[{"type":"blog","content":"# [Offline Octopus w Fabien Benetou](https://otter.ai/u/e58DWwz49LC4NXZqzdFBGU-Je9A?tab=summary)\r\nSummary\r\n\r\nUsing devices offline and connecting them for resilience. [0:00](https://otter.ai/u/e58DWwz49LC4NXZqzdFBGU-Je9A?tab=summary&t=0s)\r\n\r\n- Fabien Benetou and Alan Laidlaw discuss bandwidth issues during a video call.\r\n- Fabien Benetou shares a project called \"Offline Octopus\" during a meeting, sparking curiosity from the listener.\r\n- Fabien Benetou aims to create an \"offline octopus\" of interconnected devices for offline use, with resilience and intelligence.\r\n\r\nDigital distraction and intentional technology use. [6:03](https://otter.ai/u/e58DWwz49LC4NXZqzdFBGU-Je9A?tab=summary&t=363s)\r\n- Benetou and Laidlaw discuss the importance of intentionality in technology, particularly in regards to distractions and connectivity.\r\n- Fabien Benetou discusses his workflow, which involves prototyping and juggling multiple devices, including a computer, iPad, and phone.\r\n- He explains that he wants to cut the cord and simplify his workflow by bringing only one device, but he recognizes that this would not be representative of his actual workflow, which involves sharing resources and collaborating with others.\r\n\r\nOffline access to information and resilience. [11:33](https://otter.ai/u/e58DWwz49LC4NXZqzdFBGU-Je9A?tab=summary&t=694s)\r\n- Fabien Benetou proposes a personalized, offline data exchange solution using a mini iCloud-like system on a raspberry pi, with a Wi-Fi hotspot for connecting devices.\r\n- Fabien Benetou muses on the irony of pervasive connectivity becoming a distraction, despite once dreaming of it.\r\n- Fabien Benetou discovered that many people he spoke to had a recurring theme of difficulty accessing the internet, leading him to explore offline access to Wikipedia and Stack Overflow.\r\n- Benetou found that having a local copy of these resources can provide a safety net in case of internet downtime, and he implemented a script to update these resources periodically.\r\n\r\nTech independence and self-hosting. [18:19](https://otter.ai/u/e58DWwz49LC4NXZqzdFBGU-Je9A?tab=summary&t=1099s)\r\n- Laidlaw and Benetou discuss the benefits of self-hosting and tech independence, including reliance on centralized systems and the potential for censorship or data breaches.\r\n- Fabien Benetou expresses frustration with relying on Google services, feeling limited and trapped by their convenience.\r\n\r\nTech independence and the potential for companies to abuse their power. [22:20](https://otter.ai/u/e58DWwz49LC4NXZqzdFBGU-Je9A?tab=summary&t=1340s)\r\n- Laidlaw expresses distrust of Amazon's Kindle licensing model due to potential for ads or monthly fees.\r\n- Fabien Benetou and Alan Laidlaw discuss the importance of tech independence and the potential risks of relying on centralized platforms like YouTube and Amazon.\r\n\r\nOpen-source software and hardware for privacy and security. [26:08](https://otter.ai/u/e58DWwz49LC4NXZqzdFBGU-Je9A?tab=summary&t=1568s)\r\n- Laidlaw suggests a more robust and customizable approach to cybersecurity, moving away from proprietary solutions.\r\n- Fabien Benetou highlights affordable open-source hardware options for running open-source software, including the Pine phone and watch.\r\n- Fabien Benetou demonstrates a distributed software solution for various devices, including Raspberry Pi and VR devices.\r\n\r\nSelf-hosting AI and tech independence. [32:02](https://otter.ai/u/e58DWwz49LC4NXZqzdFBGU-Je9A?tab=summary&t=1923s)\r\n- Fabien Benetou explains his custom HTTPS server with web interface and routes for controlling devices.\r\n- Fabien Benetou and Alan Laidlaw discuss tech independence and the potential of local AI assistants, with Fabien mentioning his wiki on self-hosting AI.\r\n- Fabien Benetou mentions various AI-related projects he's working on, including a self-hosted AI server in his basement.\r\n- Benetou plans to use a VPN to access his server while offline, ensuring his data remains private and secure.\r\n\r\nOffline technology and connectivity. [39:16](https://otter.ai/u/e58DWwz49LC4NXZqzdFBGU-Je9A?tab=summary&t=2356s)\r\n- Alan Laidlaw suggests that connectivity is overrated and that sometimes disconnection can be beneficial, citing the example of running shoes.\r\n- Fabien Benetou agrees, noting that even with a small number of devices on a network, VPN can still slow things down.\r\n- Fabien Benetou is looking for a name for his project that combines the ideas of virtual connectivity and offline access, but is struggling to find the right term (42:18)\r\n- Alan Laidlaw suggests that \"offline octopus\" could be a good umbrella term for several aspects of the project, including tech independence and ambient capture ability (43:38)\r\n\r\nUsing Raspberry Pi for offline computing and networking. [45:25](https://otter.ai/u/e58DWwz49LC4NXZqzdFBGU-Je9A?tab=summary&t=2726s)\r\n- Fabien Benetou is working on an offline version of Octopus, a tool for exchanging files between devices, to test its usefulness and potential for integration with other projects.\r\n- Benetou gives workshops on weekends for kids in Brussels, using Octopus to teach them about programming and XR technology.\r\n- Fabien Benetou uses VR to teach programming pragmatically, emphasizing local control and data privacy.\r\n\r\nUsing Raspberry Pi for IoT projects and distributed computing. [50:30](https://otter.ai/u/e58DWwz49LC4NXZqzdFBGU-Je9A?tab=summary&t=3030s)\r\n- Fabien Benetou discusses using VR headsets as servers and the affordability of Raspberry Pi devices for educational workshops.\r\n- Benetou highlights the importance of tangible devices for crystallizing ideas and shows brief examples of peers that can synchronize devices without a controlling node.\r\n- Fabien Benetou discusses the concept of a distributed and decentralized IoT network, where devices communicate with each other directly without relying on a central authority.\r\n- Benetou describes the idea of using a mesh network, where devices act as hotspots to repeat messaging, and how this approach can provide more resilience and flexibility compared to a centralized system.\r\n\r\nTech independence and low latency. [56:24](https://otter.ai/u/e58DWwz49LC4NXZqzdFBGU-Je9A?tab=summary&t=3384s)\r\n- Alan Laidlaw and Fabien Benetou discuss the potential benefits and drawbacks of using low latency in various applications, including controlling robots and turning lights on.\r\n- They also touch on the idea that having boundaries and time to think about issues can be beneficial in some situations, rather than relying solely on low latency.\r\n- Alan Laidlaw and Fabien Benetou discuss tech independence and the potential for a \"Folk computer\" movement.\r\n- Benetou shares his experience with a video projector as a potential solution for handling notifications and pulling information, and mentions the offline octopus project as a related example.","frontmatter":{},"title":"Offline Octopus, Summary of Topics","description":"# Offline Octopus w Fabien Benetou (https://otter.ai/u/e58DWwz49LC4NXZqzdFBGU-Je9A?tab=summary) ","category":"marbles","tags":[],"slug":"offline-octopus-summary-of-topics","date":"2023-10-24T15:55:14.000Z","readingTime":"4 minutes","ghMetadata":{"issueUrl":"https://github.com/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/55","commentsUrl":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/55/comments","title":"Offline Octopus, Summary of Topics","created_at":"2023-10-24T15:55:14Z","updated_at":"2023-10-30T16:52:38Z","reactions":{"url":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/55/reactions","total_count":0,"+1":0,"-1":0,"laugh":0,"hooray":0,"confused":0,"heart":0,"rocket":0,"eyes":0}}},{"type":"blog","content":"Spatial computing is a new material. Some materials are more responsive to some design patterns than others. It makes no sense to say, \"Skyscrapers should be built out of cotton – if only cotton were strong enough.\" It's a better policy to figure out what design patterns play to the strengths of that material. \r\n\r\nThe gaming industry will probably do most of the grunt work to sort out which design patterns best fit spatial computing. Spatial computing (an umbrella term for a plethora of hardware, software, and sensor assemblages) submerges the user into an interface. The experience is inherently more dimensional than flat screens. Video games are more graphical, dimensional, and multiplayer than textual interfaces, so there is a strong incentive to figure out how XR can expand on games.\r\n\r\nThe command line is probably the first digital textual interface. It had one job: manipulate symbols to provide instructions for machines. It was only possible with a keyboard and a screen. Keyboards were ripped completely from typewriters. Screens were the digital analog of the typewriter's output, analog ink and paper. But the screen turned out to be a much more potent material than its original intent. Decades of innovation and revenue spilled out of it. Today, it is hard to imagine software without screens.\r\n\r\nText interfaces haven't faired well in the last decade. One can't help but feel overwhelmed by text, whatever its origins. Social threads, internal documentation, and countless tabs (of countless ad-riddled articles) are all varieties of textual interfaces. Synoptic comprehension and intuitive collaboration have suffered under the current hegemony of flat graphical text interfaces.\r\n\r\nCould text become less overwhelming if screens lost their dimensional constraints? Is XR the right material for word processing?\r\n\r\nI bet that conventions around text will have to change first. Multi-modal devices and AI augmentation blow apart current conventions about what writing is. Articles may not be written so much as composed into polymorphic shapes that complement whatever material they arrive at.\r\n\r\nWe're at a rare moment when several layers of abstraction are up for grabs. Just as we've been trained to drive cars, we've been trained to operate personal computers. The heuristics are, for the most part, locked in. Mobile phones are much younger than PCs, but most heuristics are also settled for phones. By comparison, XR is uncharted territory.\r\n\r\nEven though games will define the heuristics of spatial computing, this is the time to push the paradigms of personal reflection, public works of digital civil engineering, and possibly uncover latent talents in the material of the human body.\r\n","frontmatter":{},"title":"An Early Manifesto for Spatial Computing","description":"Spatial computing is a new material. Some materials are more responsive to some design patterns than others. It makes no sense to say, \"Skyscrapers should be built out of cotton – if only cotton were strong enough.\" It's a better policy to figure out what design patterns play to the strengths of that material. ","category":"marbles","tags":[],"slug":"an-early-manifesto-for-spatial-computing","date":"2023-10-22T18:29:26.000Z","readingTime":"2 minutes","ghMetadata":{"issueUrl":"https://github.com/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/54","commentsUrl":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/54/comments","title":"An Early Manifesto for Spatial Computing","created_at":"2023-10-22T18:29:26Z","updated_at":"2023-10-22T21:17:24Z","reactions":{"url":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/54/reactions","total_count":0,"+1":0,"-1":0,"laugh":0,"hooray":0,"confused":0,"heart":0,"rocket":0,"eyes":0}}},{"type":"blog","content":"I recommend reading [24 hours in an Invisible Epidemic](https://pudding.cool/2023/09/invisible-epidemic/). you should read it because I'm going to talk about the syntax and mechanics, not the content. Go ahead and check it out, I'll wait.\r\n\r\n---\r\n\r\nThe curtain is purple and barely lit. We see a pixelated body on stage, possibly dead. Is this a game? His name is Martin.\r\n\r\nAs you scroll, new elements appear. To the right, minutes tick like a metronome. A black box stops time to deliver a somber voice over. \r\n\r\nAt 6:01, we are pulled back to a grid view. It reminded me of a scene in Amadeus where Salieri describes Mozart's genius.\r\n\r\n{% youtube xYHJRhRym1U %}\r\n\r\n---\r\nData Journalism is an experiment. It goes by a slew of other names like explorable explainables, explainers, immersive narratives. I don't know if it's a genre or medium, so we'll call it data journalism for now. \r\n\r\nLike comics, data journalism is a bastard child of writing and the materialities of the format. Comics came out of newspapers, first as illustrations with captions and eventually as sequential art. Comics weren't a product of the printing press though. It was only several rounds of optimization and industrialization that page composition became flexible enough to allow deviation from the format.\r\n\r\nLike comics, data journalism often feels like a composition. Everything is very intentionally arranged. NYT has a few great examples. (While the pieces are engaging, there's always a question of whether it was worth the effort.)\r\n\r\nThis was the first time I felt a composition was polyphonic. The timeline on the right keeps me down in the weeds, feeling each moment pass. When the grid appears, my attention expands my view to a panoptical level. I experience two focal distances at once, like a polyfocal parallax.\r\n\r\nThis is a good design. I immediately thought of Slack and Discord, tarpits of text, and how I wish there could be a polyfocal view like this. \r\n\r\nWe have lived in software for generation now. Some of us don't know what life was like before apps. Good software design implies that the design is robust and scalable. equates good design with scalable. Frameworks become standards because they are supposedly scalable. \r\n\r\nComics are not scalable. A good design in a comic may only be good for the scope of that story. Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud is an excellent example. He creates new visual techniques that work only in conjunction with that particular text.","frontmatter":{},"title":"On Isolation and Animation","description":"I recommend reading 24 hours in an Invisible Epidemic (https://pudding.cool/2023/09/invisible-epidemic/). you should read it because I'm going to talk about the syntax and mechanics, not the content. Go ahead and check it out, I'll wait. ","category":"marbles","tags":[],"slug":"on-isolation-and-animation","date":"2023-10-11T17:04:33.000Z","readingTime":"2 minutes","ghMetadata":{"issueUrl":"https://github.com/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/53","commentsUrl":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/53/comments","title":"On Isolation and Animation","created_at":"2023-10-11T17:04:33Z","updated_at":"2023-10-12T18:14:39Z","reactions":{"url":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/53/reactions","total_count":0,"+1":0,"-1":0,"laugh":0,"hooray":0,"confused":0,"heart":0,"rocket":0,"eyes":0}}},{"type":"blog","content":"Every so often, I reverse-engineer puzzle games. I start playing them when I'm stressed. I play them like I'm trying to get an answer to a question. That's when I get interested in what's underneath the game. This time, I reverse-engineered [Dot The Game](https://apps.apple.com/au/developer/emmanuel-roux/id914649624) by Emmanuel Roux.\r\n\r\n

Background

\r\n

\r\nThis habit probably started when I wanted Optimus Prime as a kid but couldn't have it, so I built an ~interpretation~ of him with paper supplies. When I finally got to play with a real Optimus, I was crushed to find out I had the logic all wrong. (The paper Optimus used the smoke stacks as arms. Very skinny arms.) Paper Optimus was later crushed. I still remember exactly how the real Optimus transforms. I wouldn't have noticed that without trying to build it myself.\r\n

\r\n

\r\n\r\nIt's a simple game, a 4x4 matrix of sums of a 5x5 matrix of dots. I worked it out on paper and then asked GPT to code it in JavaScript. I had a game up and running in less than an hour. I was stunned at easy this was for GPT. I encourage everyone to try to reverse-engineer games with GPT. You get a sense of how different this design material is. \r\n\r\nHere's a snapshot of the game, built from simple prompts: \r\n![CleanShot 2023-10-10 at 11 07 03](https://github.com/Laidlaw/laidlaw/assets/49516/aedc9739-0c66-4d9a-96b8-9260cbe69c1c)\r\n\r\nHere's a storyboard of the gameplay:\r\n $\"shapes$ \r\n\r\nAesthetically, the game feels like a 4x4 grid of numbers. But the game is one level down, stored in a 5x5 grid of dots (like a holographic universe). Once I felt I had grasped the game, I followed my curiosity. For example, could you solve the puzzle with shapes instead of numbers? \r\n\r\nA 3 cell means a corner shape is required, so the only question was which corner it fit into. All the numbers worked this way, a shape and a number of options. \r\n\r\n| Type | Options |\r\n|--------|--------|\r\n| 0 | 0 |\r\n| 1 | 4 | \r\n| 2 | 6 |\r\n| 3 | 4 |\r\n| 4 | 0 |\r\n\r\nI was playing a different imaginary/heuristic game above the surface game, but the logic on the lowest level still defined it.\r\n\r\nLittle games like this are fun because the solution is set, which lets me focus on the journey to the solution. The numbers reveal something about their neighbors. Rules bind neighbors. Applying a rule reveals more of the board by limiting the options a shape in a cell can take. \r\n\r\nAn algorithm could solve this almost instantly, but I typically follow a path. I follow the most certain rules, but there are many different possible paths in a given game. \r\n\r\nIf I think about trying to pick the most optimal path, this starts to resemble a traveling salesman problem.\r\n\r\n(cont...)","frontmatter":{},"title":"Reverse Engineering Dot The Game","description":"Every so often, I reverse-engineer puzzle games. I start playing them when I'm stressed. I play them like I'm trying to get an answer to a question. That's when I get interested in what's underneath the game. This time, I reverse-engineered Dot The Game (https://apps.apple.com/au/developer/emmanuel-roux/id914649624) by Emmanuel Roux. ","category":"marbles","tags":[],"slug":"reverse-engineering-dot-the-game","date":"2023-10-10T17:55:44.000Z","readingTime":"3 minutes","ghMetadata":{"issueUrl":"https://github.com/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/52","commentsUrl":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/52/comments","title":"Reverse Engineering Dot The Game","created_at":"2023-10-10T17:55:44Z","updated_at":"2023-10-10T19:11:11Z","reactions":{"url":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/52/reactions","total_count":0,"+1":0,"-1":0,"laugh":0,"hooray":0,"confused":0,"heart":0,"rocket":0,"eyes":0}}},{"type":"blog","content":"\r\nFuture of Text 7.10.23\r\n\r\nThis session is a prologue to an extended conversation around spatial cognition.\r\n\r\nApple recently popularized \"spatial computing\" to distinguish their product from virtual reality. Both terms are easy to pick apart. Writing is spatial computing, just as TV and social media are virtual realities. Spatial computing implies transformation rather than replication. That is an interesting vector to explore the future of text and, more broadly, the future of cognition.\r\n\r\nSpatial computing dates back to November 30th, 38000 BC, when someone made a line in the sand. More recently, ancient Romans used wax-coated wooden tablets to augment their thinking. The chalkboard was invented in 1801. But the most popular tool for spatial computing has been paper. \r\n\r\nWhat made paper so unique that it became the standard for centuries? ChatGPT listed the qualities of paper as versatile, durable, easy to produce, portable, and absorbant (good for ink and printing presses). Paper is also analog.\r\n\r\nSidenote: I asked ChatGPT to categorize the differences between digital and analog technologies. It came up with:\r\n\r\n- **Flexibility vs. Specialization**: As mentioned, analog tools are often more flexible, while digital tools tend to be more specialized. For example, a notepad application on a computer is designed specifically for taking notes and isn't easily adapted to other tasks.\r\n- **Tactility**: Analog tools engage our senses in a direct, tactile way that digital tools often don't. Writing with a pencil on paper involves a physical, sensory experience that typing on a keyboard lacks.\r\n- **Persistence vs. Transience**: Analog tools like paper create a permanent record, while digital tools often support more transient, ephemeral interactions. For example, you can easily delete or modify digital notes, while erasing pencil from paper leaves traces.\r\n- **Affordances and Constraints**: Each tool, analog or digital, offers certain affordances (things it enables) and constraints (things it inhibits). Understanding these can be key to understanding how the tool shapes our thinking and behavior.\r\n- **Cognitive Extension vs. Cognitive Transformation**: Some argue that analog tools extend our cognitive processes in a more straightforward manner (e.g., a pencil extends our ability to remember by externalizing our thoughts), whereas digital tools may transform our cognitive processes in more complex ways (e.g., a digital calculator doesn't just extend our mathematical abilities, it changes the nature of the task).\r\n\r\nI use three tools to get my thoughts out: paper, text-based digital applications, and voice-based digital applications. Voice applications are primarily useful to generate textual artifacts. I also use digital mapping tools (aka spatial canvas tools) but mainly analog tools to map out ideas. \r\n\r\nWe are conditioned by the technology we interact with. The more count on it, the more we forget how it conditions us. \r\n\r\nOf the tools mentioned, paper seems to come with the fewest conditions. Paper is so natural that I didn't realize I had conflated paper with pages. Pages are like an implementation of paper, the way that javascript is an implementation of ECMAScript.\r\n\r\nWhen I started using a large roll of paper as my primary tool for thought, I found forgotten affordances. It was like finding a massive cellar under the floorboards of your bedroom. What's down there, and why was it covered up? (One obvious answer is that walking on a flat surface is more convenient than tiptoeing around a hole in the ground.)\r\n\r\nHeavy trade-offs come with writing on a large scroll, which may outweigh the newfound freedom. But the exercise gets me thinking about other subterranean affordances. What are other examples of micro-conditioning via technology? Has the rapid evolution of digital technology stunted other spatial cognition techniques? \r\n\r\nIf there's something to writing in the sand that is unlike any other interaction, can we pinpoint what is valuable and try to reproduce it in another medium?\r\n","frontmatter":{"description":"Apple recently popularized \"spatial computing\" to distinguish their product from virtual reality. Both terms are easy to pick apart. Writing is spatial computing, just as TV and social media are virtual realities. Spatial computing implies transformation rather than replication. That is an interesting vector to explore the future of text and, more broadly, the future of cognition."},"title":"Pages are an Implementation of Paper","description":"Apple recently popularized \"spatial computing\" to distinguish their product from virtual reality. Both terms are easy to pick apart. Writing is spatial computing, just as TV and social media are virtual realities. Spatial computing implies transformation rather than replication. That is an interesting vector to explore the future of text and, more broadly, the future of cognition. ","category":"marbles","tags":[],"slug":"pages-are-an-implementation-of-paper","date":"2023-07-09T16:51:09.000Z","readingTime":"3 minutes","ghMetadata":{"issueUrl":"https://github.com/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/50","commentsUrl":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/50/comments","title":"Pages are an Implementation of Paper","created_at":"2023-07-09T16:51:09Z","updated_at":"2023-07-09T20:20:29Z","reactions":{"url":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/50/reactions","total_count":0,"+1":0,"-1":0,"laugh":0,"hooray":0,"confused":0,"heart":0,"rocket":0,"eyes":0}}},{"type":"blog","content":"Imagine Hollywood announces that henceforth all blockbusters will be based on video games. Video games have emerged as a mature art form that can convey depth, nuance, and sincerity. The smash success of the HBO show The Last of Us is proof of what video games can be. There is also a great overlap in the audience.\r\n\r\nIf this were to occur, what would happen next? \r\n\r\n1) There are a lot of movies that wouldn't get made. \r\n\r\nBoth Hollywood and the video game industry value narrative arcs. The hero's journey is central to both worlds. But they mean different things within each industry. Video games are an orchestration story, action, and optionality. So the kinds of stories are necessarily constrained. It is hard to imagine Succession as a video game, let alone Richard III.\r\n\r\n2) There are a lot of video games that wouldn't get made.\r\n\r\nVideo games are often cherished because of their novelty. Prince of Persia is a good early example of a novel approach to painting the character that made the character feel real. Portal is another example that turned the landscape into a kind of character. Within the industry, this kind of legerdemain is called Game mechanics. \r\n\r\nIf video game producers knew that any of their games could be turned into blockbuster movies, that knowledge would have an invidious effect on the creators' minds. Game mechanics would be considered from the aspect of a cinematic experience. It would ultimately whittle down the kinds of games that get made.\r\n\r\nParadoxically, such an arrangement between movies and video games would prevent video games from becoming a mature art form. \r\n\r\nI don't know what to call this mutually procrustean arrangement, but I see it everywhere. From music to politics to enterprise SaaS. But probably first noticed it in comics. Comic books bent the knee to Hollywood decades ago. There was a time before Understanding Comics when comic art didn't need to be sequential or tell a story. Saul Steinberg (or George Grosz) made art that contained a kind of game mechanics, an internally consistent logic. They should've been thought of comics but instead got entangled with art.\r\n ","frontmatter":{},"title":"Thought Experiment: Movies, Video Games, and Symbiotic Entanglement","description":"Imagine Hollywood announces that henceforth all blockbusters will be based on video games. Video games have emerged as a mature art form that can convey depth, nuance, and sincerity. The smash success of the HBO show The Last of Us is proof of what video games can be. There is also a great overlap in the audience. ","category":"marbles","tags":[],"slug":"thought-experiment-movies-video-games-and-symbiotic-entanglement","date":"2023-06-22T03:41:53.000Z","readingTime":"2 minutes","ghMetadata":{"issueUrl":"https://github.com/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/49","commentsUrl":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/49/comments","title":"Thought Experiment: Movies, Video Games, and Symbiotic Entanglement","created_at":"2023-06-22T03:41:53Z","updated_at":"2023-06-22T03:42:14Z","reactions":{"url":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/49/reactions","total_count":0,"+1":0,"-1":0,"laugh":0,"hooray":0,"confused":0,"heart":0,"rocket":0,"eyes":0}}},{"type":"blog","content":"![desktop2](https://github.com/Laidlaw/laidlaw/assets/49516/9b05485a-9637-4cf1-806d-0438c7040814)\r\n\r\nMy wife gave me a roll of paper to mark our first wedding anniversary. I started writing on it instead of my journal. It started with little dashes of thoughts, then boxes and arrows, then sketches. It migrated to my desk. Paperclips keep the scroll from unraveling.\r\n\r\nExploring scroll tech in an age of AI and VR may seem anachronistic. But there's something uniquely immediate and refreshing about a scroll. It reminds me that pages are a technological innovation distinct from paper. \r\n\r\nThis gets into some philosophical digressions and aesthetic suspicions - but I'll table those for now. \r\n\r\nI'm adding features bits at a time. Next up is an arm for an overhead camera and QR code stickers. I want to avoid a prescriptive process while I build this hybrid workshop. ","frontmatter":{"description":"Exploring scroll tech in an age of AI and VR may seem anachronistic. But there's something uniquely immediate and refreshing about a scroll. It reminds me that pages are a technological innovation distinct from paper."},"title":"TableScroll: An Experiment in \"Analog Spatial Computing\"","description":"Exploring scroll tech in an age of AI and VR may seem anachronistic. But there's something uniquely immediate and refreshing about a scroll. It reminds me that pages are a technological innovation distinct from paper. ","category":"marbles","tags":[],"slug":"tablescroll-an-experiment-in-analog-spatial-computing","date":"2023-06-20T22:52:22.000Z","readingTime":"1 minute","ghMetadata":{"issueUrl":"https://github.com/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/48","commentsUrl":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/48/comments","title":"TableScroll: An Experiment in \"Analog Spatial Computing\"","created_at":"2023-06-20T22:52:22Z","updated_at":"2023-06-20T22:54:09Z","reactions":{"url":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/48/reactions","total_count":0,"+1":0,"-1":0,"laugh":0,"hooray":0,"confused":0,"heart":0,"rocket":0,"eyes":0}}},{"type":"blog","content":"I was watching a crime procedural tonight. I was thinking that I would've benn a pretty good sketch artist in another life. Then I was hit by a dull inevitability: Forensic Sketch Artists are goners. They'll be replaced by mugshot GPT.\n\nI'm fully on the side of the artists here, and I don't presume to know the artistry involved - but I suspect it has a lot to do with the dialogue. Asking the right questions to get into a flow, timing the questions with parts of the face being generated by the artist. I like to imagine it's similar to improv.\r\n\r\nThat said, LLMs could knock this out of the park. Even accounting for all the complexities of language and culture and bias, there's a straightforward reason why this is a job for GPT: the feedback loop. \r\n\r\n1. Ask questions about the subject of the sketch (and I/O that GPT already does pretty well)\r\n2. \"Draw\" and iterate on the sketch, hallucinating through variations until an optimal feature is surfaced.\r\n3. Disseminate the sketch.\r\n4. Find the subject \r\n5. Wait\r\n6. Feed the photo of the subject into the model along with the sketch, dialogue, and other data.\r\n\r\nWhether or not the sketch is accurate, the model will improve if the subject is found and their face is treated as training data. It's dark, but I could see a pipeline from description to facial recognition and automatic identification.\r\n ","frontmatter":{"description":"ML will replace forensic sketch artists. Sadly, Mugshot GPT is an inevitability."},"title":"Prior Art","description":"ML will replace forensic sketch artists. Sadly, Mugshot GPT is an inevitability. ","category":"marbles","tags":[],"slug":"prior-art","date":"2023-05-21T01:51:16.000Z","readingTime":"2 minutes","ghMetadata":{"issueUrl":"https://github.com/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/47","commentsUrl":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/47/comments","title":"Prior Art","created_at":"2023-05-21T01:51:16Z","updated_at":"2023-05-21T03:42:32Z","reactions":{"url":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/47/reactions","total_count":0,"+1":0,"-1":0,"laugh":0,"hooray":0,"confused":0,"heart":0,"rocket":0,"eyes":0}}},{"type":"blog","content":"I talked with Adam Wern earlier today, and he told me when he's in VR he will take the flying pretty quickly. Flying is just easier. It makes more sense than walking. He noticed that his kids do the same thing. \n\nSo it's almost an innate – it's almost like when you're presented with a new kind of technology, there are some latent heuristics that just sort of come to the surface. \n\nAnother example of that would be text messages and how we just took to the idea of left margin, right margin in text messages. As if, like, as if there was not even like a debate about it. \n\nIt was just \"Oh, yeah, this is me. I'm on the left and they're on the right.\" It was a heuristic latent in this new technology that, I suspect, was just stumbled on. \n\nI think that we'll also find latent heuristics when it comes to our new relationship with AI, you know, large language models and whatnot. \n\nThere'll be things that will suddenly become obvious and other things will become like walking, right? Why would you walk when you could fly? \n\nThat said, this is sort of a slight pivot: Stand-off replaces the outline.\n\nThat's actually the appropriate level of abstraction – the outline. It applies to code, because you know, all code is an outline. All text editors are outlines, they just decide to be flat. And standoff can easily consume or replicate the effect of an outline. So there's no loss there, but it does so much more. And what it what it offers is it's almost like a 3d outline. \n\nStand-off is an outline that can exist in higher dimensions and not be constrained by a dimensionally reduced formula.\n\n#vector databases, #LLM","frontmatter":{},"title":"Flying is just easier","description":"I talked with Adam Wern earlier today, and he told me when he's in VR he will take the flying pretty quickly. Flying is just easier. It makes more sense than walking. He noticed that his kids do the same thing. ","category":"marbles","tags":[],"slug":"flying-is-just-easier","date":"2023-05-19T02:30:54.000Z","readingTime":"2 minutes","ghMetadata":{"issueUrl":"https://github.com/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/46","commentsUrl":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/46/comments","title":"Flying is just easier","created_at":"2023-05-19T02:30:54Z","updated_at":"2023-05-19T02:31:17Z","reactions":{"url":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/46/reactions","total_count":0,"+1":0,"-1":0,"laugh":0,"hooray":0,"confused":0,"heart":0,"rocket":0,"eyes":0}}},{"type":"blog","content":"I don't know how long this series will be, but here's a list of things I plan to talk about. These all relate to the game. They are in no particular order.\n\nMachine Learning and Data Science methods and techniques. Feature Engineering. Optimization techniques. \n\nGraph Theory. Topology. Network Theory. Knot Theory. Protein folding. Category Theory. Visual Group Theory. Complexity Theory.\n\nHow to win the game. How to lose the game.\n\nWardley Maps. State Charts. Galton Boards. Bookshelves. Knowledge Graphs. Boundary Conditions. Edge Cases. Objective Functions.\n\nBooks: How to Read a Book. How to Solve it. Notes on the Synthesis of Form. The Joy of Abstraction. The Death of Time. The Model Thinker. The Temptation of the Diagram. How to Measure Anything.\n\nADHD. Apophenia. Shape Rotating. Synoptics. Pointillism. Spreadsheet Brain.","frontmatter":{},"title":"Uncrossed Examined pt2","description":"I don't know how long this series will be, but here's a list of things I plan to talk about. These all relate to the game. They are in no particular order. ","category":"marbles","tags":[],"slug":"uncrossed-examined-pt2","date":"2023-05-18T02:17:23.000Z","readingTime":"1 minute","ghMetadata":{"issueUrl":"https://github.com/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/45","commentsUrl":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/45/comments","title":"Uncrossed Examined pt2","created_at":"2023-05-18T02:17:23Z","updated_at":"2023-05-19T02:31:38Z","reactions":{"url":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/45/reactions","total_count":0,"+1":0,"-1":0,"laugh":0,"hooray":0,"confused":0,"heart":0,"rocket":0,"eyes":0}}},{"type":"blog","content":"At the end of April, I played a small part in discussing AI and academia. The biggest thrill, as always, was talking with Ted Nelson and Vint Cerf. Here's the talk and snippet of the talk (edited for clarity):\r\n\r\n# Discussed\r\n\r\n- Comics as a bastard medium, a product of newspapers and journalism\r\n- Robert Caro's writing process and the natural affordances of writing on paper\r\n- Sheet music\r\n- How the fluency engine could help take back some of the lost affordances of our current medium\r\n- Examples of how the fluency engine could be used to explore ideas and create compositions\r\n- The potential for the fluency engine to be used as an art form\r\n- The limitations of our current text editors and the potential for ChatGPT to bring back semantic geometry in writing and drawing\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n![IMG_4492](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/49516/236990084-9d5a9983-fdac-46f2-abc7-fa76c7d7ae84.jpeg)\r\n\r\n\r\n{% youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZfy_7WJwow %}\r\n\r\nVenkatesh Rao recently wrote about the physics of intelligence. \r\n> I think it's been adequately demonstrated in the last six months that at least intelligence, if not subtler notions like consciousness or sentience that may not, may or may not be well-posed is not a substrate, is not substrate dependent.\r\n> The physics of intelligence is no more about silicon semiconductors or neurotransmitters than the physics of flight is about feathers or aluminum. These low-level substrates constrain but do not define physics. \r\n> In either case, when you analyze the flight characteristics of an airplane or a bird, you might quickly check the strength-to-weight ratio of bone and feather composites or aluminum. But then you move on to talking about wing geometry, lift versus drag, and so on, concepts that still belong in physics but at different levels of abstraction. Flight is actually a very good reference phenomenon for thinking about intelligence. Since it is, it too is a property of biological organisms that reproduce with non-living machines that work on similar but not identical principles.\r\n> Understanding the physics of flight in a way that's agnostic to the differences between birds and aircraft is a similar problem to that of understanding the physics of intelligence. Whether realized with silicones or neurons. Interestingly, even though aerospace engineering is a mature discipline today, the physics of flight is actually still quite mysterious.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nOne of the things I'm personally interested in, and this might apply to Ted; it's certainly in the spirit of Xanadu, is that even the most conservative critic of GPT would probably concede that GPT (LLMs and transformers) is as big a deal as newspapers. \r\nI was a cartoonist in my previous life and comics are a bastard medium. They are an accident or byproduct of technology, in this case, newspapers. And then there was this appetite for images and whimsy or something else that kind of glommed together and comics spilled out. \r\nNow comics are a new art form or new medium. called ‘comics.’ And I think that we'll see the same thing with GPT. I think a bastard medium will pop out of GPT. This is why I'm excited about GPT. Not for the productivity boost, the better search, or the virtual assistant. But the silly side effects that lead to a new way to express ourselves. \r\n\r\n","frontmatter":{"category":"Future of Text"},"title":"Future of Text in AI in academia special session","description":"At the end of April, I played a small part in discussing AI and academia. The biggest thrill, as always, was talking with Ted Nelson and Vint Cerf. Here's the talk and snippet of the talk (edited for clarity): ","category":"future of text","tags":[],"slug":"future-of-text-in-ai-in-academia-special-session","date":"2023-05-09T03:57:54.000Z","readingTime":"3 minutes","ghMetadata":{"issueUrl":"https://github.com/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/44","commentsUrl":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/44/comments","title":"Future of Text in AI in academia special session","created_at":"2023-05-09T03:57:54Z","updated_at":"2023-05-19T16:21:00Z","reactions":{"url":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/44/reactions","total_count":0,"+1":0,"-1":0,"laugh":0,"hooray":0,"confused":0,"heart":0,"rocket":0,"eyes":0}}},{"type":"blog","content":"This is a cross-examination of the mobile game [Uncrossed](https://www.styrognome.com/uncrossed.html) by Michael Economy. \r\n

\r\n\r\nThe objective of the game is simple. The rules are stated on the first screen you see, \"Move the dots around until no lines are crossing each\"\r\n\r\nThe game feels sparse and possibly incomplete (like the instructions). But the game is a diamond in the rough. \r\n\r\n# Impossible Stats\r\nOn average, the impossible level has:\r\n- 50 dots (aka nodes or vertices) \r\n- 131 lines (aka edges). \r\n- A single node can have up to 15 connections (aka degrees), but the average is probably around 5. \r\n- In a solved state, that's about 88 triangles (aka faces).\r\n\r\nHere's a video of me solving it in about 4 minutes. I'm sure it be solved more quickly, but sometimes it can take 10 minutes. I'm curious about the cause of this variability. Is it the state I'm in or are some puzzles just much more difficult?\r\n\r\n{% youtube https://youtu.be/eMdoJRyuXas %}\r\n\r\n\r\nYou may have noticed the number 530 at the top. I've played the Impossible level **530 times.**\r\n\r\nThe first question we must answer is: **Why did I play the game 530 times?**\r\n\r\n## Tangled Times:\r\nI started playing Uncrossed during Covid, and it stuck with me ever since. I'm sure I wasn't the only one who sound solace in video games. Untangling the arbitrary dots gave me the illusion of order and control. Nothing was hidden, and nothing was timed; it was just a simple, pleasurable mess. \r\n\r\nI continued to play the game after Covid settled down. It turns out, the job stressed me out more than the pandemic. My job consisted of pretending to be the expert council, the trusted advisor, in a wide array of telecom tangles I had no first-hand knowledge or control over. With the game, I could directly manipulate the factors and side effects. More on that in a bit.\r\n\r\nThe game is rough around the edges — literally. When a dot is too close to the edge or too close to another dot... it can get frustrating. But that's part of the appeal. (It's kind of like going to a restaurant's website and they just have a pdf of the menu instead of a fancy Squarespace website — I kind of respect that.) \r\n\r\nThe absence of pizzazz let my mind unwind. That's when I started to notice how unusual this game is.\r\n\r\n","frontmatter":{"category":"uncrossed"},"title":"Uncrossed Examined (pt1 Opening Arguments)","description":"This is a cross-examination of the mobile game Uncrossed (https://www.styrognome.com/uncrossed.html) by Michael Economy. ","category":"uncrossed","tags":[],"slug":"uncrossed-examined-pt1-opening-arguments","date":"2023-05-02T01:42:27.000Z","readingTime":"2 minutes","ghMetadata":{"issueUrl":"https://github.com/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/43","commentsUrl":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/43/comments","title":"Uncrossed Examined (pt1 Opening Arguments)","created_at":"2023-05-02T01:42:27Z","updated_at":"2023-05-19T15:53:54Z","reactions":{"url":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/43/reactions","total_count":0,"+1":0,"-1":0,"laugh":0,"hooray":0,"confused":0,"heart":0,"rocket":0,"eyes":0}}},{"type":"blog","content":"\r\n## What is the Future of Text, you ask?\r\n\r\nWhen you hear the term \"Future of,\" it's typically followed by something vague, frightful, and all-encompassing. The Future of Work, the Future of Technology, and so on. The Future of Text could easily be called \"The Future of Media, Communication, Interaction, Language, Knowledge, and Culture\" because it touches all those concepts. But I like \"Future of Text\" because it keeps it small and tangible. \r\n\r\nText is a type of media. It sits somewhere between language and speech on one end and email and iPhones on the other. Text is a meta-media. It's natural to assume the digital analog of text is hypertext, but a better analogy is the pixel. We can't imagine a digital world without a pixel just as we can't imagine communication without text.\r\n\r\nSo the study of text is like an all-access pass to talk about anything. [Even math, which doesn't seem like text, involves the act of naming things](https://mathenchant.wordpress.com/2023/02/17/things-names-and-numbers/?ref=the-browser). And names are a type of text.\r\n\r\nBrandel Zachernuk defined text as, \"the explicit implication of a durable artifact.\" This a good definition. It reminds me of the definition of a game (from Bernard Suit, 1978)\r\n\r\n> Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. \r\n\r\nThere's a connection between this definition of games and the act of naming things. Ever since Adam, we've ascribed power over an object by naming it. A name captures an object. Then dimensionally reduces it (to borrow a phrase from linear algebra) until it can fit on a page. And then we forget about the other dimensions. The more we name things, the more object-oriented we become. Everything becomes data; therefore, everything can be tracked and transacted.\r\n\r\nBut what if naming a thing is like playing a game? I'm starting to suspect that naming things is one part of a Pathology of Technology. Just as the concept of ownership is part of a pathology of governance. \r\n\r\nI'll talk about this more in future posts.\r\n\r\n{% youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgkMVq6fHc4 %}\r\n\r\n[Notes from 02.20.2023](https://futuretextlab.info/2023/02/21/chat-20-feb-2023/)\r\n\r\n","frontmatter":{"category":"Future of Text","tags":"future of text, pathology of technology","description":"Future of Text is a group of earnest nerds that meet every Monday (and sometimes Friday) to talk about things only loosely related to text. I sat in for a bit yesterday and said some words."},"title":"Future of Text [Monday, February 20th 2023]","description":"Future of Text is a group of earnest nerds that meet every Monday (and sometimes Friday) to talk about things only loosely related to text. I sat in for a bit yesterday and said some words. ","category":"future of text","tags":["future of text","pathology of technology"],"slug":"future-of-text-monday-february-20th-2023","date":"2023-02-22T04:21:09.000Z","readingTime":"2 minutes","ghMetadata":{"issueUrl":"https://github.com/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/39","commentsUrl":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/39/comments","title":"Future of Text [Monday, February 20th 2023]","created_at":"2023-02-22T04:21:09Z","updated_at":"2023-05-19T16:20:40Z","reactions":{"url":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/39/reactions","total_count":0,"+1":0,"-1":0,"laugh":0,"hooray":0,"confused":0,"heart":0,"rocket":0,"eyes":0}}},{"type":"blog","content":"Check out this [database of periodic tables](https://www.meta-synthesis.com/webbook/35_pt/pt_database.php?PT_id=1220). It's like discovering a library written in another language. \r\n\r\nBut in this language, the words don't merely read left to right or right to left. They fold in and out of each other. The lines are shapes and are as critical to understanding the language as the words themselves. \r\n\r\nThere must be thousands of novel representations of the same topic: [the periodic table](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_periodic_tables). There is a [Cubical-Stair](https://www.meta-synthesis.com/webbook/35_pt/pt_database.php?PT_id=1204) representation, an [Octogonal Prismatic](https://www.meta-synthesis.com/webbook/35_pt/pt_database.php?PT_id=452) representation, and even a version by [Marco Piazzalunga: a 12-year-old](https://www.meta-synthesis.com/webbook/35_pt/pt_database.php?PT_id=417).\r\n\r\n---\r\nHere are two of my favorites:\r\n![0155BAFC-18FD-49A9-8EFE-86349909ED5E](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/49516/220250762-a5ec4807-57b4-49e2-b13c-c7ae68899c63.png)\r\n[Grainger's Elemental Periodicity](https://www.meta-synthesis.com/webbook/35_pt/pt_database.php?PT_id=996)\r\n![5D22AC56-792E-4543-9B62-7DDAA3AB6D29](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/49516/220249823-4fc3a544-9679-41e7-a69a-ab78b6e25992.jpg)\r\n[Alexander Arrangement](https://www.meta-synthesis.com/webbook/35_pt/pt_database.php?PT_id=1069)\r\n\r\n---\r\nThese two stick out to me because they anticipate a mixed reality experience. They're experiments in 4D. \r\nBecause the subject matter doesn't change, the experiments can get that much more... hyperbolic. It's like [Raymond Queneau](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Queneau)'s _[Exercises in Style](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercises_in_Style)_.\r\n\r\n> One of Queneau's most influential works is [Exercises in Style](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercises_in_Style), which tells the simple story of a man's seeing the same stranger twice in one day. It tells that short story in 99 different ways, demonstrating the tremendous variety of styles in which storytelling can take place.\r\n\r\n_Exercises in Style_ is not as aesthetically pleasing as the name suggests. (It's no _[69 Love Songs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/69_Love_Songs)_ either.) \r\n\r\nQueneau was part of a group of writers called [Oulipo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo). They were exploring the boundaries of literature to see if there was anything beyond the realm of telling stories. They seemed kind of jealous about the advances in math (echoing an earlier jealousy that philosophers felt toward scientists), so their experiments almost seem like Math Lit.\r\n\r\nI wonder if there will be an Oulipo for virtual reality? \r\n\r\nIf so, it seems like a marvelous idea to constrain the subject matter. The periodic table seems like a great topic because it's a tangle of content and physical properties. What else out there is shaped like a periodic table? \r\n\r\nI keep imagining knowledge graphs as knots. Perhaps a knot knowledge syntax could be more expressive than nodes and edges. \r\n

\r\n

I'm posting these knots to think on them more

\r\n\r\n- ![IMG_0863](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/49516/220256787-073b8295-4f5d-48c8-aef6-6b827a55e137.JPG)\r\n- ![IMG_0864](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/49516/220256812-d3145778-2044-433c-af59-60eba56cdf53.JPG)\r\n- ![IMG_0865](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/49516/220256853-a73b66b3-0691-4de5-9221-4ca05c80fb3a.JPG)\r\n

","frontmatter":{"description":"There is a secret cabal of information designers who have been redesigning the periodic table for the last two hundred years. I just discovered them via Pinterest.","tags":"Noomorphology, future projects, vr, ia"},"title":"Periodic Exercises in Style","description":"There is a secret cabal of information designers who have been redesigning the periodic table for the last two hundred years. I just discovered them via Pinterest. ","category":"marbles","tags":["Noomorphology","future projects","vr","ia"],"slug":"periodic-exercises-in-style","date":"2023-02-21T04:54:28.000Z","readingTime":"2 minutes","ghMetadata":{"issueUrl":"https://github.com/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/38","commentsUrl":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/38/comments","title":"Periodic Exercises in Style","created_at":"2023-02-21T04:54:28Z","updated_at":"2023-02-22T21:23:14Z","reactions":{"url":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/38/reactions","total_count":0,"+1":0,"-1":0,"laugh":0,"hooray":0,"confused":0,"heart":0,"rocket":0,"eyes":0}}},{"type":"blog","content":"Tasks, or To-Do Lists, are such an established pattern in applications that they've replaced \"Hello World\" as the defacto boilerplate code for any new framework. \r\n\r\nA To-Do is typically just a checkbox and some content. Get groceries. check. It's a sturdy UI pattern, like a paper clip in the real world. \r\n\r\nThe checkbox DOM element has been around as long as forms, fields, and submit buttons. But the checkbox is not the right UI element for a Task.\r\n\r\nThe only evidence I have of this is the vast repository of unchecked tasks I have accrued over the years.\r\n\r\nSome tasks can indeed be checked off, but more often, tasks function as reminders. It's different than standard content because it implies action. But that action is very often not fleshed out, and it may not ever be complete. \r\n\r\nFor example, I could make a task item to \"Answer client's question.\" If only it were so simple. A question can be sufficiently answered for a time, and then things change, and it's no longer a sufficient answer. It's expected that one answer will produce one or more questions. Answering a client's questions is like entering a race, a heightened high-stakes kind of conversational dual. Unlike a race, there is no clear finish line. \r\n\r\nA lot of To-Dos are more open-ended than we care to admit. \r\n\r\nOne thing all task and knowledge management software has in common is the checkbox pattern for tasks. Each tool advertises the wonderous things it can do with your To-Dos including reports, assignments, etc.\r\n\r\nUsing a checkbox for tasks is like using a paper clip to hold up clothes on the clothes line. \r\n","frontmatter":{},"title":"Task Management is built on an Illusion of Completion","description":"Tasks, or To-Do Lists, are such an established pattern in applications that they've replaced \"Hello World\" as the defacto boilerplate code for any new framework. ","category":"marbles","tags":[],"slug":"task-management-is-built-on-an-illusion-of-completion","date":"2023-02-20T04:54:36.000Z","readingTime":"2 minutes","ghMetadata":{"issueUrl":"https://github.com/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/37","commentsUrl":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/37/comments","title":"Task Management is built on an Illusion of Completion","created_at":"2023-02-20T04:54:36Z","updated_at":"2023-02-20T16:51:15Z","reactions":{"url":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/37/reactions","total_count":0,"+1":0,"-1":0,"laugh":0,"hooray":0,"confused":0,"heart":0,"rocket":0,"eyes":0}}},{"type":"blog","content":"A sonder of sundry & serendipitous articles I surfaced while diving for one totally unrelated article. A braid emerges between the law of large numbers, the tragedy of math, the magic of abstract intuition and the pitfalls of application.\r\n\r\n- [David v Goliath AI Edition](https://ntkris.substack.com/p/david-vs-goliath-ai-version)\r\n- [The Bitter Lesson](http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html)\r\n---\r\n- [A Mathematician's Lament](https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf)\r\n- [A Mathematician's Apology](http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/mathsapology-hardy.pdf)\r\n---\r\n- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences](https://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~v1ranick/papers/wigner.pdf)\r\n- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data](https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/35179.pdf)\r\n- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks](http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/)\r\n---\r\n- [Apple Keeps calling 911](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/03/health/apple-watch-911-emergency-call.html)\r\n- [Use ChatGPT on your own files](https://twitter.com/aibreakfast/status/1621668590738079744?s=12&t=jswbYt2NmtZX35ilCtIYBg)","frontmatter":{"description":"A sonder of sundry & serendipitous articles I surfaced while diving for one totally unrelated article. A braid emerges between the law of large numbers, the tragedy of math, the magic of abstract intuition and the pitfalls of application.","tags":"reads, math, ai"},"title":"Assorted Braids","description":"A sonder of sundry & serendipitous articles I surfaced while diving for one totally unrelated article. A braid emerges between the law of large numbers, the tragedy of math, the magic of abstract intuition and the pitfalls of application. ","category":"marbles","tags":["reads","math","ai"],"slug":"assorted-braids","date":"2023-02-05T04:22:54.000Z","readingTime":"1 minute","ghMetadata":{"issueUrl":"https://github.com/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/36","commentsUrl":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/36/comments","title":"Assorted Braids","created_at":"2023-02-05T04:22:54Z","updated_at":"2023-02-22T20:59:55Z","reactions":{"url":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/36/reactions","total_count":0,"+1":0,"-1":0,"laugh":0,"hooray":0,"confused":0,"heart":0,"rocket":0,"eyes":0}}},{"type":"blog","content":"Just a wrapper:\r\n- Guillermo Rauch made a refined point about ChatGPT. I call it \"refined\" because it manages to make a point without aligning with either camp of the latest AI hype cycle. \r\n- {% twitter https://twitter.com/rauchg/status/1621204449959231493 %}\r\n- One of the replies to his tweet led to a great article. [David vs Goliath AI Version](https://ntkris.substack.com/p/david-vs-goliath-ai-version). I call it \"great\" because it confirms my beliefs about AI. In fact, I'll tread into deeper waters.\r\n- AI* is like a merchant marine. It's that sort of invention. \r\n- Technically, any medieval peasant could've figured out how to make a boat and steer it out to sea. But if you want that boat to come back with treasure, you've got to have the resources to match. You can't make a navy and then build a kingdom, the kingdom comes first.\r\n- AI* is like fascism in the 1930s. Fascism blossomed in nations that shared certain criteria: a demographic that is used to monarch-driven governance (aka waterfall), enough infrastructure for newspapers and radio, a critical mass of people in need, and a critical proximity of neighbors that couldn't be trusted.\r\n- more on this ill-formed argument in a bit.\r\n- *: this type of AI, specifically ChatGPT","frontmatter":{},"title":"AI-Natives, Colonialization and Manifest Destiny","description":"Just a wrapper: ","category":"marbles","tags":[],"slug":"ai-natives-colonialization-and-manifest-destiny","date":"2023-02-03T16:14:16.000Z","readingTime":"1 minute","ghMetadata":{"issueUrl":"https://github.com/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/35","commentsUrl":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/35/comments","title":"AI-Natives, Colonialization and Manifest Destiny","created_at":"2023-02-03T16:14:16Z","updated_at":"2023-02-04T04:33:30Z","reactions":{"url":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/35/reactions","total_count":0,"+1":0,"-1":0,"laugh":0,"hooray":0,"confused":0,"heart":0,"rocket":0,"eyes":0}}},{"type":"blog","content":"You may have noticed a lot of issues in this simple repo. Why so many issues? \n\nWell first off, I'm probably a perfectionist. And I have ADHD. And I was raised Southern Baptist in the Deep South. And I got kicked out of my elementary school science fair for making a fake laser – which wasn't fair because I clearly explained on the cardboard placard that it was a Light Amplification SIMulated Emission Radiation (L.A.S.E.R.) – Em.pha.sis. on \"Sim\"-umlated. I was a kid, I didn't know how to \"stim\"ulate anything.\n\nFortunately, those aren't the issues we're talking about. But it may overlap a bit because I'm using GitHub Issues as my CMS. \n\nBlame Shawn Wang. He made the framework this site is based on. I really think he's on to something with this GitHub Issues as CMS. It checks all the important boxes.\nI've had at least a dozen versions of this site. PHP, Flash, Wordpress (PHP), Ruby, Jekyll, Hugo, Node, Squarespace, Racket... \n\nI didn't want to pay for something I barely used. I didn't want something that broke because I barely used it. I didn't want something that I didn't remember how to use it because I barely used it. I didn't want to `git push origin master` for every single update. Perhaps most importantly, I wanted something that I easily access from any of my devices. And finally I wanted platform that would be flexible enough for fun experiments. \n\nGitHub + Svelte hit the sweet spot. Over the holidays, I familiarized myself with SwyxKit and found myself really admiring Shawn Wang's principles to work and learn in public. \n\nRemember that bit about being a perfectionist? (I've already rewritten the first couple of paragraphs multiple times.) I love writing but hate blogging because blogging doesn't address a specific problem. So I never publish what I write. Or that's my excuse. \n\nWhen I started kicking the tires on this kit, the oddest thing happened: the obnoxious gray grid on my GitHub profile started to show signs of life. \n\nI'm usually not a fan of performance metrics and had long given up on an impressive profile because most of my work was locked behind enterprise firewalls, but this, this felt nice.\n\nSo I resolved to show some signs of life on GitHub nearly everyday. Nothing automated but nothing elaborate either. I can fake it, but I still have to show up to the science fair. \n\nI have to laugh at myself for minute. I search for a perfect paradigm for years and the minute I find, I change the rules on a whim.\n\nAnyway, the main motivation is personal. Just building out a muscle memory. Maybe I'll get better at writing along the way. And maybe I'll even start talking about the things I really care about.\n\nFor instance, there's this line in Paul Klee's Pedagogical Sketches that been sticking in my craw for the last few days: \"When a line stops moving, it ceases to be a line. It becomes a plane.\" He didn't stated exactly like that so maybe I'm riffing on my interpretation. But it's a wild claim. \n\nThink about it in the context of knowledge graphs that rely on lines to convey every relation. Now think about a whiteboard and the motion of scrolling a line from idea to another. The second example is an action. It becomes a line. But when it's done, it is no longer a line. It is topology. It's a notch in a plane. \n\nI think Paul Klee is right about this one. If he's right, we may be designing the wrong things.\n\nAlright, it's nearly midnight and I need to hit Submit.","frontmatter":{},"title":"Motivations","description":"You may have noticed a lot of issues in this simple repo. Why so many issues? ","category":"marbles","tags":[],"slug":"motivations","date":"2023-01-31T04:38:35.000Z","readingTime":"3 minutes","ghMetadata":{"issueUrl":"https://github.com/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/31","commentsUrl":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/31/comments","title":"Motivations","created_at":"2023-01-31T04:38:35Z","updated_at":"2023-01-31T04:41:37Z","reactions":{"url":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/31/reactions","total_count":0,"+1":0,"-1":0,"laugh":0,"hooray":0,"confused":0,"heart":0,"rocket":0,"eyes":0}}},{"type":"blog","content":"An old coworker recently asked me about resources for a UX designer to learn about AI, specifically how to prevent bias in machine learning.\r\n\r\nMachine learning desperately needs UX. \r\n\r\nAdditionally, UX could learn a lot from machine learning. The processes data scientists use to traverse and untangle data are beautiful. They can be used without ever touching an algorithm. But I'll dig into that another time.\r\n\r\nMachine Learning needs UX in six fundamental ways: \r\n- Helping to set the scope of the problem\r\n- scrutinizing data sources\r\n- finding orthogonal paths to alternative data \r\n- scaffolding the right data to the right context\r\n- anticipating and designing for edge cases and cascading collapse\r\n- challenge the concept of a user interface and advance it\r\n\r\nThat's a lot to unpack. But first, there are a few common misconceptions about machine learning. Correction: thousands of misconceptions. From the outside, machine learning seems like a Byzantine labyrinth. Sometimes I wonder if it's intentional because it makes it easy to spot outsiders.\r\n\r\nFor example, the term bias has two distinct meanings. One is bad (we'll call it Type 1), and the other is good (we'll call it Type 2). Well sort of.\r\n\r\nWhen the phrase \"bias in machine learning\" comes up, it usually means the bad kind. And it usually refers to a machine learning model that has been deployed to the real world. It turns out, too late, that it was either trained on insufficient data or implemented in such a way as to enable bias and ruin people's lives. (Weapons of Math Destruction is a great primer to learn about Type 1 bias.)\r\n\r\nType 2 bias has very little to do with anyone but data scientists. Bias is a term to describe the shape of the data. The data are typically just numbers with no real-world contingency attached to them. Type 2 bias can be good because it is an early form of a pattern. It's like an opinion. The opinion could be completely wrong, but it's something to work with.\r\n\r\nIt would be foolish to assume that these biases have nothing to do with each other, they do. But you must be able to distinguish between Type 1 and Type 2 bias to converse with a data scientist. \r\n\r\nThe term \"bias\" in data scientist parlance is a bit unusual. Most ML terms are as dry as dinosaur bones. Terms like P-value, SOTA, minmax fail to evoke any reaction other than a slight bitterness on the tongue. \r\nSome of the names have been around for 70 years, supposedly grown in a lab deep from the surface of the earth, cloistered from anything natural. Bias, by contrast, makes metaphorical sense. But given how much trouble it's caused, the hermetic approach may have been the wiser. (Personally, I wouldn't mind it if Type 2 bias graciously accepted a different moniker like \"inflection\" or \"preference\" - but that could create even more semantic confusion down the road.) \r\n\r\nBut fear not! Nearly all the complex names describe things we do quite intuitively. A large percentage of them are just ways to clean up a mess. So all that is needed is to match the intuition with the crazy ass name.\r\n\r\nMore on that. (to be cont)","frontmatter":{},"title":"Machine Learning needs Designers","description":"An old coworker recently asked me about resources for a UX designer to learn about AI, specifically how to prevent bias in machine learning. ","category":"marbles","tags":[],"slug":"machine-learning-needs-designers","date":"2023-01-24T04:22:37.000Z","readingTime":"3 minutes","ghMetadata":{"issueUrl":"https://github.com/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/25","commentsUrl":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/25/comments","title":"Machine Learning needs Designers","created_at":"2023-01-24T04:22:37Z","updated_at":"2023-01-24T04:36:33Z","reactions":{"url":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/25/reactions","total_count":0,"+1":0,"-1":0,"laugh":0,"hooray":0,"confused":0,"heart":0,"rocket":0,"eyes":0}}},{"type":"blog","content":"I love the ethos in [this article](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14606925.2022.2154962): Design is what you leave behind.\r\n\r\nThis could be a good theme to unpack this year.\r\n\r\nWe aren't civil engineers. We can't build bridges and aqueducts because the ground we build on is ever-changing (literally disrupting). In our technotopia, the best buildings are probably tents, and the best bridges are probably made of rope. What can we leave behind?\r\n\r\nThere is a similar conflict in [this article](https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2022/theory-building/) by Baldur Bjarnason. On the surface, it is about software - but it's the same thing as design. \r\n\r\nThe programmer's mental model is not a reductive axiom, more like a mental state (a style of reasoning - very inchoate, very elaborate, but not bound to logic). \r\n\r\nHistorically, high-dimensional interiority (imagine the inside of a complex protein) doesn't translate well to formal methods. (Only the shadows are captured on film. - see Bret Victor's latest demo) \r\n\r\nIt's an old problem that probably never gets fixed, just ignored(?). Even philosophers have this problem. (side note, the best modern philosophers are mainly good at transcribing tacit interior states into explicit formats (words). Their rigor is more profound than their thoughts. (this opinion is not rigorous.)) \r\n\r\nIn other words, we're taught to feed the machine because we can't easily teach interiority. \r\n\r\nTo put it another way: if every conservation a dev team had, every untried hunch, every search on Stackoverflow - if that was all stored and digested by an intelligent machine so that documentation was no longer a thing to do Could the theory (the mental model of the design, the secret ambitions) live on beyond the first programmer? If so, could we design better stuff? Stuff that lived beyond us?\r\n\r\n{% tweet 1613015231927648257 %}\r\n\r\nThis approach reflects an emerging world view that goes against the grain of design, but it could be future. I call it the Data Scientist's Mindset and will be poking at it in later posts.\r\n\r\n---\r\n\r\n## References\r\n- [Theory-Building and why employee churn is lethal to software companies](https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2022/theory-building/)\r\n- [Design is Lost](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14606925.2022.2154962)\r\n\r\n## Quick Reads\r\n- [Market for Lemons](https://www.fortressofdoors.com/ai-markets-for-lemons-and-the-great-logging-off/)\r\n- [The Expanding Dark Forest of Generative AI](https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest)\r\n- [Annual Performance Reviews Ruin Everything](https://medium.com/@ElizAyer/annual-performance-reviews-ruin-everything-7464e07dff3a)\r\n- [LLMS and post-scarcity](https://subconscious.substack.com/p/llms-and-information-post-scarcity)\r\n\r\n## Wordlore\r\n- Bijected\r\n- Occluded\r\n- Foveated\r\n- Elided\r\n- Palter\r\n- Heavenbanning\r\n- Spandrels\r\n- Baader Meinhof illusion\r\n- Gill-Mann Amnesia","frontmatter":{"description":"An alternate theory of design as foundation-building. A few links that revolve around the consequences of order and conquest, colonization, governance, deterioration, and existential threats.","tags":"building, scale"},"title":"Design is what you leave behind","description":"An alternate theory of design as foundation-building. A few links that revolve around the consequences of order and conquest, colonization, governance, deterioration, and existential threats. ","category":"marbles","tags":["building","scale"],"slug":"design-is-what-you-leave-behind","date":"2023-01-13T02:15:30.000Z","readingTime":"2 minutes","ghMetadata":{"issueUrl":"https://github.com/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/17","commentsUrl":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/17/comments","title":"Design is what you leave behind","created_at":"2023-01-13T02:15:30Z","updated_at":"2023-02-22T21:32:45Z","reactions":{"url":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/17/reactions","total_count":0,"+1":0,"-1":0,"laugh":0,"hooray":0,"confused":0,"heart":0,"rocket":0,"eyes":0}}},{"type":"blog","content":"description: A running list of objects I look at from different angles\r\ntags: ships, water, fire, coal, phonograph, light bulb\r\n---\r\nThis is a running list of objects that I like to look at from different angles.","frontmatter":{},"title":"Objects","description":"description: A running list of objects I look at from different angles ","category":"marbles","tags":[],"slug":"objects","date":"2023-01-06T04:08:57.000Z","readingTime":"1 minute","ghMetadata":{"issueUrl":"https://github.com/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/10","commentsUrl":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/10/comments","title":"Objects","created_at":"2023-01-06T04:08:57Z","updated_at":"2023-01-06T04:08:57Z","reactions":{"url":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/10/reactions","total_count":0,"+1":0,"-1":0,"laugh":0,"hooray":0,"confused":0,"heart":0,"rocket":0,"eyes":0}}},{"type":"blog","content":"Each one of these videos is worth discussing at length. Putting them here so I can return to them later. Most of these are just plain fun to watch. The first few are about the discipline of Systems Thinking, but the majority of the videos reflect a style of reasoning I resonate with. In other words, systems thinking in action. \r\n\r\nRuss Ackoff\r\nJames Burke","frontmatter":{},"title":"Best videos on systems thinking I saw in 2022","description":"Each one of these videos is worth discussing at length. Putting them here so I can return to them later. Most of these are just plain fun to watch. The first few are about the discipline of Systems Thinking, but the majority of the videos reflect a style of reasoning I resonate with. In other words, systems thinking in action. ","category":"marbles","tags":[],"slug":"best-videos-on-systems-thinking-i-saw-in-2022","date":"2023-01-05T01:11:53.000Z","readingTime":"1 minute","ghMetadata":{"issueUrl":"https://github.com/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/9","commentsUrl":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/9/comments","title":"Best videos on systems thinking I saw in 2022","created_at":"2023-01-05T01:11:53Z","updated_at":"2023-01-06T04:05:27Z","reactions":{"url":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/9/reactions","total_count":0,"+1":0,"-1":0,"laugh":0,"hooray":0,"confused":0,"heart":0,"rocket":0,"eyes":0}}},{"type":"blog","content":"Programming is hard. But it's the tedium that comes from an impoverished medium.\r\nPerhaps GPT will abstract most of the tedium away – as argued [here](https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2023/1/267976-the-end-of-programming/fulltext) by Matt Welsh:\r\n> Programming will be obsolete. I believe the conventional idea of \"writing a program\" is headed for extinction, and indeed, for all but very specialized applications, most software, as we know it, will be replaced by AI systems that are trained rather than programmed. In situations where one needs a \"simple\" program (after all, not everything should require a model of hundreds of billions of parameters running on a cluster of GPUs), those programs will, themselves, be generated by an AI rather than coded by hand.\r\n\r\nEven if he's right, we'll still have this impoverished medium to live with.\r\n\r\nI've been thinking about Bret Victor's old talk, [The Human Representation of Thought](https://vimeo.com/115154289). He argues that we have all these other innate capabilities. They are sitting idle, like unused CPUs, while we're forced to work in a single-threaded medium of the screen. \r\n\r\nWe work with intangible symbols to make incredibly elaborate affordances that scale globally. It sounds pretty impressive. We must all be pretty smart. But how do we compare to New York's Water System?\r\n\r\n{% youtube IDLkOWW0_xg %}\r\n\r\nIt uses physics, it's lasted a hundred years. How long do our programs last? And when they break, is it at bare metal, the pipes, and wires? Or is it a surface-level vulnerability that gets pushed to production and exploited? Or a UI oversight that prevents a submit button from working. There are so many ways to fail - and I think it has to do with this impoverished medium.\r\n\r\nFor example, take a quick at how a fan works.\r\n\r\n{% youtube BVnrD9m3nSI %}\r\n\r\nNow imagine that as a state machine. And now add a login and 2FA. I'll stop there so I don't lose the thread. The point is the logic engine of this fan is a single riveted metal rectangle. The fan's designers didn't have to write up a state machine because the logic was embedded in the physical object. The physical object may have even helped them get to a solution more quickly (similar to Feynman's insistence that, for him, that writing was thinking). Logic came out of the physical arrangement. \r\n\r\nA final example of the sort of thinking we've lost: Mississippi River Basin Model \r\n\r\n{% youtube WeTcYcd5dUM %}\r\n\r\n","frontmatter":{},"title":"New York's Aqueducts, Bret Victor, Fans, Mississippi","description":"Programming is hard. But it's the tedium that comes from an impoverished medium. ","category":"marbles","tags":[],"slug":"new-yorks-aqueducts-bret-victor-fans-mississippi","date":"2023-01-03T19:28:32.000Z","readingTime":"2 minutes","ghMetadata":{"issueUrl":"https://github.com/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/8","commentsUrl":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/8/comments","title":"New York's Aqueducts, Bret Victor, Fans, Mississippi","created_at":"2023-01-03T19:28:32Z","updated_at":"2023-01-03T19:31:12Z","reactions":{"url":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/8/reactions","total_count":0,"+1":0,"-1":0,"laugh":0,"hooray":0,"confused":0,"heart":0,"rocket":0,"eyes":0}}},{"type":"blog","content":"_Resolution_ can mean resolve, grit. _Vision_ can mean dream, quest, or resolution. (Get your ass to Mars)\r\nBut there is another kind of vision that is focused on what’s ahead. That “resolution” refers to distance, depth, and clarity.\r\n\r\n{% twitter https://twitter.com/alanlaidlaw/status/1608514888099561473 %}\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n","frontmatter":{"description":"Some harmless wordplay on the words 'Resolution,' and 'Vision.'","tags":"semantics"},"title":"Product Vision + Resolution = Delightful Confusion","description":"Some harmless wordplay on the words 'Resolution,' and 'Vision.' ","category":"marbles","tags":["semantics"],"slug":"product-vision-resolution-delightful-confusion","date":"2022-12-29T17:29:49.000Z","readingTime":"1 minute","ghMetadata":{"issueUrl":"https://github.com/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/6","commentsUrl":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/6/comments","title":"Product Vision + Resolution = Delightful Confusion","created_at":"2022-12-29T17:29:49Z","updated_at":"2023-02-21T21:33:37Z","reactions":{"url":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/6/reactions","total_count":0,"+1":0,"-1":0,"laugh":0,"hooray":0,"confused":0,"heart":0,"rocket":0,"eyes":0}}},{"type":"blog","content":"## Currently\r\n- still kicking the tires, trying to break it. \r\n- if it works well enough, strip out visual flare, and I can build it back in as needed.\r\n\r\n## Before going live\r\n- remove the current About page\r\n- add Bio, resume\r\n- personalize Readme, with massive props to swyx.\r\n- Newsletter? (a distraction?)\r\n- method for quickly adding internal deep links (possibly a keyboard shortcut on Mac and iOS)\r\n\r\n## Questions, possible glitches\r\n- 💡are emoji possible? \r\n- can I control discrete content chunks this way? Intros and such. \r\n- Using labels, or projects and categories? Projects \r\n- **Shortcode** for embedded tweets - sometimes not loading. (guess I need to look at the cache.)\r\n- `/blog` endpoint doesn't seem to work **locally** \r\n- Also, `h2` markdown, while working as expected in comments, shows hashtags on site. Style choice?\r\n - **Tags** in **YAML** are also rendered (in some instances) as `h2`.\r\n- internal linking? shortcode or hot key? MVP is just prepending my domain.\r\n\r\n## Purpose\r\nI want a system that I can effortlessly add content to, from any device, without needing to deploy. Using GitHub comments as a CMS fits the bill. I might try a different approach if these missives were important or elaborate, but they aren't. \r\n\r\nI am primarily just trying to change my habits. I write daily, but much of it is in shorthand, and none of it is public. (I have certain hesitations about contributing to the modern media zeitgeist, but I've let that become a crutch.) So the goal is to blog daily, come rain or shine, even if it's just a scribble. I'm not trying to grow an audience and may outgrow this approach, but the primary goal will stick.\r\n\r\n## Iterating on Method\r\nThe default `Published` setting should be assumed to be `Notes` and nothing more. (I want to keep a clear delineation between my thoughts and a generic public landing page.) As such, there may not be a link from the main page to the notes. They can become essays or other things as I synthesize them more. \r\n\r\n## Features to add\r\n- A 'notes' section as default.\r\n- Other possible sections: use cases, portfolio, reading, essays, \r\n- Epic: better search\r\n- Epic: GitHub action (or something) to store comments (cms) safely, locally. - must also scrape images.\r\n - Alternate Epic: From Craft, send to GitHub issue? (w images. formatting?)\r\n\r\n## Performance and Security\r\n- Netlify build seems to work. can it do more?\r\n- See swyx for github token and cache enhancements\r\n\r\n## Visual personalization\r\n- I like the feature cards, the mdx stuff, but remove chrome.\r\n- Shortcodes are great. expand on it.\r\n - try out a `fold` w mdx to make a simple accordion\r\n - categories? or perhaps a `yaml` shortcode for stuff to get injected into the header.\r\n - put a link in a shortcode to embed? nah, that doesn't make sense.\r\n - Mermaid shortcode? Ability to do graphs? \r\n\r\n## Down the road\r\n- block refs, inline content? maybe out of scope for this site. that's a lab experiment.\r\n- Perhaps link to a different repo comments section to build glossary and ontology.\r\n- eventually use this content for a GPT-powered interface.\r\n- ","frontmatter":{},"title":"Running list of technical todos for site","description":"## Currently ","category":"marbles","tags":[],"slug":"running-list-of-technical-todos-for-site","date":"2022-12-29T05:54:28.000Z","readingTime":"3 minutes","ghMetadata":{"issueUrl":"https://github.com/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/4","commentsUrl":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/4/comments","title":"Running list of technical todos for site","created_at":"2022-12-29T05:54:28Z","updated_at":"2023-01-06T19:18:44Z","reactions":{"url":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/4/reactions","total_count":0,"+1":0,"-1":0,"laugh":0,"hooray":0,"confused":0,"heart":0,"rocket":0,"eyes":0}}},{"type":"blog","content":"But I can't use exclamation points in body??!\r\ncorrection - can't in the title but can in the body.","frontmatter":{},"title":"It works","description":"But I can't use exclamation points in body??! ","category":"marbles","tags":[],"slug":"it-works","date":"2022-12-29T05:09:25.000Z","readingTime":"1 minute","ghMetadata":{"issueUrl":"https://github.com/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/3","commentsUrl":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/3/comments","title":"It works","created_at":"2022-12-29T05:09:25Z","updated_at":"2022-12-29T05:11:17Z","reactions":{"url":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/3/reactions","total_count":0,"+1":0,"-1":0,"laugh":0,"hooray":0,"confused":0,"heart":0,"rocket":0,"eyes":0}}},{"type":"blog","content":"Could be a really powerful pipeline.\n\n- will need to see best approach for internal linking.","frontmatter":{},"title":"Testing out GitHub as CMS from phone","description":"Could be a really powerful pipeline. ","category":"marbles","tags":[],"slug":"testing-out-github-as-cms-from-phone","date":"2022-12-29T04:58:50.000Z","readingTime":"1 minute","ghMetadata":{"issueUrl":"https://github.com/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/1","commentsUrl":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/1/comments","title":"Testing out GitHub as CMS from phone","created_at":"2022-12-29T04:58:50Z","updated_at":"2022-12-29T05:02:22Z","reactions":{"url":"https://api.github.com/repos/Laidlaw/laidlaw/issues/1/reactions","total_count":0,"+1":0,"-1":0,"laugh":0,"hooray":0,"confused":0,"heart":0,"rocket":0,"eyes":0}}}]

Marbles