tag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-03:244784packbatpackbatpackbat2024-03-21T01:09:48Ztag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-03:244784:341386learning a new keyboard layout is hard2024-03-21T01:09:48Z2024-03-21T01:09:48Zpublic2<p>So, we were walking home one day and there was a box by the side of the road with an ergonomic keyboard and a monitor marked "Free". We haven't tried the monitor (the stand is fractured) but the keyboard works and it has a bunch of extra hotkeys - and we were really missing the play-pause button from our laptop.</p>
<p>But also, in a fit of ... something, we decided that as long as we're learning a new physical layout, why not learn a new software layout?</p>
<p><a href="https://colemakmods.github.io/mod-dh/">Colemak-DH</a> is (a) a variation on QWERTY for easier learning, (b) designed to be more efficient in finger motions, and (c) the first one suggested to us on fedi when we asked about keyboard layouts for split keyboards. It makes ... enough sense, we're trying it. And trying to maintain our ability to type with QWERTY, because new layouts are fun but we're going to have to deal with QWERTY keyboards a lot and typing on an unfamiliar keyboard layout is frustrating.</p>
<p>On which note, wow, this is frustrating. This is hard. But also we're making progress - not a lot of speed, not nearly the 75 words per minute we used to have in QWERTY, but we're beginning to know where our fingers should be going. And only messing up a lot more than before in QWERTY now that we have other muscle memory to cross wires with. We're making progress, and it's not terrible.</p>
<p>And the keyboard is nice. Having an emoji key is weird but it's not like we <em>don't</em> use it.</p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=packbat&ditemid=341386" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-03:244784:341181every speaker is an artist (Toki Pona rambling)2024-03-07T18:25:06Z2024-03-07T18:25:06Zpublic0<p>If you spend any substantial amount of time listening to an English major or film major or literature major or whoever, you've probably come across the idea that all art is collaborative. Us, writing these words, can do nothing without your assistance, because they're just pixels on a screen until you come along and make meaning out of them. We say, as members of a society which has adopted the work-concept of creation, that Packcat wrote this and you 'just' read it, but there is no 'just'. None of this matters unless an audience comes along to <em>do</em> something with it.</p>
<p>But also language itself - the words we use to write - can do nothing without <em>both</em> of our assistance! We create and recreate language by using language. If a language is no longer spoken, it is dead ... but if a language is spoken, it changes, because we all change and we are who the language lives through.</p>
<p>This goes especially for a constructed language, a conlang, a language that was created by someone, and even more so for a philosophical conlang. And Toki Pona <em>is</em> a philosophical conlang - Sonja Lang set forth to seek a kind of simplicity, and that intent pervades the language.</p>
<p>And folks get gatekeepy about it - <em>we've</em> gotten gatekeepy about it (sorry!) - because they know that it will change when being spoken, and they want to keep it the way <em>they</em> like it, and the only way to stop change is to stop speakers from...</p>
<p>...well, having different artistic goals than they do. Or different pragmatic needs than they do. Or even just different taste.</p>
<p>No coherent conclusion, just thoughts.</p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=packbat&ditemid=341181" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-03:244784:340743English proficiency: fluent (derogatory)2024-03-06T22:37:48Z2024-03-06T22:37:48Zpublic0<p>Okay, you might or might not know the constructed language Toki Pona, but we're certainly still learning, so I think we can construct a good metaphor.</p>
<span class="cut-wrapper"><span style="display: none;" id="span-cuttag___1" class="cuttag"></span><b class="cut-open">( </b><b class="cut-text"><a href="https://packbat.dreamwidth.org/340743.html#cutid1">A hypothetical conversation about food.</a></b><b class="cut-close"> )</b></span><div style="display: none;" id="div-cuttag___1" aria-live="assertive"></div><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=packbat&ditemid=340743" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-03:244784:340534HTML tips for 90s kids trying to make 20s websites, metadata edition (indiepocalypse.social repost)2024-03-04T00:18:52Z2024-03-04T00:18:52Zpublic0<ul>
<li><kbd><!DOCTYPE html></kbd>: you have <a href="https://html.spec.whatwg.org/">the modern HTML standard at https://html.spec.whatwg.org/</a> bookmarked now, you're not making terrible Microsoft Internet Explorer 5-only broken pages, the browser doesn't have to use ~*~quirks mode~*~. Stick this at the very top.</li>
<li><kbd><html lang="en"></kbd>: If most of the page is in one language - this one is English - then you can tell the browser that so language-dependent stuff can use that. Use the ISO 639 abbreviations. I think. (<ins>Correction:</ins> BCP 47, not ISO 639. It's a subset, I think.) Anyway, if part of your page is in another language, you can put <kbd>lang="whatever"</kbd> on the element containing the other-language part. (Or, like, wrap it in <kbd><span lang="whatever"></span></kbd> if you don't have one.)</li>
<li><kbd><meta charset="UTF-8"></kbd>: Did you make your HTML files using UTF-8? It should be an option in, like, the Save As dialog or something. Anyway, if you did, you can put this in the <kbd><head></head></kbd> part so the browser knows it's not Windows-1252 or something.
<ul><li>Edit: If your server declares a character encoding in an HTTP header, this line will do nothing. It looks like Neocities doesn't do it for our site, though, so we still need it.</li></ul>
</li>
<li><kbd><meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"></kbd>: Okay, so, you didn't use any tables for layout, right? And you still don't understand CSS or Javascript? Okay, then your website probably works fine on, like, a tiny screen. You can check this by zooming in like 500% or opening it in a small window or, idk, both. Anyway, the viewport thing tells mobile browsers that they can just display your site normally and it'll all be good.</li>
</ul>
<p>Folks who learned HTML in the past fifteen years, feel free to chime in with more hot tips. Because we need them. Please.</p>
<p>(<a href="https://indiepocalypse.social/@Packbat/112028116237621683">Link to Indiepocalypse HTML tips thread</a>, because which a number of folks did, in fact, chime in.)</p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=packbat&ditemid=340534" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-03:244784:340419listening to Spoon again2024-01-27T22:20:31Z2024-01-27T22:20:31ZSpoon - "The Devil and Mr. Jones"public2<p>Anyone else remember Spoon?</p>
<span class="cut-wrapper"><span style="display: none;" id="span-cuttag___1" class="cuttag"></span><b class="cut-open">( </b><b class="cut-text"><a href="https://packbat.dreamwidth.org/340419.html#cutid1">self-indulgent, content warnings not provided for linked and referenced material</a></b><b class="cut-close"> )</b></span><div style="display: none;" id="div-cuttag___1" aria-live="assertive"></div>
<p>This post is nothing. Just, today we were looking for something to listen to and we remembered that Spoon exists.</p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=packbat&ditemid=340419" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-03:244784:340061a partial list of xdle starting guesses2024-01-21T22:50:25Z2024-01-21T22:50:25Zpublic0<p><a href="https://zaratustra.itch.io/xdle"><var>x</var>dle</a> is a game in the Wordle vein, but about guessing three-digit integers based on number theory facts like greatest common divisors.</p>
<p>Short post, but I guess might be spoilers, so it's under the cut. Also there's that one weed joke.</p>
<span class="cut-wrapper"><span style="display: none;" id="span-cuttag___1" class="cuttag"></span><b class="cut-open">( </b><b class="cut-text"><a href="https://packbat.dreamwidth.org/340061.html#cutid1">some possible xdle starting guesses</a></b><b class="cut-close"> )</b></span><div style="display: none;" id="div-cuttag___1" aria-live="assertive"></div><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=packbat&ditemid=340061" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-03:244784:339900self link: image processing silliness - from 9056 KiB to 32 KiB: a dithering rabbithole2024-01-20T21:51:56Z2024-01-20T21:51:56Z<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8qJkNuNXVs">Blurt by Mega Mango</a>accomplishedpublic2<blockquote><p>For reasons, we wanted to play with color quantization and dithering, and we found out about <a href="https://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/quantize/">command line tool ImageMagick's color quantization/dither tools</a>. Then we came up with a very silly idea: <strong>what if we took a given starting image and, using our limited knowledge of dither algorithms and complete lack of knowledge of image size optimization, tried to make the coolest versions we could under 32 KiB?</strong> Setting the limit to be filesize and not raster resolution means that every algorithm is going to create some compromise between size and detail … so maybe Floyd-Steinberg produces a clearer result at the same <em>resolution</em>, but how much smaller does it have to be to fit in the size limit?</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="https://packbat.neocities.org/32kib">"image processing silliness – from 9056 KiB to 32 KiB: a dithering rabbithole explored by the Packbats, Jan 2024"</a></p>
<p>We finally finished this freaking project, and it's such a big one that it's too big for a Dreamwidth post - click through to check it out.</p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=packbat&ditemid=339900" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-03:244784:339642ten thousand years2024-01-18T01:56:46Z2024-01-18T01:56:46Zpublic3<p>Reading <a href="https://doi.org/10.2172/10117359">the Sandia National Laboratories nuclear waste warning messages report</a> - specifically the Team A apprendix, the one with the famous passage. We made <a href="https://packbat.dreamwidth.org/335144.html">a post about that passage</a> a while ago but now we're thinking about the task they were set.</p>
<p>Like, any D&D player will tell you that a big warning sign with a clear map pointing to the exact place you're being warned about is <em>enticing</em> as <em>all getout</em>. But what are you even supposed to do?</p>
<p>Like, that's the thing, right? Imagine you, the reader of this post, were supposed to make it so some rando looking for treasure a thousand years from now - as far from now as "Hwæt! wē Gār-Dena in gēar-dagum/þēod-cyninga þrym gefrūnon" is from now - would see the notice-board you put up and go, "Oh, I shouldn't dig that up"? How do you make it seem like a bad idea to try and get at something which clearly was made hard to reach? Even knowing it was a trash heap wouldn't help - archaeologists <em>love</em> trash heaps, love seeing what people had and threw away! It says here in this warning message that there's machine tools in that pit! We could <em>use</em> some machine tools! So what do you do?</p>
<p>And what do you do if you have to get that message across for <em>ten times</em> a thousand years?</p>
<p>It's easy to crack jokes about "this place should be shunned and left uninhabited" but there's something very compelling about looking at a manifestly impossible task and asking, "okay, but if we had to, what do we do?" It's a kind of bravery, to consider a horrible situation honestly and forthrightly, and do your best to manage it.</p>
<p>We don't have a solution for nuclear waste. But maybe we can try something. And maybe we can learn something from trying, even if we fail.</p>
<p>And maybe there's something comforting about spending time in a world where we <em>do</em> try, where we don't throw up our hands and say "it would mean a smaller yacht for Jeff Bezos so there's nothing we can do". A kind of grounded science fiction, not about starships but about dirt, and rock, and salt, and public health.</p>
<p>A suggestion we saw in the report that never really got turned into a joke was the visitor's center. The place where people visiting this very expensive public works site could go look at some placards, talk to museum staff, learn about the society that made nuclear waste and the society that tried to protect its children from it. Maybe watch a looping video with a CGI representation of the site and its design. Buy a hat with a picture of the berms embroidered on it.</p>
<p>Or not. Who knows what a visitor center would look like after ten thousand years?</p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=packbat&ditemid=339642" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-03:244784:339274kyriarchy and subpersonhood2024-01-10T16:23:46Z2024-01-10T16:23:46Zmoodypublic0<p>There's a <a href="https://packbat.dreamwidth.org/tag/no+more+turing+tests">"no more turing tests" tag</a> now.</p>
<p>This might be kinda obvious but we'll just stick it here anyway. Also, shoutout to <span style='white-space: nowrap;'><a href='https://acorn-squash.dreamwidth.org/profile'><img src='https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png' alt='[personal profile] ' width='17' height='17' style='vertical-align: text-bottom; border: 0; padding-right: 1px;' /></a><a href='https://acorn-squash.dreamwidth.org/'><b>acorn_squash</b></a></span>, who made a perceptive comment about disability and neurodivergence in the last post.</p>
<span class="cut-wrapper"><span style="display: none;" id="span-cuttag___1" class="cuttag"></span><b class="cut-open">( </b><b class="cut-text"><a href="https://packbat.dreamwidth.org/339274.html#cutid1">discussion of structural ableism and colonialism and racism</a></b><b class="cut-close"> )</b></span><div style="display: none;" id="div-cuttag___1" aria-live="assertive"></div><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=packbat&ditemid=339274" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-03:244784:339142exploitative AI remarks2024-01-10T00:02:10Z2024-01-10T00:02:10Zpublic0<blockquote><h4>Packbats' policy on AI content generation, one swear</h4>
<p>Any machine built by scraping massive amounts of training data off the Internet without permission can get fucked.</p>
<p>Any machine designed to divert income from artists, writers, musicians, and other creators to companies, likewise.</p>
<p>That is to say: Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, Adobe Firefly, ChatGPT, Bard, and so on - all of them can go straight to hell.</p>
<p>If we share or boost something that uses these tools, please let us know. We will never make anything with any of those.</p></blockquote>
<p>The thing is, "AI", in its modern deceptive usage, mostly means "neural net". And that makes things a little difficult for us as people who get hinky about the literal meaning of words, because the campaigners we agree with are saying things like "generative AI" and "no AI" and making <a href="https://hinokodo.itch.io/human-made">Human Made logos</a> for humans to put on human art that isn't made out of theft and exploitation ... and yeah, we support that, but that's not what we would say?</p>
<p>Like, we keep pointing to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xMhRwxXJTc">Adam Neely's collaboration with Dadabots</a>. This was a neural net acting as a generative AI creating art ... that is based on two hours of bass playing by a musician who volunteered to have his work used this way, and that creates music that no bass player would ever play at a gig. It's not stealing anyone's creations and it's not stealing anyone's jobs. And it's not stealing credit - for as long as it existed, it had Adam Neely's face plastered on the thumbnail, it was explicitly made with his permission, and had a link to his video about it in the description. And, well, <a href="https://packbat.dreamwidth.org/338639.html">we said what we have to say about a hyperfocus on humanity</a>.</p>
<p>So, like, the AI bubble is toxic but we don't have a pithy way to say it. Except maybe to call them plagiarism machines.</p>
<p>Anyway I don't think we made a post here on Dreamwidth about that shit, so let us say again that these plagiarism machines deserve to be destroyed. And as great as nuance is, it just lends emphasis to that conclusion.</p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=packbat&ditemid=339142" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-03:244784:338938humanity, personhood, personal baggage (Indiepocalypse.Social repost)2024-01-09T23:24:25Z2024-01-09T23:24:25Zpublic6<p>(We wrote <a href="https://packbat.dreamwidth.org/338639.html">"no more turing tests"</a> after reading <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2024/01/02/the-unperson-of-2023/">"The Unperson Of 2023" by James Boyle</a>. We wrote <a href="https://indiepocalypse.social/@Packbat/111693047351245940">the following</a> after posting "no more turing tests".)</p>
<span class="cut-wrapper"><span style="display: none;" id="span-cuttag___1" class="cuttag"></span><b class="cut-open">( </b><b class="cut-text"><a href="https://packbat.dreamwidth.org/338938.html#cutid1">Read more...</a></b><b class="cut-close"> )</b></span><div style="display: none;" id="div-cuttag___1" aria-live="assertive"></div><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=packbat&ditemid=338938" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-03:244784:338639no more turing tests2024-01-03T15:18:49Z2024-01-09T23:24:50Zanxiouspublic3<p>the question "is this human" has expired - it has become a torment of con artists and cash grabbers</p>
<p>the one, perpetually remaking their machines to deceive us</p>
<p>the other, perpetually demanding that we become harder to fake so they can keep selling us to advertisers</p>
<p>the doppelgangers yell, "I am human!"<br>
the marketers yell, "Prove you are human!"<br>
we all tuck ourselves into corners trying to find respite from the noise</p>
<p>why? why are we being yelled at? why for <em>humanity</em> are we being yelled at?</p>
<p>Alan Turing started with "can machines think?" and went from there to "can machines make humans think they are humans?" but <em>listen to his imaginary machines</em></p>
<p>his machines talk about poetry, arithmetic, chess, Mr. Pickwick and winter's days</p>
<p>his machines speak honestly to their interrogators, try to understand, try to help</p>
<p>our phone makes a noise after half an hour, because we asked it to in a way it understood</p>
<p>our friends speak honestly, because they want to us to know that they miss clubbing, they like umbreon, they think of a sunrise as a sun, rising</p>
<p>why should we put the people who traumatized us in the category with the friends who help us survive? why should we put the machines that exploit us in the category with the machines that help us survive? why is <em>this</em> the split we are asked to make?</p>
<p>why "are you human" instead of "are you good"?</p>
<p>why not "are you good"?</p>
<p>can you tell if something is good to you over a teletype connection? are you good to it?</p>
<p>(edit: <a href="https://packbat.dreamwidth.org/338938.html">followup</a>)</p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=packbat&ditemid=338639" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-03:244784:338246reacting to Piranesi by Susanna Clarke2023-12-20T14:06:09Z2023-12-20T14:06:09Zhighpublic2<p>Susanna Clarke's <cite>Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell</cite> was published in 2004, and everyone seemed to be enraptured by it, and ... well, the name Packbat didn't exist until 2005, but someone who would take that name in a year read it and thought it was kind of adequate but not great. The worldbuilding was interesting, and this was a time where they didn't tend to give up on books, so they did read it through? But the whole thing felt to that reader like a plot summary - maybe somewhere else there was a version of this story that was enrapturing, but we were reading the TV Tropes recap page of that story, and it was just dry.</p>
<p>Except when it wasn't. Because sometimes Jonathan Strange would try something, or someone else would try something, and it was like being dropped into a story that was happening <strong>now</strong>, not in a summary. There was dialogue, conversation, perspective. It was suddenly and unquestionably alive, and whoever we remember being "I" then loved it.</p>
<p>Anyway, this year a friend of ours mentioned another book, <cite>Piranesi</cite>, said it was really good, and we'd been looking for an excuse to go to the library so we checked our library catalogue. And there was a book called "Piranesi" in the catalog, by the same Susanna Clarke, and it was the book our friend was talking about, so we thought, "Maybe Clarke's learned something. Bits of <cite>Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell</cite> were great, even if the book as a whole was a bit of a slog, so maybe this'll be better than that was."</p>
<p>If you liked <cite>Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell</cite>, I apologize? We mean no offense, I know that two people reading the same book will have different opinions.</p>
<p>But <cite>Piranesi</cite> was terrific. It was <em>alive</em>, not in patches but from front to back. The fantastical was there - we were dropped into an endless house of statues, like Borges's Library of Babel for statues, with waves sweeping through its lower rooms and clouds through its upper - but the fantastical was seen through a perspective. We were dropped into the world of a <em>person</em>, a world he introduced us to and spoke eloquently about and <em>cared</em> about, and cared about in the specific way that <em>he</em> cared about it.</p>
<p>We picked up this book at about one in the afternoon from the library. By seven we were gushing about it in the DMs of our friend who recommended it. By nine-thirty we were through, and reeling.</p>
<p>We can talk about what happens if you like? There's some heavy stuff in there, so if you do want to read it, you might want to check first, see if it hits something that affects you strongly. We had to ask our friend for some content warnings, which it gave, and that was helpful, and assuming we get along we'll do the same for you if you ask ... but our friend also said the story benefits from reading with very little idea of what will happen, and the story does. It would perhaps be helpful if you came into it having heard of Battersea...? but even if you haven't, you'll likely figure things out quickly. The protagonist and narrator is not deceptive towards you or me.</p>
<p>It's currently four thirty in the morning, typing this. We'll go back to bed in a moment. But we couldn't lie just in bed waiting for all these thoughts to slip through our fingers into sleep.</p>
<p>And you don't have to read <cite>Piranesi</cite> by Susanna Clarke. It is just a book, two hundred and forty-five pages among uncountable billions, and you have other calls upon your time. But we have to gush about it for a minute, because we were hoping it would be alive and it was.</p>
<p>(We were also hoping it would last us longer than a day, but somehow I think we'll live.)</p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=packbat&ditemid=338246" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-03:244784:337998unexpectedly good riddance2023-12-13T03:42:05Z2023-12-13T03:42:05Zpublic3<p>So apparently Omegle only just died this year.</p>
<span class="cut-wrapper"><span style="display: none;" id="span-cuttag___1" class="cuttag"></span><b class="cut-open">( </b><b class="cut-text"><a href="https://packbat.dreamwidth.org/337998.html#cutid1">alluding to the heavy details</a></b><b class="cut-close"> )</b></span><div style="display: none;" id="div-cuttag___1" aria-live="assertive"></div>
<p>So, that sure is a thing.</p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=packbat&ditemid=337998" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-03:244784:337874requires javascript (indiepocalypse social repost)2023-12-10T18:35:00Z2023-12-10T18:35:00Zpublic0<p>(<a href="https://indiepocalypse.social/@Packbat/111556755983062469">thread</a>)</p>
<p>okay, no, actually, I think it's actively harmful when a page is intended to display static information - text and images you can't edit - and requires javascript to do it</p>
<p>any website building tool which functions that way is actively doing harm</p>
<p>no we will not explain</p>
<hr>
<span class="cut-wrapper"><span style="display: none;" id="span-cuttag___1" class="cuttag"></span><b class="cut-open">( </b><b class="cut-text"><a href="https://packbat.dreamwidth.org/337874.html#cutid1">*proceeds to explain*</a></b><b class="cut-close"> )</b></span><div style="display: none;" id="div-cuttag___1" aria-live="assertive"></div>
<p>yes, we hate these things because they're rubbish</p>
<p>but we hate them more because they're born out of indifference and callousness at best, and active hostility at worst</p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=packbat&ditemid=337874" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-03:244784:337499Markdown and plain text2023-11-30T00:09:46Z2023-11-30T00:09:46Zpublic0<p>Yesterday, we posted a fediverse checkbox poll on indiepocalypse.social asking, <a href="https://indiepocalypse.social/@Packbat/111490787992803589">"Are .md Markdown files plaintext?"</a>. The poll received 49 votes, with eight respondents additionally replying to discuss details of the question, and the final percentages including 71% yes, 31% no, and 16% I don't know, with substantial overlap between all three of these.</p>
<p>(Also, 12% spiderman. Because Mastodon injokes.)</p>
<p>I think what makes it an interesting question is the term "plain text" (which apparently has a space, apologies). What is, and what is not, plain text? Let's run through some possibilities.</p>
<dl>
<dt>Are .md Markdown files .txt text files?</dt>
<dd>No. The extensions are different, so your computer treats them differently.</dd>
<dt>Are .md Markdown files encoded as binary?</dt>
<dd>Okay, technically, all binary computer files are binary, but no - the whole format is designed around extended-ASCII text encoding like UTF-8. You can edit it in Notepad or KWrite or TextEdit or gedit or vi or, I don't know, whatever you want.</dd>
<dt>Are .md Markdown files completely unformatted?</dt>
<dd>I mean, no, clearly. When you have, for example, <kbd>*asterisks*</kbd> being used to indicate words that are emphasized, that <em>is</em> a kind of formatting.</dd>
<dt>Are .md Markdown files readable in plain text editors?</dt>
<dd>Kinda? The link formatting - <kbd>[link text in square brackets](immediately followed by url in parentheses)</kbd> - is not very friendly to the eye, tables often get very nasty to read, probably other issues we weren't reminded of - but it's <em>mostly</em> readable. Not as readable as a 1998 GameFAQs guide, but mostly readable.</dd>
<dt>Are .md Markdown files designed for styled presentation?</dt>
<dd>Yes. This was news to us Packbats, but when we installed Linux, we got Okular with it, and when we opened a .md file with Ocular, we <em>didn't</em> see asterisks for emphasis and square brackets and parentheses for links and so on - we saw italics text, underlined link passages, headers, bulleted lists, and so on. It looked like how it looks when we write something in <em>HTML</em> and open it in a browser. Windows 7 didn't have anything for viewing Markdown that way.</dd>
<dt>Are .md Markdown files .txt text files?</dt>
<dd>No. In a .txt file, formatting is idiosyncratic, driven by aesthetic and pragmatic judgments about what the audience will want to and be able to parse. In a Markdown file, formatting has to comform to a sta—... okay, stop laughing. In a Markdown file, there is <em>theoretically</em> a standard, and the file is promising with its extension that a computer which will never even try to understand the writer or the writer's motives can produce a styled output by implementing the standard, even if it probably has to recognize some extensions to actually guess right on what it looks like.</dd>
</dl>
<p>So, yeah. I think the moral of the story is that it's not obvious what "plain text" means, but hey ... it was fun asking.</p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=packbat&ditemid=337499" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-03:244784:337210commercial aviation industry advice (Weirder Earth repost)2023-11-28T18:03:00Z2023-11-28T18:07:43Zpublic0<p><i>Caveat: we are not pilots, we have never been pilots, we have other priorities. This whole thread was us being fans of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@MentourPilot/">the YouTube channel "Mentour Pilot"</a>.</i></p>
<p>I think if there's one thing to be learned from the commercial aviation industry, it is that "am I the asshole?" is a much less useful question than "how did the totality of habits, tools, knowledge, communication, and so forth - because it's never just one thing - result in something unfortunate happening, and what can I learn from this to avoid such things happening in the future?"</p>
<p>I think if there's two things to be learned from the commercial aviation industry, it's that if you've had less than 21 hours of sleep in the past 72 (numbers to be adjusted as necessary based on your own medical history, but that's the standard for pilots), you ought to bear in mind that you are at elevated risk of fatigue-driven mistakes.</p>
<span class="cut-wrapper"><span style="display: none;" id="span-cuttag___1" class="cuttag"></span><b class="cut-open">( </b><b class="cut-text"><a href="https://packbat.dreamwidth.org/337210.html#cutid1">(the thread went on for a while)</a></b><b class="cut-close"> )</b></span><div style="display: none;" id="div-cuttag___1" aria-live="assertive"></div>
<hr>
<p>Anyway, now we're going to fix the "it's totally normal to have two to-do list alerts all the time" problem. The dentist one we can do on Thursday, so we'll hide it until Thursday, and the cmus one we can do now.</p>
<p>*opens the man page*</p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=packbat&ditemid=337210" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-03:244784:337074frustrated lately2023-11-27T01:48:25Z2023-11-27T01:48:25Zpublic0<p>been frustrated a lot lately</p>
<p>but also have been trying to try more, lately</p>
<p>to take chances on folks we don't know and folks we do, speak up even when we're not guaranteed to feel heard</p>
<p>to do new things that are hard and not just give up</p>
<p>so yeah</p>
<p>been frustrated more lately</p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=packbat&ditemid=337074" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-03:244784:336887more than a week (Indiepocalypse Social repost)2023-11-22T17:02:13Z2023-11-22T17:02:13Zpublic0<p>rewatching <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3u7bGgVspM">Devine Lu Linvega's Strange Loop talk about computing and sustainability</a> and thinking about the one deleted tweet they mentioned</p>
<p>I think Twitter, Mastodon, the microblogging Fediverse, they are utterly unsuited to be archives - they are all networks in the moment, conversational spaces with just enough persistence that you can catch up on what someone said yesterday, maybe last week if you're determined</p>
<p>and you can download your archive but it's just a huge mess - it's not sorted or connected, you can only find a thing if you already know what it is, and you might never find the context</p>
<p>that's part of why we are starting to repost things on our dreamwidth blog</p>
<p>sometimes we want the things we say to last more than a week</p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=packbat&ditemid=336887" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-03:244784:336534not at the top of the list of why large AI models are garbo but on the list (Weirder Earth repost)2023-11-22T03:13:12Z2023-11-22T03:13:12Zpublic0<p>1.</p>
<p>okay so the <em>big</em> problems with the modern wave of generative AI are that:</p>
<ul>
<li>it is designed to steal jobs from artists and writers</li>
<li>it was manufactured using titanic amounts of stolen work from those selfsame artists and writers</li>
<li>it required and requires titanic amounts of electricity and other computing infrastructure in the middle of climate crisis</li>
</ul>
<p>...but an <em>additional</em> problem is that, because they are intended to be used without warning, they force people to try and find intention, worldview, meaning, all the things we expect from our fellow writers and artists, in material which contains none of that.</p>
<p>and that's just abusing our assumption of good faith.</p>
<p>2.</p>
<p>like, okay</p>
<p>imagine a friend mentioned something bad that happened to them, and we replied "oh no!"</p>
<p>this is as nearly an automatic and thoughtless response as we can think of ... but consider what it would mean to our friend</p>
<p>at the very least, they can infer that:</p>
<ul>
<li>we have been paying attention to their speech</li>
<li>we recognize, whether we understand the details or not, that something unfortunate has happened</li>
<li>we care that something unfortunate happened, and would rather it had not</li>
</ul>
<p>if they had said the same thing to ChatGPT, and ChatGPT had said, "oh no!", would it have anything like the same effect? ChatGPT doesn't know them and won't remember them, it only understands that "oh no!" is a thing that is said frequently in its corpus in this kind of context. it is simply and utterly hollow.</p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=packbat&ditemid=336534" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-03:244784:336362The Packbat flashcard technique2023-11-16T21:50:02Z2023-11-16T21:50:02Zpublic0<p>Did we not write this post? We can't find a copy of this post.</p>
<p>Okay, so, the trick is this: each time you study from your stack of paper flashcards, you follow these steps.</p>
<ol>
<li>Lift the number of flashcards you want to study right now off the top of the pile.</li>
<li>Shuffle your small study pile. (We like to flip one half of the stack upside-down with each shuffle, so which side up the cards are is randomized.)</li>
<li>Go through each card one by one, practicing. Each time you finish a card, if you feel confident about it, put it on the <em>bottom</em> of the original pile, and if you want to bone up on it more, put it on the <em>top</em> of the original pile. (Optionally, you could put some in the middle.) If you get a card wrong, put it lower in your study pile so you can try again in a little bit.</li>
<li>When the study pile is empty, put away the original pile (that now has all your cards again).
</li></ol>
<p>What this means is that, as long as you're taking more cards off the top than you put back on the top, you always go through the cards that you need to learn, and you slowly but consistently cycle through the cards you know. That means you're reviewing all your old cards while learning your new ones, while only studying as many cards at a time as you're comfortable with.</p>
<p>It's not the scientific system that the scientific science-based flashcard programs use, but we hate all those programs because our memory is a sieve and those things don't care if we want to study more or not. <em>This</em> lets us decide what we've learned and what we haven't, and it's dead simple.</p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=packbat&ditemid=336362" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-03:244784:336081A dialogue on the nature of magic and digital computation2023-11-15T15:54:18Z2023-11-15T15:54:18Z<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIYnXgvRJVM">music for bugs</a>artisticpublic2<p>Simplicio: Computers are magic.</p>
<p>Sagredo: There's nothing magical about it; computers are simply sophisticated mathematical machines. Magic, by contrast, is supernatural - an independent force with its own logic that acts upon the world, and is merely channeled or controlled by those with magical power.</p>
<p>Simplicio: So, in your opinion, computers are not magic because they are not supernatural, not independent, not logical, and don't act upon the world. Shall we take these in reverse order?</p>
<p>Sagredo: Gladly. And yes, of course computers act on the world, and do so through logical calculation - that is the entire reason we created them. But they are not independent of it, they are part of it.</p>
<p>Simplicio: The logic of a computer is hardly the logic of a landslide or river or growing tree, however. All of these are straightforward and natural, whereas computers are constantly seized with their own caprices. You have a telephone, so surely you have seen it decide your text means something entirely different than your intentions.</p>
<p>Sagredo: You underestimate the sophistication of trees, but you are again merely describing the difference between nature and artifice. My telephone and your grandfather clock are alike unnatural, in your sense, and the errors of autocorrection in the one are much the same as the slipping minutes of the other: reflections of our limitations.</p>
<p>Simplicio: Do not try to distract me with the miracle of clockwork timekeeping - I can argue for the magic in that another day; your telephone is a much clearer example. Its errors of autocorrection happen within it, from its own memories and caprice, independent - independent! - of temperature or setting.</p>
<p>Sagredo: Only as independent as a book that remembers what is written on its pages. It acts because it was programmed to, because it stored this data and processed it in the way it was designed.</p>
<p>Simplicio: It acts because it was commanded to, by one with the power to channel its force in a direction - but even then, the magician wanted it to guess infallibly, did they not? Certainly an autocorrect without error would be quite a selling-point.</p>
<p>Sagredo: They did - but such a thing is impossible.</p>
<p>Simplicio: The computer acts on its own internal logic, independent of what its controller demands.</p>
<p>Sagredo: Independent of their intentions, but not their work - its actions spring from what it is told to do, nothing more.</p>
<p>Simplicio: Can you remind me what you had to say about DNS? I remember you spoke at some length the other day.</p>
<p>Sagredo: When many voices are speaking, the results can become confused, but it is still the result of how it was made and shaped, nothing more.</p>
<p>Simplicio: Can you remind me of what you had to say about free will?</p>
<p>Sagredo: I can - I said that we are also machines, defined by our history and origins, our nurture and nature, but able to shape ourselves, changing even our goals and desires. Are you about to claim that my telephone's autocorrection is as independent? Perhaps it should be granted citizenship.</p>
<p>Simplicio: As, no ... but independent, yes.</p>
<p>Sagredo: It is not supernatural.</p>
<p>Simplicio: Sagredo, you are a cunning arithmetician, but let me ask you: why should I care? We are surrounded by forces that we do not understand, that listen to sounds we can hear and sounds we cannot, that remember what they encounter, and that respond according to arcane and unpredicable intentions. They imbue us with tremendous power, if we can control them, but are terribly dangerous if we cannot. Lives are saved and lost because of what flows through these channels. You yourself wield this power, turning it to answer your astronomical queries and mine, to prove and to refute our theories. Do you not see what it does?</p>
<p>Sagredo: Your contention is that I am a wizard, unwitting.</p>
<p>Simplicio: It is.</p>
<p>Sagredo: I don't know how I can accept that.</p>
<p>Simplicio: Heavens help me. Sagredo, you know that you are capable, no matter how much you insist on downplaying it.</p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=packbat&ditemid=336081" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-03:244784:335690proposal: nimi lists in toki pona2023-11-06T16:15:03Z2023-11-06T16:15:03ZCity Girl, <cite>Neon Impasse</cite>public0<p>We have been struck with a sudden inspiration.</p>
<p>In the past - for example, while writing and editing our guide <a href="https://packbat.itch.io/naming-yourself-in-toki-pona">"naming yourself in toki pona"</a> - we've thought of nouns for speakers as a static thing: if someone's head noun is 'kulupu', then you call them 'kulupu', end of story. And it's important that we understand and conform to the nomenclature of the subject we're discussing.</p>
<p>...but in the style of lipu pu, "Toki Pona: The Language of Good", the first official Toki Pona book, words can be more fluid that that. jan Sonja might say "meli li lili" to talk about a woman being little, even though that meli is definitely also a jan. Provided there is no misgendering or other deliberate misidentifying going on, there doesn't seem to be anything hostile about that.</p>
<p>So, you know how, in resources like <a href="https://pronouns.page/">pronouns.page</a>, there will be lists of words that can be marked with hearts or thumbs-up or thumbs-down or other such indicators of mood?</p>
<p>What if tokiponists did that for words about them? Like, if we add this to our profile:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>sina toki e mi la, mi olin e nimi ni:</p>
<ul>
<li>kulupu</li>
<li>poki</li>
<li>tonsi</li>
</ul>
<p>...nimi ni li pona:</p>
<ul>
<li>ijo</li>
<li>jan</li>
<li>meli</li>
<li>nasa</li>
<li>tomo</li>
</ul>
<p>...nimi ni li musi:</p>
<ul>
<li>kijetesantakalu</li>
</ul>
<p>...nimi ni li ike:</p>
<ul>
<li>mani</li>
<li>mije</li>
<li>pakala (mi ken pakala! taso, kon mi li kon pakala ala. nimi "pakala Pakapa" li ike a!)</li>
<li>sewi</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p>...would that be clearly understood? Would people know that they can say statements like "meli ni li kulupu Pakapa" and be polite and accurate?</p>
<p>I think it would be good if this is something they could check as needed. Obviously, most speakers would simply grab "kulupu" or "poki" off the top and use one of those, which works fantastically and requires very little memorization ... but I think it's good to have, and good to have thought about in case people ask, "mi wile ala wile kepeken nimi 'meli' lon sina?"</p>
<p>wile. mi meli tonsi. mi tonsi meli. pona, pona.</p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=packbat&ditemid=335690" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-03:244784:3354512023-W44: it turns out you don't accomplish a lot of goals while resting2023-11-05T16:22:43Z2023-11-05T16:22:43Z<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfFd5MARrKM">MUNA - Runner's High</a>public0<p>So, lately we've been reading a lot of travel blog posts from <a href="https://100r.co/">Hundred Rabbits</a>, and it makes us want to blog more. Not daily, but like ... ever, y'know? To create something that people can read.</p>
<p>As the subject line says, this week's been very unfocused because this has been specifically a rest week - and I mean "we told our fellow mods we'd be gone until Monday" rest, we have no unfun obligations at all. (Well, almost none - we posted on <a href="https://www.patreon.com/packbat">our TTRPG patreon</a> and <a href="https://ko-fi.com/thepackbats">our TTRPG ko-fi</a>, but shh.) Lately we've been in a state of staring at each obligation blankly and wondering if this is <span class="cut-wrapper"><span style="display: none;" id="span-cuttag___1" class="cuttag"></span><b class="cut-open">( </b><b class="cut-text"><a href="https://packbat.dreamwidth.org/335451.html#cutid1">okay this got a little dark</a></b><b class="cut-close"> )</b></span><div style="display: none;" id="div-cuttag___1" aria-live="assertive"></div>, so we really needed some time when we did not have to do that.</p>
<p>(...okay, the unfun obligations thing is almost twice - we did set ourselves a goal to get or make a cover image for an itch.io jam. It's not made, and that's okay - the jam is not gonna be until February.)</p>
<p>So, what did this rest week look like?</p>
<span class="cut-wrapper"><span style="display: none;" id="span-cuttag___2" class="cuttag"></span><b class="cut-open">( </b><b class="cut-text"><a href="https://packbat.dreamwidth.org/335451.html#cutid2">...I mean, I don't know, we weren't paying attention. But [...]</a></b><b class="cut-close"> )</b></span><div style="display: none;" id="div-cuttag___2" aria-live="assertive"></div>
<p>So, like, a lot is happening? But most of it is what we want to do in that moment, and we can drop it whenever. And we do, regularly.</p>
<p>We'll see what happens tomorrow. For today, that's where we're at.</p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=packbat&ditemid=335451" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-03:244784:335144not a place of conlangs2023-10-30T18:43:48Z2023-11-01T16:18:40Zpublic10<p>In 1990, Sandia National Laboratories convened two teams of cross-disciplinary experts with a question: how can we mark a disposal site for nuclear waste in a way that will successfully warn people off for ten thousand years? The two teams went off to develop their strategies, and by 1992 had returned their reports; in 1993, the final paper, <a href="https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1279277/">"Expert Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant", by Kathleen M. Trauth, Stephen C. Horal, and Robert V. Guzowski</a> (doi:10.2172/10117359, OSTI 10117359), was published.</p>
<p>Appendix F - the report from Team A, made up of Dieter G. Ast, Michael Brill, Maureen F. Kaplan, Ward H. Goodenough, Frederick J. Newmeyer, and Woodruff T. Sullivan, III - contains the following passage:</p>
<blockquote><p>This place is a message...and part of a
system of messages...pay attention to it!</p>
<p>Sending this message was important to us.
We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.</p>
<p>This place is not a place of honor...no
highly esteemed deed is commemorated here
...nothing valued is here.</p>
<p>What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us.
This message is a warning about danger.</p>
<p>The danger is in a particular location...
it increases towards a center...the
center of danger is here...of a
particular size and shape, and below us.</p>
<p>The danger is still present, in your time, as
it was in ours.</p>
<p>The danger is to the body, and it can kill.</p>
<p>The form of the danger is an emanation
of energy.</p>
<p>The danger is unleashed only if you
substantially disturb this place physically.
This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I don't think that it's surprising that, decades after this report was written, this ominous and urgent warning caught the imagination of many.</p>
<p>And I think that, if they aren't already doing it, conlang enthusiasts should add this to their repertoire of standard example texts, alongside the Tower of Babel story from Genesis, "The North Wind and the Sun" from Aesop, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from the United Nations, and others.</p>
<ol>
<li>It's memorable and popular;</li>
<li>It's evocative and interesting;</li>
<li>It is simultaneously a very modern message (being concerned with radiation poisoning) and one intended to be understood by an audience without a modern understanding of science (and therefore possible to convey in most languages);</li>
<li>The intent of the message - that people understand that they are not to dig here lest they release radioactivity into the local environment - can be clearly understood by we the translators;</li>
<li>Communication of that intent is more important than perfect word-by-word translation, allowing a degree of artistic liberty in translation;</li>
<li>It (or, more precisely, something like it) was always intended to be presented in multiple languages, for obvious reasons; and</li>
<li>It is reasonably short, and therefore not too onerous to translate.</li>
</ol>
<p>None of that is a coincidence, either. If you read (or skim, in our case) the original report, you will find that this passage is what Team A intended to convey "<em>non</em>-linguistically (through the design of the whole site), using physical form as a 'natural language'" - it is a translation into English of the emotional impact on (they hoped) any human of an ominous field of spiky obelisks engraved with warning messages and human faces expressing horror and disgust. (A place that is both a message and part of a system of messages, you may note.) The actual messages they proposed to write on these obelisks are much more straightforward and direct, and the actual languages they propose translating them into are much more popular.</p>
<p>So it's not useful to Sandia National Laboratories to translate this into a conlang ... but I think it <em>is</em> useful to creators of conlangs to do so. I think very few standard passages pose similar challenges to this one - it speaks of things that many such messages do not, in a manner that many such messages do not.</p>
<p>And I think it would be fun if it existed in lots and lots of languages.</p><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=packbat&ditemid=335144" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments