Eaton / is on Nostr

Social justice advocate, content strategy ne'er-do-well, co-founder of Autogram, co-host of Christian Rightcast. Anti-fascist, partner to @sparrowpost

Last Notes

2024-07-10 16:57:01

I feel like I missed Hades Discourse at the time but damn that’s a good game

2024-05-28 23:47:15

My personal theory is that (long-term, at least) the clearest value-prop for LLMs will be rewriting highly structured text generated by explainable/reproducable systems into conversational/stylistically tailored language. Humans will still have to be in the loop, but this is already where the RAG/KG stuff feels like it’s driving.
Tons of energy, right now at least, seems to be focused on making LLMs do “analysis” or “research” etc, where their essential nature is a detriment.

2024-05-25 20:33:29

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@npub1xed…yg9w this feels like the right weekend to make the 11ty AI Poisoner transform plugin

2024-05-23 22:00:53

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@npub1rv4…ft5j i'm imagining planning meetings in which engineers ask, "Realistically, what are the odds any of us will work here when that bill comes due?”

2024-05-12 00:09:09

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@npub1ykg…g4jv Is a copy of that talk up anywhere?I’d love to see/read/etc.

2024-03-25 14:53:45

Re-reading Tom Standage's excellent book, "The Victorian Internet," after quite a few years. One detail jumped out: as telegraph infrastructure exploded around the world in the mid 1800s, it created a wave of related jobs for folks without technical expertise in telegraphy proper.
Armies of messenger boys, for example, handled last-mile delivery for the rising tide of telegrams that businesses in major cities generated. Many of the next generation of entrepreneur got their start there…

2024-02-08 05:14:54

This piece in the Atlantic is a eyebrow-raiser; a defense of James Dobson, an earnest insistence that "despite its flaws" Evangelicalism has helped many people live better lives, etc…
I'll say this, at least: The public defense of Evangelical culture is no longer able to rest on the assumption of moral superiority. "But it helped them be nicer, doesn't that count for something?" is... a hilarious fallback for fundamentalism.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/evangelicals-christianity-james-dobson/677362/

2024-02-04 18:20:43

The iPhone’s success has really given birth to an ecosystem of bros who dismiss any critique of any half-baked tech solutionism with “they said the iPhone would flop, TOO.”

2023-10-04 21:11:24

In a lot of ways, Facebook has a classic IBM problem
1. Won big early, and accumulated a war chest that let them absorb hits instead of adapting
2. Facilitated genocide

2023-10-01 16:01:26

i feel this in my bones this in my bones, via @npub1khg…g6t3
https://sb-0zfmbqf4l5.b-cdn.net/media_attachments/files/111/160/595/777/005/976/original/de8b245b3d6d92eb.png

2023-08-01 13:27:34

For future nerd reference:
protocol://username:password@subdomain.domainWithoutSuffix.publicSuffix:port/directory/subdirectory/file.extension?param1=value&param2=value#hash
hostname == subdomain.domainWithoutSuffix.publicSuffix
host == hostname:port
pathname == /directory/subdirectory/file.extension
search == ?param1=value&param2=value

2023-07-16 20:10:31

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Even if you find the manufacturer's site it’s more likely than not broken, with a search feature that pulls up what it claims are results but empty divs instead of links, or busted jQuery code from 2013 that prevents anything from loading.
Is it a real but broken site? Is it just another click farm? Does it matter?

2023-07-16 20:09:14

The failure of the Internet to deliver its promise is particularly noticeable when you hunt for repair manuals for a product from the 90s. Used to be, the information would either be there or not there, finable or unfindable.
Now, there are hundreds of algorithmically generated sites claiming to have it just because it appeared in their search logs, generating potemkin village content traps with endless paging, broken-thumbnail named-like-the-file-you-want but actually-just-ebay-photos bullshit

2023-07-01 18:32:05

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Even funnier that the current weirdness is an obvious result of the batshit API pricing.
Anyone interested in low end tinkering wa suddenly incentivized to sidestep the API and just scrape the oEmbed or web endpoints, and they did. So he locked out unregistered visitors and killed embedding, which broke every citation of a tweet on the Internet.
Then people start using logged in sessions to get that data. So he limits *actual logged in users* to only viewing 600 tweets per day.

2023-07-01 18:17:18

The sudden chaos as Twitter — a service built on the idea of shouting your shower thoughts to the world — locks everything behind a registration wall, jacks up prices, AND gets demonstrably less stable for the PAYING customers is a hilarious demonstration off the fact that Musk isn’t actually good at business, just at being a rich guy.

2023-06-13 21:13:29

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@npub1c35…9pmh @npub1xl7…ss7c i just tried it and IT WORKED, breaking apart shapes with blend fills was borked but the shapes themselves stuck around. Compared to my existing process that relied on A COPY OF POWERPOINT as an intermediary, I will TAKE it

2023-05-20 14:38:31

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There’s a great post for the supernerds in the room that goes into the nature of “dithering” and even explains the algorithmic nudges Atkinson Dithering uses to achieve its distinctive look: https://surma.dev/things/ditherpunk/
These days, dithering is usually encountered as an affectation or an artifact; we’ve got ridiculously high res deep color displays on our *wrists*. Back in the 80s when Atkinson was doing some of his most memorable work, though, it was the cutting edge of image display optimization.

2023-05-20 14:38:06

I will never, ever stop loving Bill Atkinson’s dithering algorithm. If you cut your teeth on Macpaint or Hypercard, you probably recognize it without even realizing it.
https://sb-0zfmbqf4l5.b-cdn.net/media_attachments/files/110/401/518/084/273/122/original/d6f7705e13b0b286.png
https://sb-0zfmbqf4l5.b-cdn.net/media_attachments/files/110/401/518/168/877/892/original/fb6db98a2ae5a4a5.png
https://sb-0zfmbqf4l5.b-cdn.net/media_attachments/files/110/401/518/351/185/974/original/3955639ec80c1465.jpeg
https://sb-0zfmbqf4l5.b-cdn.net/media_attachments/files/110/401/518/470/179/656/original/522170a50371cd74.png