I've written several new substack posts since I last updated this feed, the best of which I think are: from paris with love (https://alicemaz.substack.com/p/from-paris-with-love), about turn of the (20th) century lesbian culture and the love between two of my literary and romantic icons, renée vivien and natalie clifford barney. commentary on xunzi's "discourse on heaven…
new substack post (this time _not_ on an airplane), one with the machine: https://alicemaz.substack.com/p/one-with-the-machine. I read "as you may think" by vannever bush and "man-computer symbiosis" by jcr licklider and wrote about them in the context of intelligence augmentation, transhumanism, and the promise of ai this one was really fun to work on, and pretty important I think too. my central…
new substack post, you can just do stuff: https://alicemaz.substack.com/p/you-can-just-do-stuff. I summarize lessons from arpa and xerox parc that inform how we aspiring technology cultists might think about putting together new ambitious orgs for science and engineering work that aren't just venture-backed startups. also I write about franny and zooey, stoicism, and a few little anecdotes about…
I wrote my first substack post, into the void: https://alicemaz.substack.com/p/into-the-void. I used the science fiction novels/serials void star, a memory called empire, and to the stars as a jumping off point to talk about different visions of the future and the desire every fighty autist girl has to spend her life in battle. I'm very pleased with how it turned out, especially since I wrote…
I made a substack the other week: https://alicemaz.substack.com. I haven't posted anything to it yet, but I expect to eventually. partly because the twitter algorithm makes it impossible to ensure people who explicitly want to see certain posts will ever actually see them, and partly because I hope it will encourage me to write smaller, lower effort things more frequently I generally write one…
I wrote a tour through the general principles of programming, as something of an art and something of a bucket of hammers. I muse on learning styles, knowledge graphs, the contingency and interplay of systems, and the future of the "software engineer": https://www.alicemaz.com/writing/program.html. I also give a working idea of abstraction, debugging, and coin the term "jenga pagoda" for the…
it's been awhile! crazy couple years, huh? things have been pretty turbulent for for me, but I'm doing my best 2020 was really exciting! everything had a sheen of change and newness. going out in the world, it felt like everything was on the brink of becoming something completely different and unexpected, every day. I don't know if I'll ever have that same feeling of wonder and excitement as I did…
I wrote a bit about sylph's business strategy: https://sylph.io/blog/strategy.html. forgot to post it here when I wrote it aha. been busy lately! we got first money in so I'm on break from actively fundraising for now. the plan is to spend as much time as I can programming until we get to launch, taking a few more safes as needed or offered (so, not "actively" raising, but still raising lol), then…
sig wrote a post about the mathematical challenges facing systems biology and the techniques sylph is using to solve them: https://sylph.io/blog/math.html
this week we announced sylph! it's the systems biology startup I'm cofounding with viv. you can read our full announcement here: https://sylph.io/blog/announce.html basically, systems biologists model the behavior of biological systems as differential equations, we're making an optimized solver for those equations and providing a public web api plus specialized client software for using it. we've…
I wrote about artificial intelligence, early germanic law codes, distaste for school and cops, my perspective on history, and some personal stories: https://www.alicemaz.com/writing/alien.html
my first site at this domain I made when I was still doing twines, and shortly after I started freelance webdev. the background was black festooned with dark gray mojibake. the text was white and yellow and sat in bright pink boxes with rounded corners that floated into different configurations based on the screen dimensions. there was a page with embedded tweets talking about the semiotics of the…
big doings in aliceland. as usual I'm pulled in fifty bajillion directions by this and that, but things are starting to come together in a good way. soo stockfighter launched! this is something I've been looking forward to for awhile, neat quasi-ctf game by the matasano crypto challenge folks. (gah! I keep forgetting to get back to this, still only halfway through.) so I made a REST client for it,…
so I started writing rust a week ago. very enjoyable thus far. functional goodness and I get to fiddle with pointers?? best of both worlds. the ecosystem is also really fresh, it's so exciting to look around and see all this work that needs to be done! look forward to doing some of it. part of my "learn the language" first project, I wrote code to do oauth 1.0a request signing. incidentally a…
this site now supports tls. yay! shoutout to the folks at letsencrypt, truly they are doing the work of the goddess. note that presently git only works over http. alas, nothing I can do until my subdomains are whitelisted. for now I've just set https to git to 403, but if you happen upon a scary browser warning, that is why. ideally I will have a 1.0 of twistor up and running in a week or two. I…
current project: twistor, a site that archives and makes publicly viewable deleted tweets from politicians, and a small set of programs that enables others to do likewise with arbitrary twitter feeds.