About a year ago I made a note in my reminders to do a game based on grawlix , a set of little doodles which I turned into emojos. When this year's Lisp Game Jam rolled around I did it, and came fifth, which I was really pleased with, considering how …
This is the fifth year I've done Looptober, a Fediverse exercise where you post a little track every day for all of October. Last year I did as much as I could with the Arduino which made it a bit musically uninteresting. My technical constraint this year was that I …
Over the summer break I started trying to make a set of custom emoji which could be tiled to make geometric patterns in interesting ways, got bogged down in various fiddly issues, and wrote a quick tool using Observable so that I could visualise the maths behind it. I liked …
If you can read this, it means that at least some of the server migration worked properly.
The Dragon in the Sea The Santaroga Barrier Frank Herbert About a year ago my brother lent me an old copy of Frank Herbert's first novel, The Dragon in the Sea , and I hadn't got around to reading it, but after watching the second of the new Dune films I …
Fedivision is an annual song contest held around the same time as Eurovision on the Fediverse. I entered an instrumental in 2022 but this year I wanted to actually write a song with lyrics and vocals. I've tried songwriting many times over the years but have always gotten too shy …
Late last year I started looking at a microtonal pitch quantiser for my modular synth setup, and then I remembered that I had an Arduino Nano and an Adafruit MCP4728 Quad DAC sitting in a drawer, waiting for me to overcome my fear of soldering, and thought that fiddling with …
Books Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth , Tamsyn Muir The Book of the New Sun , Gene Wolfe Boswell's Life of Johnson In Search of Lost Time: The Way By Swann's , Marcel Proust, tr Lydia Davis The Chronicles of Amber , Roger Zelazny Letters from Amherst , Samuel R Delany I read …
The second half of 2023 was pretty hectic, between work and health issues, but I did get a chance to play with the synths: this is my first stab at a sequencer running on an Arduino Uno and sending out control voltages through an Adafruit MCP4728 Quad DAC. I also …
About a month ago I had to rest up at home following a medical emergency, and I was looking for a way to distract myself which wasn't getting stuck on the harder levels of Baba Is You or reading Boswell's Life of Johnson (which was good, but sometimes too gloomy …
@GLOSSATORY now has a merch shop where you can get colourful versions of the original emojos as stickers and t-shirts and more! Check it out on Redbubble
I'm recovering from respiratory syncytial virus and thinking of sticker designs, as part of this I searched through the @GLOSSATORY archive for all of the posts which feature Strong Fish.
Part of my daily routine is to do a bunch of drawings each morning based on the output of @GLOSSATORY , which is a now completely obsolete neural network trained on a big list of dictionary definitions. I try to post two of these every day to another Mastodon account at …
This post is meant to point out some of the ways in which I think mainstream journalism has been dropping the ball in its coverage of large language models. I'm not an AI expert, but I can tell when journalists are confused and out of their depth when writing about …
It's only taken me two decades but I've worked out why I've never liked people using the term "grok", despite being a big nerd who's the right age to have read that Heinlein novel. Using it is a way of reinforcing your sense of being part of a special group …
Too Like The Lightning Seven Surrenders The Will to Battle Perhaps the Stars New York City: Tor, 2016-2021 Ada Palmer I wrote a review of the first part of Ada Palmer's novel (it's very much one book in four volumes) back when I read it in 2018. I caught up …
Stories about AI have an impoverished visual grammar: bots that look like something from a 90s music video, all porcelain surfaces and dark hydraulic sinews, against corporate vaporwave neon swirls, or junk from DALL-E. I suppose there's a need to embody the disembodied, the same impulse that puts a CGI-rendered …
I've been spending spare moments putting together a sort of musical experiment - it doesn't feel coherent enough to call it an instrument yet - written in Scheme using Spritely Goblins and David Thompson's Chickadee framework . I do not know if either of these technologies is the best for the job but …
I put filters on "ChatGPT" and "LLM" on Mastodon because the constant flow of discourse, to which I was also contributing, was starting to wear me out, so I'm writing this post with a slightly guilty conscience. Here's something about nerd culture which it has taken me longer than it …
I turned off the Twitter versions of my fleet of bots last week, and today I went through their various home pages and took out the Twitter timelines - which seem to have stopped working anyway - and replaced them with embedded timelines from their Mastodon incarnations, using Emfed , which was really …
This cosmology paper has the best acknowledgements section ever written I'll admit that I had never actually read the paper in which Turing outlined his 'Imitation Game' until this week, and I really want to write a whole blog post which gives it a close reading. You should read it …
This was the first week I've gone to an office for five days straight since March 2020. I'm enjoying commuting and getting more of a sense of separation from my work and home life. A terrible Philip Adams article from 1983 Nature is not allowing scientists to include ChatGPT as …
Visualise and/or animate the effects of git commands - a warning that this blew up when I tried using it to visualise a simple git rebase Sapling is Meta/Facebook's source control system, a fork and rewrite of Mercurial which they've started to open source. The fact that it interoperates …
Last year was a really big one for me - I changed jobs and institutions just before the end of 2022, and was lucky enough to become a group lead in the new team in May. It's been challenging but really exciting, I feel like I'm getting a lot more out …
I never have the wherewithal for the Advent of Code but this year I've really been enjoying practicing my R skills on The Hanukkah of Data New Nazca geoglyphs just dropped Villem Flusser and social media The Prime Minster of Latvia has an Irish accent The Topologist's Map of the …
Since I set up Funkwhale I'd been thinking of using it to host my music collection so that I could listen to it from anywhere, but I did the sums and the cost of the extra storage would be about the same as if I got a static IP for …
Like every other nerd, I spent way too much time earlier last week playing with and worrying about Chat-GPT , but you can relax, I've stumped it: I never thought that my addiction to lipograms would lead to any useful conclusions, but these exchanges seem to capture exactly what Chat-GPT is …
One of the nice things about the influx of Twitter users to Mastodon has been peoples' reaction when they find out that most of my bots are on the Fediverse, too. Even though they are still posting on Twitter, I've updated bots.mikelynch.org so that the front-page links go …
I didn't have as much time as I usually do for National Novel Generating Month , but I think the less time I spend on it, the better the results. I started out with a plan to do a complex, procedurally-generated parody of Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili but only got as far …
When I was very young, perhaps four or five, I can remember imagining that the world was a flat slab of rock, and that the sky was a hemispherical dome suspended over it, and which somehow always managed to be centered on our car as it drove over the flat …
It's been good to see people from Twitter coming onto the Fediverse, or reviving the accounts which they started in 2018, but I'm also getting worn out. Though not nearly as worn out as the admins and moderators, who have been doing an amazing job. Hugh's essay captures a lot …
It's been quite a week on Mastodon eh. The death of God and the decline of the humanities Ethan Hein on the Ghostbusters theme with a collection of links to Ray Parker, Jr's other stuff Fuck Your Magical Antisemitism an entertaining zine on problematic aspects of the Western occult tradition …
Since there's been a big influx from Twitter, here's an updated and shorter version of a Mastodon primer I wrote back in 2018. For more detail on how federation works, see Elilla's Futuristic Mastodon introduction for 2021 . Get off mastodon.social There's mastodon.social , which is run by the lead …
Everyone's coming (back) to Mastodon this weekend thanks to a certain social media acquisition. Here's an old blog post of mine which I wrote after a similar influx in 2018 but which I should update at some stage. I haven't been posting as many daily links thanks to being at …
This is the presentation I gave last week at eResearch Australasia in Brisbane. There's a page of links to the tools and references mentioned here . The slides were converted to blog form with Peter Sefton's pptx_to_md converter . PDF version | Powerpoint Version Hi - I’m Mike Lynch, and I work at …
I am doing Looptober again this year. Last year I used it as an opportunity to clean up my SuperCollider toolkit. This year I've been trying to use the modular synths as much as possible but I'm still at the stage where getting started takes fifteen minutes of faffing around …
What system of ideas which you first encountered indirectly through artists you admired was the most disappointing when you got to actually know about it? For me it's Gnosticism. Me, aged 21: Wow, Philip K Dick, Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas Pynchon, Octavio Paz and Sonic Youth are all into the …
An interesting blog post argues that we are living through a golden age of programming language research. I like the point that dynamic languages such as Perl, Python, Ruby and Javascript have done more to popularise functional programming concepts than anything else put together. Photographs of the Nakagin Capsule Tower …
Today's a one-off national public holiday to mourn Queen Elizabeth II. Since I'm no longer on Twitter I feel a bit insulated from the usual wave of discourse which events like this set off: the nearest I've come to it is seeing someone pose in a bandana on Facebook with …
Ranjit commented on my drawing of Glossatory's definition of GARTER: "I find this one particularly evocative! Please do an oil painting next" so I colourised the original and fed it to StableDiffusion with different degrees of desaturation, and the prompt text "A man in a green boat holds a ladder …
Camestros Felapton on whether there's an inherent political tendency to subgenres of science fiction and fantasy, with bonus Judge Dredd mention A post doing the rounds about how hard it is to run a mail server. I think this is too paranoid - there's no need to posit an oligopoly, things …
A blog post about the latest image generator, StableDiffusion, which coins the term 'AI veganism' for the the ethical case against using this sort of thing, which I think is a poor analogy even by the standards of tech bloggers. There's a public beta here . Unlike DALL-E the source code …
Last weekend I wrote my first Rust program, which made an LED flash on an Arduino, following this blog post and with the help of this hardware abstraction setup The impetus to getting into microcontrollers came from playing around with modular synths: I've got a little quad DAC chip and …
Early this year I finally got weary of dragging my collection of mp3s from one iTunes installation to the next. I'd worked out a fairly nice solution where I had the library on a 2TB SSD connected to my laptop's dock, so the music collection didn't take up any space …
I picked this up from the music store this afternoon and discovered that I don't have the right kind of USB cable to plug my keyboards into it, but I have managed to get one (1) annoying buzz out of it.
It's amazing that Mark Zuckerberg has managed to make so much money off all of us pretending to keep in touch with our friends. I realised about a month ago that although I still have an account there, for the ostensible reason that it feels like an important way to …
The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band who Burned a Million Pounds London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2012 John Higgs I went into this book feeling a bit cocky, like, how much is it going to surprise me? But it did. Quite a lot. I don't want to say which bits surprised …
Hermes Trismegistus driving a schoolbus Last week I saw someone describe GitHub Copilot—the code-completion tool which has been trained on all of the public source code on GitHub—as a form of license-laundering, and the same thing occurs to me about DALL-E. Clearly, it's been trained on an enormous …
GLOSSATORY is a bot which posts spurious definitions from an RNN trained on a dictionary, and every morning I use its output as a prompt for little drawings, some of which I post at GLOSSATORY . Today I tried feeding some recent definitions to DALL-E to see what it came up …
"Graffiti art of Wittgenstein riding a skateboard" Happy Friday.