flâneur

Amber Zeng

11 followers · 13 following · 501 views

on the atlas — 98

highlights — 62

  • There is authoring intent, purpose, and a sense of iteration felt throughout, not seemingly arbitrary excess for the sake of creative provocation.
    Contrasting Aesthetics
  • Diagram comparing isotropic kernels vs anisotropic kernels.
    On Crafting Painterly Shaders - The Blog of Maxime Heckel
  • Shader light effects
    Maxime's Personal Website
  • not everyone may be familiar with
    On Crafting Painterly Shaders - The Blog of Maxime Heckel
  • When trying out this formula, I noticed the performance improvements highlighted in the paper but also that I could get a satisfying output at a smaller kernel size compared to what we've implemented so far.
    On Crafting Painterly Shaders - The Blog of Maxime Heckel
  • they propose to replace the Gaussian with a polynomial that roughly approximates it.
    On Crafting Painterly Shaders - The Blog of Maxime Heckel
  • In case you need a refresher, here's the formula for a 2D Gaussian function: f(x,y) = e^(-(x² + y²) / (2σ²))
    On Crafting Painterly Shaders - The Blog of Maxime Heckel
  • That’s what sustains the whole stupid tech industry, the fact that a glowing screen looks a little like a glowing fire, and it’s good to look at fire. The only thing in the external world that resembles the subjective experience of having a mind.
    Numb at Burning Man - Numb at the Lodge
  • In the same way that a Tolstovian peasant has a deep, spiritual knowledge of the land, we will have a deep, spiritual knowledge of Tung Tung Tung Sahur.
    Reading is magic - by Sam Kriss - Numb at the Lodge
  • One result of the Soviet Union’s mass literacy campaign is that today, Russians are essentially the only truly literate people left. The vast majority of Russians read regularly, more than anywhere else in the world.
    Reading is magic - by Sam Kriss - Numb at the Lodge
  • Modern nationalism would have been impossible without the dislocation of the written word.
    Reading is magic - by Sam Kriss - Numb at the Lodge
  • n fact, the written word is a kind of madness. It tears you out of your actual context and deposits you in a world of bodiless abstractions.
    Reading is magic - by Sam Kriss - Numb at the Lodge
  • Post-literate culture is deeply incurious.
    Reading is magic - by Sam Kriss - Numb at the Lodge
  • They are incapable of saying anything once; they have to rhythmically fixate over the exact same phrase six or seven times before moving on.
    Reading is magic - by Sam Kriss - Numb at the Lodge
  • That study reported that male fruit flies that were sexually rejected drank four times as much alcohol as fruit flies that mated with female fruit flies.
    Love and the Brain | Harvard Medical School
  • Prototaxites is an extinct genus of large macroscopic eukaryote dating from the Late Silurian until the Late Devonian periods.[2][3] Prototaxites formed large trunk-like structures up to 1 metre (3 ft) wide, reaching 8 metres (26 ft) in height,[4] made up of tiny interwoven tubules around 50 micrometres (0.0020 in) in diameter, making it by far the largest land-dwelling organism of its time.
    Prototaxites
  • a hodgepodge of anachronistic elements that Goodspeed describes as “Geocities Neue,” after the early web-hosting service.
    The Blobby, Drippy Maximalist Design You’re Seeing Everywhere - The New York Times
  • Anyway, that's it. If you made it to this point without losing the will to live, congrats, you have the same type of mental illness that I do and you are in the exact right place.
    MAKING SOFTWARE
  • they are transparent crystals that change their structure when exposed to an electric field.
    MAKING SOFTWARE
  • Most students call OpenAI’s model “Chat.” Many refer to it familiarly, consulting with Chat repeatedly over the course of a day, letting it decide how to text a situationship and confidently repeating hallucinated assertions while in line at the coffee shop. For years, online livestreamers have used the word “Chat” to interact with their audiences, asking commenters to tell them what choices to make in video games. That students now use the same name for A.I. feels appropriate. What really is the distinction between a nameless, faceless human you’ll never meet except over the internet and a st…
    Opinion | What A.I. Did to My College Class - The New York Times
  • Who is doing work I care about? What are they trying to make happen? Where are they stuck? What do I know how to do, or what could I learn to do, that would help? Who would be delighted, relieved, or intrigued if I showed up with something useful?
    how to enter side doors - by maja - velvet noise
  • “getting a job” meaning finding someone with a problem and convincing them you can solve it.
    how to enter side doors - by maja - velvet noise
  • It feels good to create quality.
    Notes on software quality
  • But don’t forget that whatever you work on, there is an amount of quality you personally can achieve.
    Notes on software quality
  • 100% of the time I’ve seen an organisation make high quality software, it is because the leaders wanted it. If the leaders don’t want quality, it will be much harder.
    Notes on software quality
  • I had somehow thought myself a kind of academic Raskolnikov, curiously exempt from the cause-effect relationships that hampered others
    On Self-Respect – Alex Burgin
  • Basically, what I think is that artists DO deserve to live
    How I Listen - by Phil Elverum
  • Not to mention that they are fairly power hungry - turns out firing electrons out of a gun and deflecting them with electromagnets is not particularly efficient.
    MAKING SOFTWARE
  • links to learn more about my work:
    my phone is making me dumb - Isabel Unraveled
  • Obviously there are good things to this device, such as this whole career I have found myself in, and the ability for you and I to be connecting in this moment via these pixels. But I feel an urgent urge to restructure my relationship with this thing.
    my phone is making me dumb - Isabel Unraveled
  • If your idea is out there in the world, it can be reproduced.
    chinese creativity (a visit to china pt.3)
  • In China, ideas are worthless; execution is the only thing that matters. The one who survives is the winner.
    chinese creativity (a visit to china pt.3)
  • My friend Frank (not his real name)
    Box of Secrets | Jack Hogan
  • But it’s worth noting that the internet of yesteryear, where almost every article was free to read, was also the internet that drastically reduced the value of highly researched, carefully argued writing. That internet helped shape our contemporary attentional landscape, full of bad work, underpaid artists, and antisocial incentives for content creators
    we've created a society where artists can't make any money
  • (One of the most violent things you can do to a young woman’s intellectual development, I feel, is to convince her that she has to be a ‘math person’ or a ‘humanities person,’ and not both.)
    we've created a society where artists can't make any money
  • “Our contemporary idea of design,” Gram writes, is often used to convince ourselves “that positive social change could be achieved without politics and government action; that problem solving could be both generative and profitable.”
    The Perils of ‘Design Thinking’ - The Atlantic
  • In theory, they were meant to instill a more “human-centered” approach to technology. In practice, however, they were pressured to solve problems quickly and prioritize profit over the ideal experience.
    The Perils of ‘Design Thinking’ - The Atlantic
  • designers need more than just craftsmanship skills; they should “be students of human culture.
    The Perils of ‘Design Thinking’ - The Atlantic
  • But design was capable of inflicting such harm, he wrote, only because it had so much potential, and therefore also the capacity for immense good.
    The Perils of ‘Design Thinking’ - The Atlantic
  • welcome to jean land
    home - jean land
  • Such is my own entropic trajectory: I am decaying into an insane person and I am decaying into an animal. All the while I refuse to decay into a machine.
    Entropic Boredom
  • The times in my life when I have experienced true, bone-penetrating boredom have always precipitated great change.
    Entropic Boredom
  • Attention is a process of refinement; a way of imposing order on a disordered world. Boredom, meanwhile, is chaotic; it indiscriminately lets everything in, thus attributing importance to nothing at all.
    Entropic Boredom
  • But I don’t think boredom is the same as numbness. Numbness simply distances us from our desires; boredom makes us painfully aware of the space where our desires used to be.
    Entropic Boredom
  • I have always hated Alice in Wonderland, a story about a fascist state where people are executed at random and all the animals suffer from psychosis
    Entropic Boredom
  • I’m making a bet that the codex—one of the oldest information technologies we have—is going to outlast many of the others we’ve come to rely on.
    The Afterlives of Computer Art
  • And attending to something also transforms us, shaping how we understand our past, present, and potential futures.
    The Afterlives of Computer Art
  • The amateur artist-archivist may, in the end, be the primary—or only—way we learn about certain stories.
    The Afterlives of Computer Art
  • Digital artworks are challenging to conserve because they exist not just in a social context—where viewers interact with, participate, and thereby contribute to the work—but also a technical context, requiring specific hardware and software.
    The Afterlives of Computer Art
  • “In order for artifacts to survive culturally,” Espenschied said in an interview, “they need to become useful again in contemporary digital culture.” Too often, he lamented, “conservation is done by removing artifacts from the cultural tempest they originated in and putting them into a safe place.”
    The Afterlives of Computer Art