Are there any Wikipedia editors on micro.blog? I am still pretty new to it, but when I find a place I can contribute, I go on a mini-tear and start editing and writing articles. I would love to learn more from other editors.
The disgust and dread at seeing “Lockdown drill” on my schedule for tomorrow and knowing that I am working with Kindergarteners. Thanks america.
Found some new liquid dnb / jungle to fall in love with. Ocean Deep by Arcologies.
My goodness, the Iron & Wine cover of “Never Meant” is something else.
Midwest emo living on in these little corners of the internet is such a delight to the few pieces of my heart left in Illinois.
I cannot stop thinking about Dynamicland
This feels momentous. I can’t stop thinking about Dynamicland and Bret Victor’s work with it. Since watching the introduction video yesterday, I am devouring content about it.
Whenever someone at an ed-tech conference showed off a new device or piece of software that involved a screen blasting my eyeballs or some glitchy 3D model on a table, it takes every part of my being not to respond with John Oliver’s “Cool”.
The folks at Dynamicland must have felt the same. They have an explanation for why they do not rely on head-mounted displays. It puts words to everything that is unappealing about VR and AR to me, two interaction modes that just NEVER appealed to me. It puts words to what we are capable of with the simplicity of a platform like Realtalk. They say:
Perhaps our most surprising discovery has been: to maximize agency, minimize what the computer knows. Every time we make the computing system less aware of what’s going on, every time we remove “user interfaces” in favor of noticing simple spatial relations between objects, every time we remove programmed rules in favor of socially-agreed-upon practices, our systems become more flexible and composable, and new dimensions open up for improvisational modification.
Virtual worlds, by contrast, must maximize awareness. In screen-based systems and VR, the entire world is simulated. Anything the computer is unaware of, simply doesn’t exist. AR has the further challenge of inferring a high-fidelity model of the real world on which to overlay its virtual world. Anything the computer is unaware of will generate a clash between the real world and its virtual overlay.
A person wearing a head-mounted display is a guest in someone else’s house. The totalizing nature of the simulation, and its overwhelming computational complexity, prevent anything like the constant remixing, reworking, and improvisation that we regularly see in Realtalk.
This is exactly it. I love computers, but I don’t believe that I ever understood that love until yesterday.
My heart feels full in ways that it did not feel before.
[Insert hyperbolic statement about how much I love what they are doing over at] Dynamicland.
h/t @chadkoh
Hawaii hotel workers spend Labor Day walking picket lines as strike enters 2nd day:
Roughly 5,000 workers at Hawaii hotels spent Labor Day walking picket lines in the heart of the city’s tourism center as the strike for better working conditions entered its second day.
Meanwhile, more than 10,000 workers at 25 hotels across the U.S. were also on strike Monday.
Solidarity forever! Here are tips for how to support unions and striking workers.
Not everyone has the same opinion about AI as you do.
Take that as you will.
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.
Currently dealing with a complex teaching schedule that makes absolutely no sense and is what I have termed as “anti-human.” This year we are operating on cycle days rather than weekdays and it is truly awful. No particular day means anything.
Being at the Okinawan Festival yesterday and hearing the sanshin, reminded me of one of my favorite movie scenes from Sonatine. I can listen to “Play on the Sands” by Joe Hisaishi on loop 24/7 and not get bored.