aparrish

aparrish, 11 months ago to random

a few weeks ago I decided I wanted to be in charge of my own bookmarking infrastructure, so I exported my bookmarks from pinboard and spent the afternoon writing ~500 lines of python/html/css/bash to make a lil bespoke database manager/static site generator. pleased with the results: https://bookmarks.decontextualize.com/ (there's no link to the feed on the page, but it does support RSS! check the metadata)

aparrish, 1 year ago to random

I curated a reading series for the Center for Book Arts, and the first reading in the series is tomorrow evening (6:30pm Eastern): https://centerforbookarts.org/calendar/poetry-calendar/human-artifacts-i the event will be online, streaming here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40CSMt4P5rA

aparrish, 11 months ago to random

oh my god "AI" is such a clown show https://www.theverge.com/features/23764584/ai-artificial-intelligence-data-notation-labor-scale-surge-remotasks-openai-chatbots just a big funhouse mirror of useless labor, all because billionaires and computer scientists can't get it into their heads that the task of accurately answering a question is fundamentally incompatible with statistical prediction

aparrish, 9 months ago to random

this table of C escape characters is making the same noises as I do when I have to wake up early

aparrish, 10 months ago to random

aparrish, 1 month ago to random

my bootleg gameboy cart lives!! sorta! i can flash a game on it and play it but only on the occasions when the rp2040 actually starts up... which seems to happen only randomly, like one out of twenty tries. but that is a problem for tomorrow allison; tonight allison is overjoyed that it works at all!

underside of the gba sp shows a cartridge with no top revealing a pcb with a lot of ics and a janky led soldered in place

aparrish, 8 months ago to random

the game boy is the perfect game platform imo. there are >100 million hardware units in existence (probably one in your junk drawer); the hardware is low-power, portable, well-documented and user-serviceable; free, near-perfect emulators run on basically any platform. there are several foss dev toolchains, and the limited capabilities of the machine means naturally lower dev costs. and it's not online so it's basically impossible to make exploitative free-to-play shovelware

aparrish, 10 months ago to random

okay you might remember this project that i posted about last year: https://posts.decontextualize.com/solar-powered-dawn-poems-progress-report/ in which I generate poetry from a markov chain on a microcontroller using a solar panel harvester chip and some big capacitors. i originally wrote the generator with CircuitPython, which gave me 2–3 lines of poetry per discharge from the harvester.

well I just finished reimplementing the generator in C++ and now I get... ~200 lines of poetry per discharge (!)

aparrish, 1 year ago to random

your computer whenever you run a for loop

aparrish, 3 months ago to random

i am looking at languages for making little diagrams and the projects truly run the open source gamut from "still hosted on sourceforge" https://asymptote.sourceforge.io/ to "we've got a discord and a variable sans-serif font" https://mermaid.js.org/ to "our documentation is a 1300 page PDF" https://github.com/pgf-tikz/pgf

aparrish, 8 months ago to random

another update on my solar-powered poetry project! I got back the first round of PCBs I designed from the fabricator, and discovered I had messed up a bunch of stuff (I got literally every switch wrong, and picked inductors with the wrong frequency), but after a few bodges I was at least able to copy my code to the rp2040 and generate poems while connected to USB power (the solar harvester chip still doesn't work, owing to the aforementioned wrong inductors i think)

a square flipped over solar panel next to a square circuitboard with the same dimensions as the circuitboard. several recognizable components: a limit switch, a USB-C port, two supercapacitors. a USB-A breakout is nearby for scale (about 1/4 the width of the board)
back of the pcb, with white text silkscreened: "Thine age asks ease, And since thy duties be To warm the world, That's done in warming us. Shine here to us, And thou art everywhere: This bed thy center is, These walls, thy sphere."

aparrish, 3 months ago to random

I just posted the text of a talk that I gave last week at NYU, titled "Language models can only write ransom notes." I argue that LLM outputs are a kind of collage, and then work through Douglas Kearney and Samatar/Zambreno's theories of collage in an attempt to explain my own poetics. also surprise appearances of Anni Albers and Simone Weil https://posts.decontextualize.com/language-models-ransom-notes/

As | argued earlier, maintaining the anonymity of “the hand behind... the cut” is precisely the aim of both large language models and ransom notes. Large language models are designed with the intention to obscure the cut between tokens; likewise, ransom notes specifically draw attention away from the material-level cut and toward a reading of the surface text. Both of these forms of collage work against the affordances of collage: they have “decentralized” authorship, but with the seams of the cut smoothed over, the result is a text that is neither “intertextual” nor “intertextural.”
Let us love this distance; we touch the objects of our love. Computational text collage is suited to many forms and emotions—form letters, satire, poetic juxtaposition, avant- garde linguistic exploration—but I'd like to believe love is among them. More broadly, | would claim that the act of making a collage always has stakes that are interpersonal, historical, and contextual. In my own work, | prefer to face those stakes head-on, by using only corpora whose relation to me | can know and understand, rather than the “unfathomable,” coercively dematerialized corpora of large language models. In my work, | want to make the distance manifest, rather than hide it away.

aparrish, 1 year ago to random

can anyone recommend a blog or newsletter to follow for interesting python (programming language) news and other python-related stuff? the python weekly newsletter had been my go-to, but it looks like this now

aparrish, 11 months ago to random

i'd bet that the federation's universal translator is almost certainly some kind of large language model, which makes me wonder how much dialogue spoken by non-humans (or just non-English speakers?) in the show is inaccurately translated or outright fabricated according to what the training data says is most statistically likely

aparrish, 9 months ago to random

i am going to die from laughter. the entire appeal of LLMs to capitalism is its potential for obviating the cost of creative labor. it would be hilarious if the only way to prevent LLMs from eating themselves is... to pay people for their creative labor

aparrish, 9 months ago to random

a computer can never be poked in both eyes three stooges style. therefore a computer should never make a management decision

aparrish, 1 year ago to random

I just posted the text of my talk "Nothing Survives Transcription, Nothing Doesn't Survive Transcription," which I gave at a data science event at Iona University a little while ago. https://posts.decontextualize.com/nothing-survives-transcription/ among other topics featured in the talk: Emily Dickinson's punctuation, psychics making the wrong guesses, the sound of data centers, a wrapped ream of blank letter-sized paper

aparrish, 10 months ago to random

aparrish, 12 days ago to random

testing out a bit of code to display text on the gameboy by rendering 3px x 8px characters to VRAM tile data and tile maps, as needed at runtime. I like that the density of this allows more information on screen, but i'm worried that in practice it would be difficult to read—both because of the small size on an actual hardware screen, and because of the letters that don't take well to being rendered at 3px width, like Ms and Ws

aparrish, 9 months ago to random

feels like there was a missed opportunity to just call it "regular data" instead of "small data"

aparrish, 10 months ago to random

got the very very beginnings of a first-person dungeon crawler for the gameboy working (it's not reading from a map here yet, it's just drawing random walls whenever i press A)

random configurations of first person grid-based walls. it's kind of abstract haha

aparrish, 1 year ago to random

gritting my teeth and holding on tight as yet another wave of VR hype washes over me

aparrish, 4 months ago to random

still working on my rp2040-powered gameboy flash cart. the leds here are hooked up to the upper rom address lines and are basically visualizing the index of the memory bank that is currently being accessed. in this case, it also kinda serves as a music visualizer (presumably the game is loading the data to feed to the noise channel from a bank whose binary representation is mostly 1s)

a row of five leds in a breadboard, lighting up in time to the snare-ish sound in the music (intro music to gen1 pokemon)

aparrish, 4 months ago to random

i'd be the one keeping everyone late at the apple branding meeting with my refusal to support the phrase "spatial computing" instead of my suggestion, "spomputing"

aparrish, 16 days ago to random

!!Con has consistently been one of the weirdest and most fun tech(-adjacent) conferences out there for a while, and their call for talks is open for their 12th and final(!) gathering later this summer in Santa Cruz. consider submitting something! https://bangbangcon.com/give-a-talk.html (talks are ten minutes long, must have something to do with computing, should be about something you think is neat, and need to have an exclamation mark in the title)