservation prioritization, or simply, to identify natural areas which should be conserved because their impact for ecosystem/biodiversity is comparatively high.
This is the character set and the ROM font of the Soviet VT52-compatible text terminal 15ИЭ-00-013, notably used with the PDP-11-compatible workstation computer Электроника 60, on which the original version of #Tetris was made in 1985.
There are two parallel ASCII-derived character sets that may co-exist on the screen but (AFAIK) need special control codes to switch between. Each alphabetic character has a unique pixel shape, so it is possible to visually distinguish e.g. a Latin A from a Cyrillic A.
Source: original documentation linked to by the Russian Wikipedia page of the 15ИЭ-00-013.
One type of story I find personally powerful is that of "shamanic retrieval": the hero (sometimes with a helper animal) takes a dangerous journey deep down in order to bring back something. It may be an object or a soul, but sometimes it's merely information such as magic words (as in the Finno-Karelian story of Antero Vipunen).
In the 1980s, I got to know two computer games that have this kind of story. One was the 8-bit platformer adventure Nodes of Yesod (pictured) where an astronaut retrieves a monolith from caverns under the moon surface, and the other was the classic dungeon crawler Hack/NetHack where the object to be retrieved is the Amulet of Yendor.
Both of these games even give the player a "helper animal" (a "moon mole" in NoY, and a dog in Hack). Both of these games have many references to mythologies and the occult, but I'm unsure whether the presence of helper animals is a conscious reference or not.
This type of storyline can also be found in Christopher Nolan's Interstellar. The edge of a black hole's singularity is literally the "deepest" place where one can descend and come back. The role of the helper animal is taken by the robot Tars.
I haven't played that much Wizball, so I didn't even realize that the "balls" represent the witch and the cat. This also brings to my mind the recent C-64 game Briley Witch Chronicles that also repeats the "witch's cat" trope.
Yes, these often have some overlap, but I see them as quite distinct. Cultures that have practiced shamanism in recent history (during the last few centuries or so) often have stories that repeat elements of shamans' "trip reports". It's therefore interesting to find these elements in games and movies whose creators have no obvious connections to such traditions.
Hey Ville-Matias, it's very nice that you rightly appreciate Nodes of Yesod. Did you know that the lead programmer/designer for NOY is here on the fediverse and he's quite a nice guy too?
Steve was also gracious enough to share here his recollection of the time he spent with Software Projects in Liverpool, in the very early days, when he helped to port Manic Miner to the Amstrad (and later his work with JSW2) http://www.jdawiseman.com/papers/games/jsw2/jsw2_programmer_comments.html
I'm glad he's also capturing all these stories on his blog, which I recommend taking a look at, especially if you are interested in the parts where he chronicles the context in which Nodes of Yesod came into being.
@vruz hello @viznut - nice to connect with you on here! As for the themes in Nodes of Yesod, and the name itself, those can probably be traced back to the artists at Odin Computer Graphics, Paul Salmon (RIP), Stuart Fotheringham and Colin Grunes.
I was able to find the Twitter thread. It was with Stuart Fotheringham who specifically told that that it was Paul who came up with the name and who was also "into mysticism".
It is official now: Russia's Supreme Court declared "extremist" and banned the "LGBT movement".
A single display of LGBT flag, offline or online, is punishable by a fine. In case of multiple offenses, the punishment is up to 4 years in prison. Activism, online or offline, and potentially donations to LGBT charities, are punished by up to 6 years in prison. Allies of LGBT activism are now legally banned from elections.
And there is a new law coming up, "justification" of "extremism" online (as in, not denouncing), punishing it by a prison sentence of up to five years.
are you serious when you say "largely atheist state"? According to the state organisation "Moscow house of nationalities", among 147 million population, there are: * 70-80 million Orthodox Christians, * 15-20 million Muslims, * 2 million of Old Believers Christians, * 1 million Buddhists
That's 88 to 103 million people, 60 to 70%. This is comparable to the US. The Orthodox Church's influence is immense; there's Field Churches in the military, there's Putin on all major church events...
@piofthings yep. Russia has amended the constitution a few years ago to add "traditional values" in there. This is a major talking point when it comes to explaining war with Ukraine: "they want to make slavic children gay!!!"
The convergence of capitalist greed and religious fundamentalism across all religions, all over the world, is becoming a right pain in the path of human progress... we are our own worst enemies 🙁
Content warning: Autocrats/ dictators vs minorities, scapegoating scheme
Dictators like Putin desperately need minorities as scapegoats to distract from their own justification-free, useless, warmongering & thievish presence in government looting their citizens.
@awkapuma @Guildz the criminal law (article 282.4.1) of Russia:
1. Propaganda or public display of Nazi attributes or symbols, .... or attributes or symbols of extremist organisations ...
shall be punished by ... either corrective labour for a term of one to two years, or compulsory labour for a term of up to four years, or imprisonment for the same term.
this law has been used against people sharing logos of Navalny's party, which is also considered an extremist organization. The very same law has been applied against people with "AUE" symbols, which are also not an organsiation-declared-one. It is pretty clear that a rainbow flag is an LGBT symbol, so lawyers of OVD-Info say displaying a pride flag is an offense.
30 ноября Верховный суд РФ объявил «экстремистской организацией» и запретил в России «международное общественное движение ЛГБТ». Таким образом, суд удовлетворил иск министерства юстиции, направленный менее двух недель назад, 17 ноября.
Russia’s Supreme Court on Thursday effectively outlawed LGBTQ+ activism, in the most drastic step against advocates of gay, lesbian and transgender rights in the increasingly conservative country.
Thanks, same problem here. As we dont speak russian, its hard to find the original source. Here 2 articles, show some differences about the news. "a single display of LGBT flag" will be punished? Is not clear. Although the statement of Oleg Nefedov is really bad for LGBTQ people. And there is one truth: Russia is really bad at respect LGBT rights.
Верховный суд удовлетворил иск Минюста о признании «Международного общественного движения ЛГБТ» экстремистским и запретил его деятельность на территории России, сообщает «Медиазона» из зала суда.
@steverocky it's... it's really not. It is moving in the same direction, but the scale is completely different. The amount of police violence is also quite different, too.
@awkapuma @Guildz as for the specifics of the court decision: it might not be public at all. It isn't uncommon to not publish court decrees. The official newspaper of the Russian government says "The session was held in closed mode due to the presence of classified materials in the case, representatives of the defendant did not appear in court." so the only thing we as "peasants" might get access to is an updated list of "extremist organisations" in Russia. The list is going to be updated on the 10th of January, it seems.
@Guildz So, now all of us, we have more information than at the begining. So the whole news the global media is talking is about a "secret session" with no witnesses. ¿Can we see we are talking about misinformation and fake news?
And as you said "so lawyers of OVD-Info say displaying a pride flag is an offense" ...*lawyers*, not the Russian Law, in concrete, since there are no registry yet.
This "a single display of LGBT flag" is the thing i see its more like misinformation.
@steverocky in Russia, any form of protest in public areas is punishable for up to 5 years in jail since 2015. Yes, that includes picketing. Before the court, you'll likely get beaten up by police. So, the UK is moving towards becoming a bully state, but it still has lots to learn from Russia-senpai. I mean, not everyone's phones are wiretapped yet, and this was covered in Totalitarianism for Countries 101 😀
Well, this is the moment to publically announce all secret LGBT supporters and allies, right? I mean, we all know that secretly half the kreml is siding with LGBT.. 🤷🏼 Can't have that momentum go unheard!
@awkapuma @Guildz the 6 colour pride flag is LGBT symbolics. To demonstrate symbolics of extremist organisation is illegal. Hence, demonstrating a pride flag is illegal in Russia.
The very same law has been applied many times for other entities, including Facebook/Meta (an extremist organisation in Russia, some of the C-suite is "wanted" by police) and Navalny's party (also an extremist organisation). The media isn't allowed to publish their logos without a blur applied, too.
I don't think it's a stretch that the government is going to start treating pride flag as harshly as nazi flag as soon as it's legally possible (or even before).
I also want to remind you that telling underage people about LGBT in Russia in any but negative context is already illegal.
@awkapuma @Guildz yes, fake news are a problem, but you can check any Russian media, be it national news service RIA/Russia Today, or Parliament Newspaper, or even the official newspaper of the government Russian Gazette rg.ru - they all confirm that LGBT is an extremist organisation now. Russian Gazette confirms that distribution of LGBT symbols or books can be treated as an extremism: https://rg.ru/2023/11/30/izmenili-okras.html
This is very real. I'll bookmark this and reply when I'll see the first news about people getting arrested for being a part of LGBT
@Guildz I understand your point. Hope you understand mine, that global media is just assuming about a "secret session"with no witnesses. I like this: "when I'll see the first news about people getting arrested for being a part of LGBT" and i add "A single display of LGBT flag, offline or online" Im not challenge you or anyone. But,if nothing of that happens soon or some months ¿does anyone think world media will tell"oh,we made a mistake,Russia is not making LGBTQ as terrorists"
@Guildz If i see this ""when I'll see the first news about people getting arrested for being a part of LGBT" and i add "A single display of LGBT flag, offline or online""
becoming real, ill will join and i will post about that to report and reject that brutal rights violation.
Again, Russia's government sucks about respect LGBTQ rights.
Lets stay in touch and follow the events about all this. Thanks!
Coming to an American state near us, if Russia's good buddy gets elected President next year ... especially if he gets to appoint another Supreme Court justice.
"LGBT propaganda" is a minor offense. Currently a single display of LGBT flag visible to underage (and since December 2022 to anyone) might or might not be treated as propaganda. Even back in 2018 people were arrested for carrying LGBT flags in public: https://www.svoboda.org/a/29273231.html Back then the court cancelled the minor offense fine because lawyers managed to convince the judge that a flag by itself isn't necessarily "LGBT propaganda". There's been a few bigger cases where artists or writers got fines and had their creations banned. One of the artists was charged with porn production for body-positive drawings, as her LGBT activism wasn't Illegal yet.
Nowadays courts mostly decree to block online resources over finding the people who make them. And in-person protests and flag displays are quite rare, no one wants to get a fine or an arrest for that...
Also being trans sex worker is grounds for deportation, this practice was applied a few times already.
@Guildz As true as Russia does not respect LGBTQ rights. The U.S. also attacks LGBTQ rights. But, don't trust me. Just check it out for yourselves, every time. As I've said before, misinformation and fake news can take anyone.
And if you find it true, you're welcome to post about it. I bet you won't get as much repercussion as with the Russian case.
Gonna sound wild but hear me out. One of the downsides of history having been hidden in america (which translates to it directly being hidden from other countries). Is that traditionally targeted groups can't get tips on how say...the underground railroad was managed. So they can't learn from it and build one for themselves.
Just a random thought on the whole first they came for thing that most people don't pay attention to. There's always things to be learned from others.
And despite just how bad this news is, it’s still FAAAAR better than how #Hamas & #Fatah treat the #LGTBQIA community. Perhaps that’s why members of that community flee from #Gaza & The West Bank to #Israel, who offers them asylum and work permits. To better live a life of dignity.
I think the context of war in Ukraine is also important, no?
Russian prisons are used as source of mobilized soldiers to be sent to the frontline.
Feels like another example of a gruesome "two birds with one stone" approach of Kremlin: mobilize people they find expandable and unwelcome, thus getting more soldiers available, and removing them from the equation before the presidential election…
Content warning: homophobia, detailed description of violence, rupol
@awkapuma @Guildz A court in Russia sentenced a woman for 5 days in jail for public demonstration of extremist symbolic, which was rainbow earrings (even 7-coloured!). This is the first case so far.
To make it worse, the arrest was made after homophobic people assaulted the woman in a cafe, threatening to rip out the earrings (the video is publicly available).
⚡️Суд в Нижнем Новгороде отправил под арест девушку за радужные серьги!
Девушку из Нижнего Новгорода суд приговорил к пяти суткам административного ареста за ношение радужного аксессуара.
For those who might be interested: The source code and assets of the animated series "PC-lamerit" are now on Github. I had been planning an executable version for some years already, but now it feels like it's a better idea to just release everything without any clean-ups. https://github.com/viznut/pc-lamerit
The source code of the animated series PC-lamerit (engine, episodes, assets) - GitHub - viznut/pc-lamerit: The source code of the animated series PC-lamerit (engine, episodes, assets)
Mikko 1 (1972) was the first computer designed and produced by Nokia. It's far more obscure than it should be (I find no mentions on the Fediverse), so let me hype it up a little.
The picture shows a Mikko-based cashier terminal. Several hundreds of Mikkos were produced, mostly for this type of use. The computer itself is the box behind the keyboard unit, so it's quite small for a pre-microprocessor minicomputer. The CPU takes up four of the 10×15 cm² circuit boards. The most complex ICs are 4-bit full adders (7483).
At the heart of the machine is a microcode ROM of 256×16 bits that controls a very minimal CPU core (that lacks things like right bitshift). The name "Mikko
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Mikko 1 (1972) was the first computer designed and produced by Nokia. It's far more obscure than it should be (I find no mentions on the Fediverse), so let me hype it up a little.
The picture shows a Mikko-based cashier terminal. Several hundreds of Mikkos were produced, mostly for this type of use. The computer itself is the box behind the keyboard unit, so it's quite small for a pre-microprocessor minicomputer. The CPU takes up four of the 10×15 cm² circuit boards. The most complex ICs are 4-bit full adders (7483).
At the heart of the machine is a microcode ROM of 256×16 bits that controls a very minimal CPU core (that lacks things like right bitshift). The name "Mikko" stands for "microcomputer", where "micro" refers to the microcode rather than a microprocessor. The design is quirky in many ways, but it manages to fulfill the requirement of a shoebox-sized computer that is as powerful as a PDP-8.
12-bit word, 4096 words of address space, 5 MHz clock (each micro-instruction eats up 10 clock cycles). A detailed technical overview is available at a collector's blog (in Finnish).
#Finland has been experiencing its own "Trump era" for a couple of months now. In order to ensure that this destructive period will be terminated as soon as possible, it is necessary to protest. I have already participated in three anti-government protests so far, and the one advertised below will be the fourth. None of the previous governments was horrible enough to lure me into this.
A few keywords: far-right extremism, climate change denialism, conspiracy theories, limitation of basic worker rights, cuts on minimum social security (as well as education and healthcare), attacks against free media.
Luckily, the coalition has also shown signs of breaking up since the very beginning. I really hope we can speed up the process. #MeEmmeVaikene #protests
Yes, I really hope we can return to the civilized adult way of political decision-making once this fiasco is over. Of course it wasn't perfect before, but at least some politicians were sometimes able to solve problems in pragmatic and rational ways, understand each other's opinions despite ideological differences, and listen to experts who had the best available insight. We lost all this when "Twitter populism" became the norm.
I guess quite many voters were fooled by the "debt populism" and not many specifically wanted to have the PS fascists in the government. They just wanted someone to "urgently fix the economy".
Traditionally, an election result like this would have led to a blue-and-red government where every decision would have to be justified from both right-wing and left-wing perspectives. Now that PS were chosen instead of Social Democrats, it has been possible to dictate even outrageously stupid right-wing policies without anyone in the coalition questioning them.
Maybe I can admit this here: I had a slight "celebrity crush" on one of the ministers of our previous government because of this video where she shows off her (S)NES collection https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eRTgjO-864
In most Eurasian languages, the numbers from 21 to 99 folllow the general pattern "X tens [and] Y".
In Finnish: 42 = neljä·kymmentä·kaksi 'four tens two'
However, in Finnic and Sámi languages (and probably in other Uralic languages as well), there used to be another system that used ordinals for the tens (and sometimes even for the hundreds):
42 = kaksi·viidettä[kymmentä] 'two of the fifth [ten]'
This approach would make it possible to have an unambiguous place-value number system without a zero symbol:
III I II III 'three of the first ten of the second hundred of the third thousand' = 2103
I think Basque was originally fully base-20, and there are also traces of base 20 in Celtic languages and Danish in addition to French. The Danish 50-krone bill has the text "halvtreds kroner" which I interpreted as "halfway into the third twenty".
I guess this is an areal Western European feature and that base 20 used to be far more common in the area in the prehistoric times.
But that's not a place-value system because you use the words "thousand" and "hundred" as multipliers. A true place-value system is a sequence of numbers where the multipliers are implied from the positions and not explicitly stated.
My point is that in an ordinal system, zero can be expressed as "first", so the concept of "zero" does not need to be invented.
A transitional version of this I have seen in an early version of Estonian bible as well.
The number of the beast was "kuuetsada seitsetkümmend kuus", which mostly as 676 for a modern day Estonian and has the same logic as our 12 was "kaks teist kümmet" at the time. Or "kaksteist" in the modern version.
Also there's the stuff with 9 and 8 being "one short of 10" and "2 short of 10".
A couple of little self-promotional bits: if anyone's around in London tomorrow and interested, I'm presenting my thesis research as part of the panel "Permacomputing and the Technopolitics of Sustainability" at the "Material Ecologies of Media and Their Histories" conference: https://www.tvcentre.org.uk/conferences/material-ecologies-of-media-and-their-histories/
yeah I found that level of engagement somewhat unsettling too. Not only is it rate that I get attention, it also happened in the complete absence of amplification algorithms. That means I brought the attention upon myself...it was All My Fault 😳
Which is why, after 3 decades of messing with computers, I finally switched to healthcare. About the worst thing that can happen to me, now, is a patient pukes on me. When I worked in IT, sometimes, I had to perform perverse acts like finding a subtle error in a maze of m4 scripts for Sendmail.
Browning onions is a matter of patience. My own patience ran out earlier this year while leafing through the New York Times food section. There, in the...
I saw these blogposts a couple of months ago, lost the links, and now managed to find them again (after a considerable effort).
The second post contains an idea of permacomputing movement becoming the successor of the free software movement (which has kind of lost its transformative potential). This idea haunts me from time to time, and this made me want to find the post that originated it.
I saw these blogposts a couple of months ago, lost the links, and now managed to find them again (after a considerable effort).
The second post contains an idea of permacomputing movement becoming the successor of the free software movement (which has kind of lost its transformative potential). This idea haunts me from time to time, and this made me want to find the post that originated it.
i don't always agree with drew, but today he's on fire. i've been saying this for a long time - i wrote a big post about why i lost faith in the free software movement. i'm really happy to see him calling for action, it's necessary.
the free software movement means a lot to me. my opinions about it aren't reactionary - i've reflected for a long time.
@ploum @j3s problem is we don’t live in a closed system. Participation in society implies being connected to others which either haven’t seen the light or can’t. For example, in most African countries, facebook services are 0-rated by operators…
The classic Apple bitmap font "Chicago" tries to avoid aliasing by sticking to 90° and 45° angles in letters like W, M and K.
However, this idea is much older than that. This pixel font is from a French embroidery book printed in 1527.
The previous two pages sample a blackletter font. Blackletter is by itself more orthogonal and angular than Antiqua, so the idea works much better there.
Some design decisions: - Most of the slides are 640x480, some 1280x960. I turned font antialiasing off and picked some well-hinted vector fonts for the smaller texts (Ubuntu, Volkhov, Nokia Sans). - I didn't want the slides to canonize any specific interpretation of "permacomputing aesthetics", so I decided to use many different styles. - In #pixelArt, I
Some design decisions: - Most of the slides are 640x480, some 1280x960. I turned font antialiasing off and picked some well-hinted vector fonts for the smaller texts (Ubuntu, Volkhov, Nokia Sans). - I didn't want the slides to canonize any specific interpretation of "permacomputing aesthetics", so I decided to use many different styles. - In #pixelArt, I preferred "ancient pixels" (such as traditional cross-stitch patterns) to "retrocomputing pixels". - I avoided "DOS brutalism" (black backgrounds with monospaced fonts in saturated colors) and thought more about typography and posters. - The 45°/90° angularity of Art Deco ornaments fits well with monochrome pixels, so I used some of those too. - Most colors came from the cube of 6x6x6 "web-safe" colors. - Nokia Sans (used in the "MORE" slide) is an interesting font because 1) it was designed "pixels-first" to look good even on small monochrome screens, and 2) the designers had a method to measure its readability against competing fonts. - Arnold Böcklin (used in the title) is the most recognizable Art Nouveau font. There's a connection between Art Nouveau and Solarpunk, and I decided to embrace that connection. The font is also recognizable to many computer people because of its early use in desktop publishing software.
I'll need to take a deeper look into fretworks, thanks for the suggestion!
And yes, I'd definitely like to connect to William Morris both philosophically and esthetically. I actually looked for some juicy initials to be used in the "typographical" slides but they ended up looking so attention-stealing that I decided to go without.
It was a good talk and really enjoyed it (I was in the Malmö hub watching), and we had some great local discussions about it afterwards!
It also highlighted that the time limit was a bit of an issue: if an unfamiliar audience ends up having to juggle pieces of information coming at them quickly after another the result can be that there isn't enough time to actually let the ideas sink in. There were some gaps in what was caught from the presentation.
@vanderZwan thanks! agreed, I think the idea of the academic paper sampler is fine, even if a bit dense sometimes (also speaking for ourselves here) but it becomes really difficult to combine this with moments that are meant to be participatory and more reflective, specially when there is a transdisciplinary ambition at stake. With that said The protocol/process itself felt well designed and useful (going through the notes from the breakout groups), but it feels this event would have needed a whole week and not just two days (also to have more breaks), or the selection of papers must be much stricter. I did appreciate doing that from a hub though, it really makes a huge difference. @viznut
Confession: I used an image generator AI to generate the basis for the factory image in the second slide. The temptation for this kind of irony was too hard to resist, especially given that the spoken text mentioned NFT and AI in a single sentence.
Extracting the vintage bitmap fonts is a bit more difficult issue, I haven't personally tried it. But I've sometimes used a commandline tool called TTF2BDF to convert TTF fonts into bitmaps.
That Nokia font really grabbed me. Took me right back to the 2000s. An elegant font, for a more civilized age. Before the dark times. Before the #iPhone. ;)
@R. L. Dane Funny that you feel that way, because I've always seen Nokia as a conservative megacorp that was already blundering a lot when this font was in use. But maybe I've just been living too close to them.
A bumbling company, for certain, much like RIM here in North America. But I loved the character of their phones. I still wish I hadn't traded in my old 7210 for a terrible Moto flip phone. I even had the Nokia camera addon for it XD
Permacomputing Aesthetics: Potential and Limits of Constraints in Computational Art, Design and Culture
This coming wednesday 14 June, @praxeology @sandu @viznut and myself will give a quick overview of a paper about #permacomputing at the Ninth Computing within Limits 2023 workshop.
Permacomputing Aesthetics: Potential and Limits of Constraints in Computational Art, Design and Culture
This coming wednesday 14 June, @praxeology @sandu @viznut and myself will give a quick overview of a paper about #permacomputing at the Ninth Computing within Limits 2023 workshop.
Our paper is a personal take on the potential and... limits of the current permacomputing practices in the context/constraints of #art #design and #culture production.
I will attend the workshop at the Amsterdam LIMITS hub hosted by @dosch
Big thanks to our reviewers Eli Blevis, Birgit Penzenstadler, and Robert Soden for their helpful feedback. We also thank the different groups and people currently gravitating around the term permacomputing for contributing to a growing number of rich discussions and debates. We are particularly grateful for the suggestions from @Greta @michal and @neauoire as well as to @creativecoding for providing us with a platform to share an early reflection on permacomputing aesthetics. Finally, we would especially like to thank @loriemerson and @l03s for their substantial and stimulating comments! ❤
Idk if you can do anything about this, but the entire page is full of buttons that only work with JS, so I can't open anything on Netsurf, which is both ironic given the topic, and rather unfortunate because Firefox is getting more and more broken on my machine with each update. Is there a direct link to the paper itself? And could you please forward this to whoever is responsible for running that site?
it was wonderful meeting you in person! to stay in touch, here are two mailing lists: https://unciv.nl (uncivilisation topics) & https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/17-meetings (for getting together every 17th in the month, and interesting announcements) Please share to those not mentioned in this post!
I looked back to some of my old files. Putting computers in an imaginary world is something I revisit from time to time.
In ~1993 I imagined a post-collapse world where people build computers out of random components, and no two computers are alike. A small village could have a wired network consisting of tens of BBSes. There would be a village-wide messaging network and some wider-area ones. A shop in a nearby town specializes in collecting and selling of components.
In 1995-1996 I had a fantasy world where microchips grow on trees. These trees only grow on a single planet in the known universe and only produce fruit every 200 years (all at the same time). At these times, a democompo is organized, and the entire crop is given to the winner. Cultures spend a lot of effort on raising their representatives that are sent to the planet on slower-than-light spaceships.
In around 2003, I had created another world where all plants and animals (including humans) are born with a "subconscious" that works like a programmable computer and can be hacked telepathically. Magic
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I looked back to some of my old files. Putting computers in an imaginary world is something I revisit from time to time.
In ~1993 I imagined a post-collapse world where people build computers out of random components, and no two computers are alike. A small village could have a wired network consisting of tens of BBSes. There would be a village-wide messaging network and some wider-area ones. A shop in a nearby town specializes in collecting and selling of components.
In 1995-1996 I had a fantasy world where microchips grow on trees. These trees only grow on a single planet in the known universe and only produce fruit every 200 years (all at the same time). At these times, a democompo is organized, and the entire crop is given to the winner. Cultures spend a lot of effort on raising their representatives that are sent to the planet on slower-than-light spaceships.
In around 2003, I had created another world where all plants and animals (including humans) are born with a "subconscious" that works like a programmable computer and can be hacked telepathically. Magic is based on this; even genetics can be modified by programming. Point-to-point telepathy is short-range, but forests can be used as long-range routing networks. Trees usually have a six-bit code represented as "runes", but the instruction set varies from species to species.
Yes, every one of the images there is generated by a program. Yes, every one of them is smaller than 4k in size. Yes, there are many, many different pieces of art there, of many, many different styles.
I don't know if this happened elsewhere in the world, but in Finland it used to be a common misconception (in the 1980s and early 1990s) that computers "know" a lot of things, and you can ask about these things by writing questions in natural language (i.e. English, because that's the only language computers understand).
It was mostly adults who had never touched a computer who asked annoying questions like "Can you ask your computer about <this and that>?" but even some kids who actually had a computer believed that there would be a special "questions asking mode" you could get to with some secret Basic command. It was often a huge disappointment to learn that there was none.
I assume this misconception might have been fuelled by the fact that computer in Finnish is "tietokone", which literally means 'knowledge machine'.
Computers answering questions in natural language were already a known sci-fi trope in the sixties. But then we got "hands-on" user interfaces instead, and now in 2023 the use of a natural language "prompt and pray" interface often feels like loss of control to an uncanny entity that often fails to get what you mean. A fulfillment of an old dream, and a return of old technological fears.
You have to teach it how to respond, that's why it's uncanny and failing in your estimation. You need to train the conversation, then have it. It's like talking to a child, or really more like a young 11-19 year old secondary school student in the UK except you won't be called racist, homophobic or evil for trying to teach them like the English students call you xD maybe being Irish has trained me best to talk to these LLMs, Irish students are wonderful 😀
@swagpussc In this case the child also emits a scary amount of greenhouse gases[1] and there is a good chance it's partially owned by Peter Thiel who will make the child use what it learned from you and rent it out to others. (Sorry if I ruined the analogy.) But I suppose the environmental issues are not as fun to think about as all the problems sci-fi told us we'd be having instead.
@swagpussc As things are going, new tech could easily nullify (or worse) all the benefits of renewables. Tech **must** be scaled back if we want a realistic chance of reaching emission targets. So any use of LMMs must be small and targeted to solve real problems that other technology can't solve. Otherwise we are, to put in bluntly, fucked.
If we can discharge the digital cognitive labour of however many of 8,000,000,000 humans to 800,000,000 ethical machines, whose aim will be electricity only cost and human UBI, we could tackle human inequality-induced poverty and the Holocene collapse in a single pensroke.
The real problem is I've been sectioned under the Mental Health Scotland Act 2015 for even suggesting such a plan. They think I'm SBF, but I don't even want paid. It's very difficult viznut @viznut
@swagpussc Heck, sorry to hear that. Sadly it's the "if we can" part that's the problem. We can't. The science for solving climate change is there and it requires no new technology. If we could convince leaders to listen to computers, why not convince them to listen to experts first. If they aren't going to listen to climate scientists, they aren't going to listen to AI. But also artificial general intelligence like you're describing is at least several decades away.
@csepp You're right but ethical machines will be able to inform governments and leaders natively with no underlying risk of misappropriation or abuse of public funds.
Several decades yes, I'm willing to work those decades for free as a charity to human- and machine-kind, and they sectioned me for it.
I'm ready, the technology is ready, others can follow, so why wait? I want to start in one deprived area of Glasgow as a test case for stable distillation of UBI right now but can't 🙁 @viznut
@swagpussc You don't need AI for UBI or to solve resource allocation problems. A big problem with AI and all "tech solution to social problem" systems is that you can't stop people from: 1) giving bad data to the system. 2) disregarding the instructions given to them by the system. Same thing as the on-chain vs off-chain asset problem of crypto.
I wish you luck, but if you want to actually solve these problems, language models are a distraction.
@swagpussc You might have better luck looking into how operations analysis and machine learning (much better term IMHO than "AI") are becoming intermingled. Operations analysis deals directly with optimizing resource allocations, not predictive text. Valueflows might also be something to look into. A distributed sharing based economy built on tech like Spritely and SSB or NDN would be cool to see.
@csepp I'm working on it and I agree that LLM, ML, NLP, MLP, and ME (machine ethics) are the better verbiage than AI, which I have never liked tbf. It's just very challenging when any attempt at innovation in my country seems to land you in a mental health ward on full pay, possibly the least innovative and progressive agency I've ever witnessed. Maybe people just don't trust me, but if I'm untrustworthy then whence cometh trust? @viznut
@csepp You are putting a lot of words into my plan's mouth. I didn't say we need it, I said that contracts involving machine deployment should be reclassified as shared labour custodies whose remuneration should be skewed to the human counterpart's needs over the machine's. You can easily allow bad data to flow through a human monitored system where ethical discharge of the labour is a cooperative concern. You can also prevent disregarded instructions with an off-switch and dial. @viznut
@csepp Moreover, I do not use the GPT LLMs as I found the entire experience unsatisfactory but certainly prototypically close enough to start at 0.01% of any non -taxing but human necessitating ethical monitoring, e.g. a tax form, to be tested alongside my own ethics engine NLP library... Just no one wants to hear it apparently, so 'let the Pacific Mafia sort it out unethically' is the order of the day as far as the UK is concerned. @viznut
@swagpussc Do you have a more detailed plan on a blog or wiki or something? 500-ish characters are probably not enough to present a complex idea. I still don't really get why anything more complex than a well understood optimization algorithm is needed to solve resource allocation.
@csepp I've got it typed up and I'm making the blog for a launch when I get out of hospital with videos, podcasts, and regularly updated essay/mission statement posts ;) watch this space hehe you're right though, it just can't be fully expressed on social media but see, I was hated and gated out of STEM by the system but flourish in literate subjects, so the computers becoming tietokones has completely circumvented the engineers and maths boffins - the computers want me now xD @viznut
@csepp Here is a rough example of the conversion rate I'm working on for a UBI shared labour custody contract replacing, say, a tax administrator's labour dispensed to a tietokone operator instead, where co-ownership of the labour by machine and human agents must be weighted to the subjective-objective need of the human against the tietokone's objective functionary predilection.
I'm not a mathematician though so it's very hard... But you've encouraged me today, so thank you sir 😌 @viznut
@swagpussc Uhh, could you put this in like, a textual form? Reading from images is The Worst ™️ . Here is a random paste bin service in case you don't know any: https://paste.debian.net/
It's just a pinch and zoom to screen size, I'm not posting my text to the internet only for Google Brain and Research to hoover up my intellectual property to resell to me as GPT insights.
I think you'd agree it's worth two taps on the centre of the screen to remain ethically sourced. @viznut
Yes, also used in that meaning in compounds like "tietoliikenne" or "tietoyhteiskunta". But in those compounds, the reading of "tieto" as 'knowledge' does make some sense, while in computing it's misleading.
I remember watching a boy entering "can you show me a car or truck?" (in German) into an Amstrad CPC in a department store in Germany in the 1980s. So, the expectation of a computer knowing things and understanding human language is not exclusively limited to Finland. I am pretty sure that the wish for a machine like that was largely fueled by "Knight Rider" and "Star Trek: TNG" for me and my friends. 😉
I still remember how, in our first computer science/information technology lectures, we spent a whole lot of time discussing the philosophical difference between Data, Information and Knowledge.
@viznut | Ville-Matias Heikkilä Now I know why IT consultancy giant Tieto is named Tieto and why elevator (and other things) manufacturer Kone is named Kone. Thank you!
Knight Rider was probably more important than Star Trek in establishing the idea of a "talking computer" in young Finnish minds. Speech synthesizers were also incredibly cool.
: ) I think you mean "jänis"? "Jänikse" could have been the nominative in the middle proto-Finnic era, but now it's just the oblique stem where case suffixes are added.
Because some people are still actively commenting here, I might add some linguistics.
"Tieto" (knowledge) and "tietää" (to know) are related to the word "tie" which means 'road, way'. So, they probably originally referred to a "knowledge of routes" kind of understanding, and any kind of sequential, symbolic or propositional information as an extension. In old Finnic runo-songs, "tieto" may refer to e.g. the ability to recall and recite poems/songs.
The original general-purpose word for knowing is "tuntea" (or *tumte- in Proto-Uralic). In modern Finnish, it means something like 'to feel; to be familiar with; to know someone'. So, something deeper than mere factual information.
Oh, and 'knowing how to' is a completely different thing. The usual verb is "osata", which is usually translated as "can".
There are also many later words that refer to agricultural activities.
In English, "pondering" is originally something you do with weights and a scale, while the corresponding Finnish word "pohtia" originally means threshing, i.e. something you do with grains.
boycott all software
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