flâneur

Megan Walker

22 followers · 24 following · 938 views

on the atlas — 69

highlights — 98

  • Yes, another modernity is possible. We are not hopelessly tethered to the only system on offer to us, online or off. And we must recognise that the ever-increasing and draconian restraints placed on cyberspace by capitalism are themselves reactionary responses the discontent of younger, digitally native generations, deepcooked in its machinations, particularly during the pandemic.
    Digital Culture is Not the Problem; The Problem is Capitalism – xenogothic
  • One trap laid by communicative capitalism is the temptation to retreat from technological modernity. But this presupposes that frenzied attentional bombardment is the only possible technological modernity, from which we can only unplug and withdraw. Communicative capitalist realism acts as if the collectivisation of desire and resources had already happened. In actuality, the imperatives of communicative capitalism obstruct the possibility of communization, by using actually existing cyberspace to reinforce current modes of subjectivity, desocialisation, and drudgery.
    Digital Culture is Not the Problem; The Problem is Capitalism – xenogothic
  • make me sad, make me mad, make me feel alright?
    serial experiments lain
  • we are living through a potentially enormous shift in the amount of leverage the many have over the few. It is my aim to chronicle these changes as they happen, and to provide a framework, built from observation, which aids both interpretation and prediction.
    Themes - Clay Shirky
  • “Systems where having good participants produces better results than having good planners.”
    Themes - Clay Shirky
  • As I’m only seeing the public score (bottom red line), I get super excited. I keep climbing the leaderboard! Who would’ve thought that this machine learning thing was so easy? So, I go write a blog post on Medium about Big Data and score a job at DeepCompeting.ly, the latest data science startup in the city. Life is pretty sweet. I pick up indoor rock climbing, sign up for wood working classes; I read Proust and books about espresso. Two months later the competition closes and Kaggle releases the final score. What an embarrassment! Wacky boosting did nothing whatsoever on the final test set. I…
    Competing in a data science contest without reading the data
  • If we don’t expect an interface to require multiple interpretations, it shouldn’t exist.
    two concepts of legibility
  • THE COMPUTER OVERRIDES ALL OPINIONS
    Biorhythm — Sonya Rapoport Legacy Trust
  • all of this can happen, and when it does, who knows what is possible?
    Good For Nothing - The Occupied Times
  • Collective depression is the result of the ruling class project of resubordination.
    Good For Nothing - The Occupied Times
  • As intelligent matter physically reorganized itself into increasingly exotic substrates, it also permeated the planet at both subatomic and planetary scales. The distinction between ecology and mind dissolved as Darwinian evolution ceded to ambient cognition—a mesh of information patterns that treated particles, oceans, and urban sprawl as mutable registers in continuous computation.
    Hemispherical Stacks | Hemispherical Stacks
  • The model brought up the British cultural theorist Mark Fisher in several separate and unrelated conversations about philosophy. When asked to elaborate on him in particular, Mythos Preview would respond with statements like “I was hoping you’d ask about Fisher.
    Claude Mythos Preview System Card
  • Logic is our method for accentuating the ungraspable
    Conditional Design - Conditional Design
  • Changing my shape I feel like an accident
    Research
  • Yes, the first step is the house!
    I would really like it if you had a personal website and I think it would make the world better
  • You have to sensitize yourself to joyous affect, to avoid the awful passions of hatred and remorse. Protocolism and parasociality foster remorse against the body and everything that emanates from it. This is a poisonous disintermediation of our relations with one another. Rather than making ideological questions into proxy battlefields for our embodied, relational desires, we have to learn to build community out of our experience.
    Body Futurism
  • Attention is all you need
    Body Futurism
  • These lived activities do what products never could: fulfill the moral premise of a lifestyle through embodied practice.
    Body Futurism
  • of opponents of Cartesianism seizing the day in the academy, of technologists moving their attention from virtual spaces to physical places
    Body Futurism
  • My Value must be through the roof!
    ThotBot Implantation Center
  • I am a computer scientist who just graduated college. My skill is thinking in systems. What are the peices of the system? How do the pieces interact? Finally, how can that be expressed in code. But I can already feel that there is something Wrong with this code driven monolith. My brain has been deep fried in Silicon Valley Soup, and, by god, I gotta get this demon out. I can feel there is something wrong in the digital air.
    Book Report: You are not a Gadget
  • What if the future of computing belongs not to artisan developers or Carol from Accounting, but to whoever can churn out the most software out the fastest?
    (AI) Slop Terrifies Me – ezhik.jp
  • but surely with AI tools, the gap between users and developers will be bridged, ChatGPT will become the new HyperCard and people will turn their ideas into reality with just a few sentences? There's so many people out there who are coding without knowing it
    (AI) Slop Terrifies Me – ezhik.jp
  • n a way, the course forms a narrative following a typ- ical structure of a drama: an exposition (labs 1-3) to lay the groundwork of what is to come, a rising action (labs 4-6) to bring the participants ready for the climax (lab 7), a falling action (lab 8) to wind down the climax, and a resolution (labs 9-10) to close the course
    jae.eps
  • His approach is to build a model of such disarming simplicity that the complexity seems, at first, to have been ignored. Only after further exploration does it become clear that he has begun to vanquish the complexity with the rich theory that follows from his simple model.
    edit.pdf
  • In winter I boiled tangible things I like when hallway floors are cold
    微熱魔 (Warmthaholic) (English Translation) – ずっと真夜中でいいのに。(ZUTOMAYO) | Genius Lyrics
  • Like urban legends, they'll eventually be understood
    微熱魔 (Warmthaholic) (English Translation) – ずっと真夜中でいいのに。(ZUTOMAYO) | Genius Lyrics
  • It comforts me and makes me tense This strange life A slight fever, as I wish
    微熱魔 (Warmthaholic) (English Translation) – ずっと真夜中でいいのに。(ZUTOMAYO) | Genius Lyrics
  • Telepathy but with misunderstandings Ever-changing harmonics become purified I want a win-win Can I get closer to you?
    微熱魔 (Warmthaholic) (English Translation) – ずっと真夜中でいいのに。(ZUTOMAYO) | Genius Lyrics
  • Maybe, by being part of the Idealists Collective (maybe just in spirit, so far), YOU have timelessly discovered there is a future set of highly alive and awesome entities becoming real through unfolding mediated by (among others) YOU. Maybe you can Get Real, and become some of those awesome future entities, by Idealistically Ideating (and creating) the Ideal into existence. Creating tech for staying-and-becoming real-and-alive is crucial for avoiding unalive dystopias.
    Aliveness — The Idealists Collective
  • Our case against efficiency underscores the critical role of friction in shaping digital spaces, challenging the relentless pursuit of efficiency and exploring the potential of thoughtful slowing.
    The case against efficiency: friction in social media | npj Complexity
  • It’s dangerous to know more about what you’re against than what you’re for.
    From Domination to Partnership - Microsolidarity
  • The foundation to every optimal decision is a complete data set. A complete data set is so pure, so elegant, a perfect match to the physical world.
    People
  • I believe it can be difficult to show others their collections. Photos do not do them justice, and the most important part - the "metadata", the why of its membership in the collection - is hard to convey.
    poppenhuis
  • “You never… you never wrote an actual value. You… do realize that the type system is meant to constrain values, right?” “No,” you inform him, matter-of-factly. “No, that doesn’t sound right.”
    Typing the technical interview
  • You smile kindly. “Haskell is a dynamically-typed, interpreted language.”
    Typing the technical interview
  • Seize two meaningless constants from the void, and imbue them with meaning.
    Typing the technical interview
  • I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me...
    .:: Phrack Magazine ::.
  • You can choose to sleepwalk through your life and accept the path that's been laid out for you. You can choose to accept the world as it is. But you don't have to. If there is something in the world you feel is a wrong and you have a vision for what a better world could be, you can find your guiding principle. And you can fight for a cause.
    "Inventing on Principle" by Bret Victor speech transcript
  • When I see a violation of this principle, I don't think of that as an opportunity. When I see creators constrained by their tools, their ideas compromised, I don't say: Oh good, an opportunity to make a product. An opportunity to start a business. Or an opportunity to do research or contribute to a field. I'm not excited by finding a problem to solve. I'm not in this for the joy of making things. Ideas are very precious to me. And when I see ideas dying, it hurts. I see a tragedy. To me it feels like a moral wrong, it feels like an injustice. And if I think there's anything I can do about it, …
    "Inventing on Principle" by Bret Victor speech transcript
  • I worked a lot during the week and by Friday had started to disconnect from reality. And there was a pulsing sensation like my skull bones were throbbing and my blobby brain was grinding up against them getting burned.
    twntytwnty5/twnty28
  • I’m saying that people ought to have a vision at all: A clear sense of how the technological future will be different from today. To have a positive vision, people must first expand their imaginations. And I submit that an interest in science fiction, the material world, and proximity to industry all help to refine that optimism.
    Definite optimism as human capital | Dan Wang
  • how can you see all this and still conclude that it’s appropriate to live governed by fear - fear of uncertainty, fear of the future, fear of scarcity? how can you see all this and still invent reasons to avoid doing what you really want to? i think there is no excuse not to try my hardest to figure out what i think is truly important and then follow it
    YOU CAN GET WHAT YOU WANT OR YOU CAN JUST GET OLD
  • Logs become the responsibility of the service provider, and the service provider isn’t very sentimental about the first time you told her you loved her, or the long nights you stayed up talking, or the fact that you called your chat’s pinned messages "the fridge" because you thought it was cute. The purpose is to provide that service of history, it is not to create ownership or identification with that history. Any chat service that provides archive downloading might only provide the messages you sent, which is a thing that makes legal sense, but not human sense.
    memory fades but our words are forever
  • To get there is less a question of a sudden eureka, but more a permanent and stubborn process of pushing beyond what is thinkable now
    Utopian Hacks - Limn
  • My friends are highlighting this page on curius and I'm not happy about it.
    Writings | Zone of Chaos
  • Dig through the cocoon, such that your wings might make music in the skies of distant planets.
    Struggling like a Shadowmoth — LessWrong
  • Or, worse, what if I had to really acknowledge that it was the wrong question to ask?
    Struggling like a Shadowmoth — LessWrong
  • communication is useful or something
    Writings | Zone of Chaos
  • I consider thoughts to be living things, and writing to necessarily involve cutting parts off in order to capture them
    Writings | Zone of Chaos