aparrish

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, 8 months ago to random

i made this custom game boy flash cart by "dead bug" soldering a DIP parallel flash chip to a cartridge edge breakout board that i designed. there's no memory bank controller in here, so you can only flash roms up to 32kb (i have tetris on there now haha) but i like how it turned out!

bottom of cartridge, shows the back of the memory chip and my cartridge edge breakout
soldered flash chip to cartridge edge, outside of the shell. the wires are in multiple groups of colors and the flash chip is almost as wide as the edge connector

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, 5 months ago to random

out: google it if you want to learn more
in: google it if you want a heavily monetized sequence of tokens in an order deemed to be statistically similar to information on the topic

aparrish, 5 months ago to random

i taught a course called "Programming with data for artists and designers" this semester at NYU. schedule, notes, readings and example code available online here: https://progdat.decontextualize.com/schedule.html the course introduces Python and Pandas from the ground up, as a means for undertaking basic exploratory data analysis

aparrish, 10 months ago to random

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, 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, 11 months ago to random

this paper is so so good https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.09800 it outlines the properties of conversational AI systems that cause people to anthropomorphize them, and the reasons that makers of such systems lean into those properties (i.e. "engagement" = $$$), and why that's almost always a bad idea. the authors categorize it as a position paper but it's useful as a literature review too imo

aparrish, 2 months ago to random

celebrating nearly 100 years of "educational institutions must adopt [this tech thingy that i want to sell] or risk falling behind the times" https://www.si.edu/object/pressey-teaching-machine%3Anmah_1367149

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, 4 days ago to random

opens the hood of your laptop welp i see your problem. you got transistors in here. lil electric switches. maybe billions of 'em. not much i can do for you

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, 6 months ago to random

gameboy cart breadboard monstrosity v2 (now with sram)

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, 11 months ago to random

if i have seen far, it is by taking the giants' data without understanding or permission and training a text-to-image model on it

aparrish, 2 months ago to random

three years out from the Stochastic Parrots paper (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922) it's remarkable the extent to which LLM researchers and startups have seemingly used the paper's recommendations as a list of things to specifically not do

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)

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, 4 months ago to random

sometimes it's amusing to pretend you're a tescrealist and mourn the trillions of impeccably content immortal simulated human brains whose existence will be delayed because someone did a post saying "chatgpt sucks"

aparrish, 4 months ago to random

aparrish, 2 months ago to random

I'm teaching an experimental new class called "Human-scale Natural Language Processing" this summer (mid-June to mid-July) for the School of Poetic Computation https://sfpc.study/sessions/summer-24/human-scale-nlp it's being taught online, with two sections scheduled to (hopefully) be convenient for folks all over the planet. applications are due April 15th!

aparrish, 1 month ago to random

latest issue of Taper is gooood https://taper.badquar.to/12/index.html (online journal of literary web experiments, all of which are implemented in 2KB of html/css/javascript or less)

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"