Last 50 notes on Work In Progress
I’m coming to the conclusion chatbots work better (for programming) when constrained. My postcard database was built on top of FilamentPHP and was more-or-less one shotted. Because everything was abstracted away, the chatbot had relatively few places it could get into the weeds. If I’d asked for the same thing from scratch I think the result would have been more inconsistent, and would have had…
Is the current LLM boom the first time an entire industry has been bootstrapped from a philosophical thought experiment ? When can we expect the Trolley Problem startups? I need to reconsider ADRs in an agentic world. In fact, I don’t see why a chatbot couldn’t extract ADRs from an existing codebase - make explicit in English what was previously implicit in code. New house has glazed bricks around…
I’m thinking about archaeoacoustics , and I’m thinking about Alvin Lucier sitting in his room (different from the one you are in now). I’m wondering what that technique would sound like when applied to those spaces. Or a church. Are there commonalities? More postcards added - we’ve hit 800 addresses (734 unique), and I’m starting to backfill the occasional message. I think the Southsea hull, at…
I updated my postcard project today. Lots of small tweaks, but the big ones are that more source data is included, and the addresses link out to the OS 1:1250 map at NLS Next thing I want to know is the sex ratio of the recipients - I get the feeling a lot more postcards were sent to women than men, but I’d like numbers. After that, I’ll probably add search over the names and addresses. Random…
Notes to help me date postcards. Culled from various sources, mostly https://www.gbps.org.uk/information/rates/inland/postcards.php and https://www.edinphoto.org.uk/0_PC_0/0_post_card_history_-_stamps_postage_rates_uk_1952-2000s.htm Start Event Image 1870-10-01 ½d postcard rate 1902-01-01 Edward VII 1d red first issued 1902-01-01 Edward VII ½d green first issued 1911-06-22 George V 1d red (Downey…
Static Water Supply sign I didn’t know existed
A project I’ve been working on for a while has just moved to maintenance mode. It’s an attempt to crowdsource an historic map of the districts of Portsea Island . I built point, convex hull and heatmap views, but it turned out the heatmap wasn’t much use. I’m not sure what you’d call this type of map, but taxonomy:folksonomy :: map:[whatever this is]. Folk map? The raw data for the project is…
Lovely bit of found typography.
Semi-regular link dump. Cleaning out my browser tabs without guilt, or effort. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_%2747_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Friends https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summerland_(2020_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Minutes_to_Midnight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cracks_(2009_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_Through_(1985_film)…
An extended link dump from Clive Thompson’s Linkfest . Just the bits I find interesting, as of Issue 38. (If the links don’t work, it’s because I’m playing with text fragments here. Incidentally, text fragments break a lot of markdown processors.) Garlic hacking %20%F0%9F%A7%84%20Garlic%20hackers) Cable bacteria Infraordinary FM
A rebase mind trapped in a merge reality.
It’s been a while since I’ve written anything. I’ve spent the last few months archiving auctions of postcards that mention my hometown. I’ve got several thousand images now, and I’m currently filtering down to just those that include postal addresses. Eighty lines of Python and a post-industrial golem. Done. I’m feeling this viscerally. So far I’ve processed about 8000 images, for $0.58 and 5.6m…
Sora. This one amuses me greatly. There’s been a slew of “real-life cartoon character watching herself on a retro TV” renders lately. I’ve no idea why .
Link dump Maps geojson.io overpass turbo MapIt UK Input a postcode, and MapIt knows which constituency, parish, council area it’s in – and lots more. felt.com Make maps, apps, and dashboards in seconds. Images Related Faces Identify unknown family members in your photos with Related Faces. Our software isolates and maps faces and then compares them to reveal previously unknown connections. (Very…
Exploring ChatGPT's new multimodal image generation capabilities. Added an “improve” step, in the hope of injecting some creativity: Please describe this image in detail Please improve this description of an image Please create an image based on this description Observations The direction the rabbit is facing is never mentioned in the text. There seems to be a bias for facing left (14 vs 6 in this…
Exploring ChatGPT's new multimodal image generation capabilities. Hoping that adding an intermediate textual step might inject some randomness, I fell back on: Please describe this image in detail Please create an image based on this description Observations: There’s a bit more variation The tendency to simplify things is mostly gone (possibly because the image didn’t have many elements to start…
Exploring ChatGPT's new multimodal image generation capabilities. Another image chain. Please improve this image Again, initial image is by the Jan 2024 version of DALL·E. Again there’s that tendency towards darkness and simplification. The rabbit loses its determined expression and gets younger and friendlier. Most of the peripherals on the desk, the text on the screen and the background get…
Exploring ChatGPT's new multimodal image generation capabilities. Below is a chain of Please create a cartoon based on this photo Please create a photo based on this image Interestingly, if you say “cartoon” instead of “image”, it’s more likely to refuse to create a photo from it, quoting content restrictions. Unlike the “describe this image/create an image from this description” chains, this…
Exploring ChatGPT's new multimodal image generation capabilities. can you tidy this cartoon up a bit please? I want to keep the “printed” aesthetic, but improve the proportions slightly That text is remarkably error-free. I wonder if it’s using a font engine. I suspect it couldn’t reproduce the misaligned liquid in the glass even if it tried.
I’ve had these links on salt production open for weeks https://www.hantsfieldclub.org.uk/publications/hampshirestudies/digital/2010s/Vol_67ii/Greenwood.pdf https://salthistory.yolasite.com/post-medieval-sea-salt-industry.php The dirty secret of pair programming is that it stops you checking your email. As soon as you swap tabs to check your email, you’re lost.
https://threadinburgh.scot/ blog to emulate
A lot of the shopping districts in Southsea actually started out residential, before being repurposed (North End too. One day I’m going to dig into how this happened - I’d like to know if it was planned, or if it just happened piecemeal). This is probably the most extreme example I’ve found - a rather nice Victorian villa buried up to its waist in extremely utilitarian shopfronts, on the junction…
Rops, Félicien (1833-1898) Pornokratès . source Those weeping muses. I’ve got a feeling the best translation of Pornokratès in this context might be Queen of Fucking .
Dew ponds Why are there so many postcards of the Chanctonbury Ring dew pond? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dew_pond https://www.cantab.net/users/michael.behrend/repubs/hubbard/pages/index.html Source for images is ebay.
Great artists really do steal. But they do it so well .
Had honestly forgotten how nice working in a functional, mature environment is. It’s like suddenly I’m kicking this dead whale downhill .
Quote Psychoactive Substance Consumption and Negative Cadaveric Coping in Anatomy Students In preliminary studies we found a significant level of consumption of psychoactive substances among students of Anatomy in the Medicine course, mainly among those who are attending the subject again and/ or those with working activities, this was associated with the amount of hours the subject implies and…
The top of the harbour Reshuffling a couple of images I’ve already posted. Prison Hulks with Nets Turner, Daniel (early 19th Century) Prison hulks in Portsmouth harbour . source Something interesting going on with nets in the bottom-right corner. And several buildings - St Thomas’, St Mary’s, Portchester Castle - look wrong. Could this have been painted from memory? Uninspiring watercolour Turner,…
At the Sign of Milton’s Head Quote in [1777, R. Carr] describes his address as “at Milton’s Head, near the Grand Magazine.” This is the only instance I have met with in [Hampshire] of a custom, at one time common in London, of denoting booksellers’ shops by signs as we do public houses to-day. — Edwards, F. A. (1891) Early Hampshire Printers Papers and Proceedings of the Hampshire Field Club and…
I bought a thing. It’s totally without provenance, but… The only 20th century “Her Serene Highness” I know of who was associated with Portsmouth was the last surviving daughter of Alexander II, Princess Catherine Alexandrovna Yurievskaya (b. 1878 d. 1959). Quote For many years, Catherine was supported by an allowance from Queen Mary, the widow of King George V, but after the Queen’s death in March…
Evidence of prehistoric human activity in the Falkland Islands
I built a thing - or rather, I didn’t build a thing. This is a colour picker. I wanted to take the colours on a soft toy, and figure out what colour would be complementary. There was nothing out there that did exactly what I wanted, so I built something. Once it was done I just kept improving it, as an experiment. Except… not a single line of code on that page was written by me. The whole thing…
Looks like I’ve done something that caused Google to dump this entire site from its index. Realised I kinda prefer it that way. Going to spend a couple of hours on rss-transform today. Mostly just refamiliarizing myself and looking with fresh eyes, I think.
Todo Punishment of Frauds Act, 1857. Need to find a copy of this. https://vlex.co.uk/vid/punishment-of-frauds-act-808094521 Image of Southsea Common showing the shingle beach as a bank, protecting a lower-lying common: https://www.heritage-print.com/naval-review-promenade-southsea-common-36321280.html
Been a while since I’ve written one of these. Great write-up of the development of a software tool that was then used to create a great tchotchke. There’s a lot to love about this post: https://ianthehenry.com/posts/bauble/building-bauble/ Excellent “state of the nation” post about LLMs at the close of 2024. Commercial, rather than academic: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/31/llms-in-2024/ Blog…
Hyperlinks inhibit knowledge sharing. The history sections of this site are heavily hyperlinked in an early 1990s “underline all the verbs” style, and although it’s very useful for me to take notes like this, I’m pretty sure it’s going to be useless for anyone who wants to learn from it. Sarah Westwood is a case in point - there’s too much information, on too many pages, for anyone to easily get…
Saxon speech is gut speech. Vulgar Latin is the language of erudition. I once wrote a script to colour words by the point at which their roots entered the language (the older the root, the deeper red the word was painted). From memory, Emmylou Harris’s Deeper Well has maybe two words that weren’t in English in some form by the 11th Century, and a large majority were in before the 9th Century. I…
A Solid Silver Yacht The Royal Albert Yacht Club’s Nicholson Trophy source “comprising a silver model of sailing dinghy with drop keel, rudder, clinker hull and sails set, mounted in ebonised display case with plate inscribed ROYAL ALBERT YACHT CLUB TROPHY / PRESENTED IN MEMORY OF C. E. NICHOLSON O.B.E. R.D.I. / BY HIS SON JOHN W. NICHOLSON, with winners on rim plates listed between 1955 and 1968…
Another before-its-time object (although less so than the Staffordshire Caneware or the Spirit Painting ) American sweater (c. 1895) source Field, M., & Golubitsky, M. (1992) Symmetry in Chaos [Book cover]. Oxford University Press source Dr. Stephen Nagy, Diatoms arranged in an exhibition rosette by Klaus D. Kemp . source
The Castle at Apple Dumpling Bridge, Gosport
The time for the GitHub Action to deploy the site has dropped from about 1m10s in January to about 1m today. Considering how the content’s grown since then (so many binaries), that’s surprising.
AI Dreams Come True All these are, more or less, prescient: Quote The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus…
The Kingsclere Massacre https://bmmhs.org/the-kingsclere-shootout/ Bloody hell. Once again I’m left wondering if records of Court Martials are actually kept. There’s more than a few “hushed up for the sake of morale” WWII stories out there. Here’s another one: The Bethnal Green Tube Disaster https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Bethnal-Green-Tube-Disaster/ The Verifier Economy…
Dreamfish Quote They may induce hallucinogenic effects similar to LSD if eaten. However, based on the reports of exposure they are more likely to resemble hallucinogenic effects of deliriants than the effects of serotonergic psychedelics such as LSD. In 2006, two men who apparently ate the fish experienced hallucinations lasting for several days (an effect common with some naturally occurring…
You maniacs! You blew it up! Idle thought: is there a chain of causation between hackerish social engineering and the modern wasteland of Skinner-box driven games and web? It’s all just applied psychology, right?
For true dominance over the other devs, pair vim with this keyboard Do not break eye contact.
The Nature of Code: Simulating Natural Systems with JavaScript (Daniel Shiffman, pub. 3 Sept. 2024) Modeling Life: The Mathematics of Biological Systems (Alan Garfinkel, Jane Shevtsov, Yina Guo) The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic (Alan Moore, Steve Moore, pub. 17 Oct. 2024) Principia Discordia (Malaclypse the Younger, Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst)
WebGPU Unleashed: A Practical Tutorial via
Algorithmic Game Theory Unsong - this is fantastic, for something published for free as a serial. It needs an editor (it drags in places and it really didn’t need Buffy The Vampire Slayer), but it is, IMO, 100% publishable , and absolutely worth reading if you’re interested in Kabbalah, Esotericism and magic-as-science. Quote “HELLO PRESIDENT NIXON. THIS IS THE ARCHANGEL URIEL. I APOLOGIZE FOR…
An “I really need to close some of these tabs”-style linkdump. Thoughts on blog design awesome-bash ProcessWire CMS Pretty colours A Pretty colours B FrankenPHP