Tim Boucher – Page 13 – Questionable content, possibly linked

Two New Wooden Automata: Bee & Robot

On 5 December 2024

Made my first and second attempts at wooden automata over the past week or so. I tried uploading videos of them but the internet is stupid and I don’t feel like jumping through a million hoops to make it work right now. So pictures will have to suffice for this round.

This is the first one I did, where the central bee is fixed on an upright dowel, attached to a horizontal circle which acts as a friction wheel/cam follower, which an eccentric cam raises up and down, while also turning it round in circles. The two flowers on either end simply rotate on friction wheels. The bee looks like he can’t decide which flower to land on when you turn the crank.

This is the second in the series, a robot whose body and hands (connected by paperclips) go up and down offset from one another by eccentric cams pointed in different directions. I tried initially on this one to do a different configuration for the cam followers, where they were square with wings extending down from them to keep them riding the cams, but with the wood I cut everything from and however I had it, I could not get them to work that way. So I just cut the circular cam followers instead. Since they naturally travel a bit while the crank is being rotated, the end motion effect is also that they rotate a little while bobbing up and down, and the motion is slightly constrained by the paper clips joining them together. Also discovered on this one how not being careful about aligning the holes in pieces does not make for good consistent planar travel of parts as they rotate.

These are extremely fun to make and figure out. I made them using a scroll saw (a Dremel Moto-Saw, the newer portable one, not the older one by that name) that I got and a Dremel 4300 with flex shaft kit – both of which I bought for being able to fabricate small mechanical parts for drawing robots and other little fun projects like these automata. I’m replacing this portable scroll saw from Dremel though with a larger Wen instead, as I think a more substantial scroll saw would be better for more serious scrolling – which is a whole wide interesting craft world and online subculture in its own right.

Joni Mitchell’s Hejira

By Tim B.

On 5 December 2024

In Other

This one is a few weeks too late, but I’ve been meaning to post about an album that I was listening to obsessively for a few weeks straight, Hejira by Joni Mitchell, 1976. I first caught wind of this amazing album via Radio Paradise Mellow Mix which I listen to on a standalone wifi-based radio in my house, particularly via the tune Song for Sharon:

I thought this song was amazing, and when I read this comment on it, it piqued my interest to actually BUY THE CD!!!

For me, Hejira was one of the greatest work of art of the 20th century

Having listened to it a lot now, I think I would tend to agree. Someone else called it, paraphrasing, cinema for the ears. Utterly agree with that one. It’s one of the most lyrically complex albums I think I’ve ever heard, and the deeper I got into it, I was more and more surprised how little I’ve ever heard anybody talk about it. (I had to listen all the way through about 3-4 times before I really felt like I “got” it.) Plus, amazing Jaco Pastorius 70s melodic fretless bass… what else can I say?

The Wikipedia page on the album has tons of interesting morsels, some that are expressed in greater detail in songs on the album, others that provide good context and texture for the music. A sampling:

On her way back home, Mitchell met with Tibetan Buddhist master Chogyam Trungpa in Colorado, an event she credited with curing her cocaine addiction and leaving her in a selfless “awakened state” that lasted three days.

During some of her solo journeys, Mitchell donned a red wig, sunglasses, and told the varying strangers she met that her name was either “Charlene Latimer” or “Joan Black”. Despite the disguise, Mitchell was still sometimes recognized. She traveled without a driver’s licence and stayed behind truckers, relying on their habit of signaling when the police were ahead of them; consequently, she only drove in daylight hours. […]

Mitchell grew increasingly frustrated by the rock session musicians who had been hired to perform her music. “…There were grace notes and subtleties and things that I thought were getting kind of buried.” The session musicians in turn recommended that Mitchell start looking for jazz instrumentalists to perform on her records. In addition, her relationship with drummer John Guerin (which lasted through a significant portion of the mid-1970s) influenced her decision to move more towards experimental jazz music and further away from her folk and pop roots.

After recording the basic tracks that would become Hejira, Mitchell met bassist Jaco Pastorius and they formed an immediate musical connection; Mitchell was dissatisfied with what she called the “dead, distant bass sound” of the 1960s and early 1970s, and was beginning to wonder why the bass part always had to play the root of a chord. She overdubbed his bass parts on four of the tracks on Hejira and released the album on November 22, 1976. […]

The album title is an unusual transliteration of the Arabic word more commonly rendered as Hijrah or Hegira, which means “departure or exodus”, usually referring to the migration of the Islamic prophet Muhammad (and his companions) from Mecca to Medina in 622. Mitchell later stated that when she chose the title, she was looking for a word that meant “running away with honor”. She found the word “hejira” while reading the dictionary, and was drawn to the “dangling j, like in Aja… it’s leaving the dream, no blame”. […]

Mitchell has described the album as “really inspired… there is this restless feeling throughout it… The sweet loneliness of solitary travel”, and has said that “I suppose a lot of people could have written a lot of my other songs, but I feel the songs on Hejira could only have come from me.”

Anyway, just wanted to leave this signpost here for other musical adventurers to explore, or come back to. Here’s the opening track on the album, Coyote, which is probably more well-known than the one above.

So what about Spines?

By Tim B.

On 2 December 2024

In Other

This subject keeps coming up. I looked at it and I guess I don’t really care that much. 8000 books in a year is probably a lot less than whatever Amazon prints for print on demand customers. $5000 is too much to spend on pretty much anything for seat-of-the-pants small publishing. The AI angle doesn’t seem all that strong here to me personally, as I keep thinking that running any of my weirdo AI-hybrid books through a purely AI editor-ing system will absolutely destroy the novelty and nuance of the way I pieced everything together in my very human “bursting at the seams” style of editing.

Reply to Dear Corporate AI Overlords Letter

By Tim B.

On 28 November 2024

In Other

This has been making the rounds in the AI/Art infospace, that a group of testers of OpenAI’s upcoming Sora video gen model broke ranks and leaked access to the model publicly when they weren’t supposed to, and posted this open letter on Huggingface in support of the effort (signable version here).

ARTISTS ARE NOT YOUR UNPAID R&D ☠️ we are not your: free bug testers, PR puppets, training data, validation tokens ☠️

Hundreds of artists provide unpaid labor through bug testing, feedback and experimental work for the program for a $150B valued company. While hundreds contribute for free, a select few will be chosen through a competition to have their Sora-created films screened — offering minimal compensation which pales in comparison to the substantial PR and marketing value OpenAI receives.

▌║█║▌║█║▌║ DENORMALIZE BILLION DOLLAR BRANDS EXPLOITING ARTISTS FOR UNPAID R&D AND PR ║▌║█║▌║█║▌

Furthermore, every output needs to be approved by the OpenAI team before sharing. This early access program appears to be less about creative expression and critique, and more about PR and advertisement.

I guess I feel mildly sympathetic about “sticking it to the man” in a general way, but maybe I feel mostly confused on the specifics here. Not to sound too cynical, but were the people behind this letter not aware of what the nature of the agreement must have been when they presumably signed it?

None of what’s being described by them seems all that new or different for software companies, which routinely leverage unpaid labor out of their user base (ahem, social media anyone?), and *of course* inviting artists for early access is part of PR & advertising. That’s just a given for me on something like this. I can understand not wanting to be a part of that for sure, but I just end up wondering: why sign up then in the first place?

All that said, let’s find ways to pay artists for helping build these technologies, and let’s actually actively listen to their feedback (instead of, for example, banning them), because artists bring a whole other holistic and humanist set of skills to AI development that are so well-represented by the overwhelmingly technical, academic, PhD, research, math and engineering-types who currently populate the halls of AI power.

Only Four Years (Cartoon)

By Tim B.

On 25 November 2024

In Other

Made with Dalle.

Four years is being extremely optimistic, in my opinion.

Quoting Cory Doctorow on Bluesky

By Tim B.

On 25 November 2024

In Other

Source:

I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will.

The whole piece is worth a read.

Personally, I go one step (or several) farther: I will simply not join any new social platforms. Ever. Period. I even made some AI images to celebrate the occasion:

For me, it’s not a question of services that start out good and then gradually through market pressures enshittify – because that’s literally every platform. It’s more about my experience of the paradigm of social media – at base – is already fundamentally profoundly shitty.

I don’t want *any part* of my experience of life to be ruled by likes, follows, subscription membership counts, traffic analytics (I have none on this site), etc. etc. It’s a train that goes on and on forever and you cannot get off, and all the other passengers are hostile as hell, and there is no food and nowhere to sleep or go to the bathroom. Why people still participate in that shit and why they expect it to be any different with a new coat of paint and new management is so beyond me that its unfathomable at this point.

You Should Be Able to Mention Anyone On the Web, From Anywhere, And Have Them Be Able to Get It

By Tim B.

On 21 November 2024

In Other

You should be able to mention anyone on the web publicly, from anywhere, and have them be able to get it (if they want).

Google Alerts kinda almost does this, but usually only for “news” sources (many of which are questionable), and its a closed system.

I don’t know much about them, but talking with ChatGPT is leading me to believe that elements of such a concept exist already in Webmention and ActivityPub, but they would require participants in it to adopt compatible technological approaches.

My idea is much more broad than that, and as someone posting a blog or a tweet or a toot or a flutter or whatevertf people call them now, you would just say whatever you’re gonna say, to whomever you feel the need to address, publish it – and somehow, magically, it would be available to that person, or any person, since it is publicly available, just like a search result.

PublicPing

ChatGPT and I are calling this system PublicPing right now for lack of a better name. The idea goes something like this (my text):

PublicPing bridges siloed systems by providing a universal way to observe mentions, making it easier for users on different platforms to engage with the same public conversations.
So that would go like:
A blogger mentions a person’s name in a post.
Many diverse automated observers index and process natural language mentions of peoples’ names (or other identifiers) from public blogs and other open public sources.
Observers collate these mentions from sources they observe according to their own criteria into public PingFeeds that anyone can view or subscribe to updates from.
People can subscribe to PingFeeds for mentions of their own name/s or identity/s, and since PingFeeds are always public, anyone else can subscribe to them just the same.
The system is agnostic about the identity of people who post mentions and consumers of a PingFeed. It simply observes, collates, and retransmits mentions into a common format.
Such a system would allow us to have conversations as people across different technological systems, without having to be locked into any one of them.
We could publish how and where we like, and read public PingFeeds where and how we like too. No one would own this simple open framework or have a monopoly on how we communicate with one another online.
To participate in the system, you would just publish your thoughts – anywherere, publicly, and mention someone in them.
We would not need to agree to become anyone’s “users,” nor be subjected to the whims, restrictions, policies or bad UX of malicious owners or bumbling admins.
PublicPing should remain simple and accessible by avoiding unnecessary technological complexity like cryptocurrency or blockchain.
Observers would instead be incentivized to act by serving the common good of public civic discourse.
The framework is open, non-proprietary, and free for anyone to implement, ensuring no single entity controls the system.
Multiple independent observers ensure resilience, transparency, and diversity in how mentions are indexed and shared.
Observers faithfully re-transmit their findings based on public sources into corresponding public PingFeeds (unless doing so violates the law, etc. TK).
Consumers of PingFeeds would be able to filter them according to their own custom criteria. (Example: “Only mentions from verified websites,” “Exclude mentions with profanity.”)
Consumers decide on their own actions which they will take independently in their own way regarding items in PingFeeds (which could include ignoring them altogether).
If consumers choose to respond to a mention, potentially proving their identity as the person originally mentioned is up to them and outside the scope of the PublicPing system, which merely observes, collates, and re-transmits public mentions into public PingFeeds without intervening or mediating.
The system respects individual privacy, since it only deals in clearly publicly-available information. Does not harvest private or semi-private personal data (no private groups, no DMs, etc.).
Something something spam, malicious uses, ethical concerns – the usual grab bag of stuff nobody wants to have to deal with but perpetually exists with any system, like it or not. So may as well consider it a feature not a bug at this point.

Anyway, a lot to chew on here, and yes much of it half-baked. But this seems like it would fit in with the Intertext Protocol as well…

@Signal: Please build a way to cluster chats into groups

By Tim B.

On 21 November 2024

In Other

Have been trying to use Signal in a way that is “slackier” where a specific set of group DMs are named like #slack-channel style. And one group has a short custom message retention period, and the other does not. It’s the kind of thing where with Slack having an entire workspace for just DMing one other person doesn’t always make sense (overkill). But in Signal it fits – kinda.

What would make it fit more is if I could select a couple of DMs from the list on the left (I am a Mac desktop Signal app user, and nowhere else), and have those groups/DMs/proto-”channels” live together as a visually differentiated set, indented, with the ability to name the cluster, and collapse or expand it. Small change that would make a big difference.

Listening to Radioside on random

By Tim B.

On 20 November 2024

In Other

This is one of the best music websites I’ve ever come across, especially if you enjoy web-based radio, which I do (I have a portable handheld and fixed web radio that are separate from my computer).

Radioside is a browser-based web radio tuner, the best use of which I think is to power up and click the RND (random) button until you find something you like. Rinse, repeat. And save stations you like. I’ve been stuck on 100077, “Exclusively Supertramp” for the past few days. Loving it. So many good finds here, and an excellent way to find stations to listen to on other web or wifi-connected radio devices.

Dark Forest Internet

By Tim B.

On 20 November 2024

In Other

Via Perplexity.ai query on the topic, it did a good job summarizing.

The dark forest theory of the internet posits that users are retreating to private, closed online spaces to avoid the hostile environment of the public internet. This theory draws its name from Liu Cixin’s science fiction novel, where civilizations hide to avoid detection by potentially hostile aliens.

Key aspects of the dark forest theory include:

Users seek shelter in private channels like Slack, WhatsApp groups, Discord chats, and invite-only message boards.

These “dark forests” provide psychological and reputational safety, allowing users to be more authentic.

The public internet is seen as a competitive, predatory space filled with advertisers, bots, trolls, and attention-seeking behavior.

Communication in public spaces is viewed as risky, potentially exposing one’s existence to hostile entities.

This retreat to private spaces is a response to the increasing noise, manipulation, and surveillance on mainstream platforms.

I’ve definitely been feeling this and reacting accordingly for years and years, and even more so lately, as I trust less and less mainstream apps in the hostile information space opening up to us in the coming months. I’m mostly abandoning Slack for that reason, and for it being an over-priced way to keep in touch with a small group of friends. I will be setting up the end-to-end encrypted Rocket Chat on a Digital Ocean droplet in the coming days, and have corralled some other remainder Dark Forest activity over to Signal.

Jay Springett has a good audio piece on this topic here as well. Worth a listen:

Looks like this 2019 post from Y Strickler is one of the original pieces on this topic, some choice quotes:

Imagine a dark forest at night. It’s deathly quiet. Nothing moves. Nothing stirs. This could lead one to assume that the forest is devoid of life. But of course it’s not. The dark forest is full of life. It’s quiet, because night is when the predators come out. To survive, the animals stay quiet. […]

In response to the ads, the tracking, the trolling, the hype, and other predatory behaviors, we’re retreating to our dark forests of the internet, and away from the mainstream. […]

These are all spaces where depressurized conversation is possible because of their non-indexed, non-optimized, and non-gamified environments. […]