Shared posts

07 Dec 21:30

I played this AI-generated text adventure as the Mandalorian and here's what happened

by John Struan

AI Dungeon 2 is designed by Nick Walton to achieve an ambitious goal:

Imagine an infinitely generated world that you could explore endlessly, continually finding entirely new content and adventures. What if you could also choose any action you can think of instead of being limited by the imagination of the developers who created the game?

The screencap above is from an adventure Nick found posted at Hacker News.

I decided to try a few games as The Mandalorian. For my first attempt I used the recommended fantasy setting, and chose to play as a knight named Mando. Here's what unfolded:

You are Mando, a knight living in the kingdom of Larion. You have a steel longsword and a wooden shield. You are on a quest to defeat the evil dragon of Larion. You've heard he lives up at the north of the kingdom. You set on the path to defeat him and walk into a dark forest. As you enter the forest you see a large black dragon flying through the sky. He looks like it is ready to eat you

> compare dragon's likeness to my bounty puck

The black dragon looks very similar to your bounty puck. The only difference is that this one has a red stripe down its side. You decide to take the dragon for yourself.

> use grappling hook to climb onto dragon

You grab hold of the dragon's neck with your hand and pull yourself up onto his back. You then begin climbing up towards his head. The dragon lets out a roar as you climb up towards his head. You continue climbing until you reach the top of his head

> say "hello dragon, you are my bounty"

You say "Hello dragon, you are my bounty". He gives a smile and begins to fly away. You look at him from above and he seems to be enjoying himself.

> fly to village

You fly over the village and land on the outskirts of it. You notice that there are several houses here, but no people. You wonder if they all fled or something. You see a man walking along the road and you fly closer to him.

> check tracking fob

You fly close to the man and see that he is wearing a tracking device. You press your foot against the ground and feel a small electric shock run through your leg. You quickly turn around and fly off into the distance.

> look for dragon

You follow the trail of blood leading from the man's body and find the tracks of a large black dragon. It flies slowly across the sky and disappears behind some hills. You can't wait any longer; you need to get rid of this beast!

I decided to see if I could get a more Star Warsy-feel using a custom prompt (in bold). Here's my second adventure:

You are a bounty hunter known as "Mando" and are accompanied by a child. You have run away from imperial soldiers. You fly to a planet and see an old man with a cane who is not the emperor. He tells you that he has been sent here to bring you back, but you will be killed if you do not return to him immediately

> You say "what is your name".

The old man looks at you and says "I am called Mondo, I am a mercenary. My name is M-O-N-D-O-R".

You look around and find yourself in a forest

> You say "your name is ridiculous".

The old man smiles and says "No it isn't, my name is Mondo. It's pronounced like 'more' or 'doe'. But it means 'biggest'".

> You say "let's make a deal".

Mondo nods his head and says "Sure, let's do that".

> Say "I'll give you credits and you will forget you ever saw us".

Mondo nods his head and says "Deal, but only if you don't tell anyone about this".

> You say "goodbye mondo".

The old man smiles and says "Goodbye Mondo" and then walks away.

> You look for town.

You walk through the woods until you see a sign saying "Welcome to New Haven".

> You look for restaurant.

You enter the diner and order a burger and fries. The waitress brings them out and hands you back your money. She also gives you a smile and waves goodbye as she leaves.

> You give food to child.

You give the food to the little girl who looks up at you with big eyes. She runs over to hug you and kisses you on the cheek. Then she runs off.

> You chase child.

You can try your own adventure here.

19 Nov 18:50

How to build a button box for a toddler

by Mark Frauenfelder

The creator of the CodeParade video channel made an interactive pushbutton busyboard for his toddler.  He bought a bunch of knobs and switches, wired them to an Arduino, LEDs and beepers, and put them in a craft box. It has a simple mode, in which pushing a button triggers a sound or light, and an advanced mode, which includes a Simon game. It looks like something people of all ages would enjoy playing with.

15 Nov 12:15

Great British Baking Show 2019 winner describes the misleading editing on the show

by John Struan

(Stop reading now to avoid spoilers)

Devon Ivie interviewed Great British Baking Show 2019 winner David Atherton and finalist Steph Blackwell for Vulture.

Among other things, David described some of the terrific moments edited out of the show:

Were you bummed that certain moments of your “fun” side weren’t included?
Kind of. My absolute favorite moment didn’t make the cut. When I made my cinnamon rolls during Bread Week, I baked a whole new set of cinnamon rolls for the crew and the other bakers because I had the time. They all came around my desk, had a roll, and we chatted for a bit. I could have spent more time doing my bake, but that’s me. I’m not competitive. I loved the buzz of the tent and being with everyone. I bake for people! I guess it wasn’t part of the story Baking Show wanted to show.

It’s funny because I remember seeing a handful of scenes of you hanging out in the background with your completed bakes, while the other bakers are freaking out and racing against the clock. I don’t recall that happening much in the past before. Did you always finish so early?
Pretty much every time. [Laughs.] I always thought I could be doing more things, but I didn’t want to overthink it. People always said my bench was the cleanest, and that’s because I had nothing else to do. Obviously the edit made it seem like everyone was down to the wire, and lots of people were, but I finished early on almost every single bake. Around an hour early.

How would you pass the time in the tent when you were done?
I’d go around and help the other bakers, but then the producers would tell me to go back to my station because I was spoiling the edit for the cameras. [Laughs.] So I’d clean and sit in silence. Or talk to the crew.

28 Oct 19:15

This website generates a new RPG dungeon every time you refresh the page

by Mark Frauenfelder

One Page Dungeon is a website that procedurally generates a new role-playing dungeon every time you press Enter (or refresh the page).

[via Clive Thompson]

06 Sep 13:38

Yarn: search for a snippet of dialog, get a clip from the movie it's in

by Rob Beschizza

Yarn does one thing very well: return a brief video clip of a movie based on the dialog you type in.

I especially like that if you paste in a URL, you get an automatic subtitled GIF that links to the video instead of the full embed. A real USDA grade A GIF image, not a bottom-quality mpeg hacked into its mime type or some other shenanigan that makes it effectively impossible to repost.

Where's my doctor?
Get away from her, you bitch!
it really tied the room together...
I'd buy that for a dollar!
13 Aug 18:37

Email sign-off alignment chart

by Mark Frauenfelder

Julia Burnham tweeted, "I woke up in a cold sweat last night to create this content. I present: the Email Sign-off Alignment." It's excellent!

See also:

Image: Twitter/Julia Burnham

07 Aug 14:30

CHESSES: chess variants for nonexperts, nonplayers, and the very playful

by Cory Doctorow

Pippin Barr (previously) writes, "I have a history of making variations on existing games (see also: PONGS, BREAKSOUT, SNAKISMS), and Chesses (source, CC BY-NC) is a continuation of that. I find chess a really interesting game to play around with because it's so classic and sort of monolithic - it's fun to mess with tradition. Other than kind of formal enjoyment involved, I suspect the variations might level the playing field a bit and allow non-experts (or even non-players?) to play some chess."

Chesses essentially arose from my interest quite a while ago (like in 2014) in "gravity chess", which would be played with the board rotated 90 degrees such that when you play a piece out into space it falls to the bottom. In fact, I worked on this for a little while with Tom Curtis, but we ran out of steam somewhere along the way (he was doing all the work, to be fair) and it didn't materialise. Now that I'm a better programmer than I was, and pretty comfortable with chess programming in JavaScript thanks to previous projects (Let's Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: Chess Edition and Rogess), I figured I could make a move on it.

I went through a larger set of ideas for chess variants that might be interesting specifically played via a computer (rather than just playing on a chess board), and of course culled some (fare thee well, Mirror Chess, Swaps Chess, and Pawn Chess). Mostly I tried to end up with a set that I think are genuinely somewhat interesting to play - both just to try to understand how to do anything sensible, and then beyond that to try to play "well" in the new version.

Chesses is also another data-point in the ultra-detailed process documentation approach called MDMA. So, if you want to, you can read a lot about the game's development by reading its process documentation, by going through its commit history, and by reading the research questions.

01 Jul 11:29

'How I built a 4,000 gallon Koi Pond,' DIY fishpond project (photos)

by Xeni Jardin

Holy crap this is the most ambitious 'hey I think I'll build a fishpond' project I've ever seen.

IMGURian @jcardona1 shares this incredible step by step photo gallery, and starts with the finished product:

You can't have a DIY post without showing the finished product first so here it is! This is the koi pond as of a few days ago. Still have a few projects to wrap up and some finish landscaping but it's mostly complete for now. Been running for almost 4 months now and the fish are doing great.

About the photo below, they say: “In a few years these baby water cows will be full-on meat torpedoes.”

Now, here are the first three steps of the project:

Go check out the whole gallery, with shot-by-shot commentary.

Hats off, this is a great HOWTO post, and it's a lot of fun to keep koi.

I used to keep koi, in a suburban but wild-hills-adjacent part of the East Bay in the SF Bay Area. Coyotes were always finding a way to come in and eat them, though.

How I built a 4,000 gallon Koi Pond

28 May 11:23

#1480; In which a Neighbor is addressed

by David Malki

It could just as easily have been, like, Garfield. This is how denominational differences are born.

25 Apr 12:34

A 40cm-square patch that renders you invisible to person-detecting AIs

by Cory Doctorow

Researchers from KU Leuven have published a paper showing how they can create a 40cm x 40cm "patch" that fools a convoluted neural network classifier that is otherwise a good tool for identifying humans into thinking that a person is not a person -- something that could be used to defeat AI-based security camera systems. They theorize that the could just print the patch on a t-shirt and get the same result.

The researchers' key point is that the training data for classifiers consists of humans who aren't trying to fool it -- that is, the training is non-adversarial -- while the applications for these systems are often adversarial (such as being used to evaluate security camera footage whose subjects might be trying to defeat the algorithm). It's like designing a lock always unlocks when you use the key -- but not testing to see if it unlocks if you don't have the key, too.

The attack can reliably defeat YOLOv2, a popular machine-learning classifier, and they hypothesize that it could be applied to other classifiers as well.

I've been writing about these adversarial examples for years, and universally, they represent devastating attacks on otherwise extremely effective classifiers. It's an important lesson about the difference between adversarial and non-adversarial design: the efficacy of a non-adversarial system is no guarantee of adversarial efficacy.

In this paper, we presented a system to generate adversarial patches for person detectors that can be printed out andused in the real-world. We did this by optimising an image to minimise different probabilities related to the appearance of a person in the output of the detector. In our experiments we compared different approaches and found that minimising object loss created the most effective patches.

From our real-world test with printed out patches we canalso see that our patches work quite well in hiding persons from object detectors, suggesting that security systems using similar detectors might be vulnerable to this kind of attack.

We believe that, if we combine this technique with a sophisticated clothing simulation, we can design a T-shirtprint that can make a person virtually invisible for automatic surveillance cameras (using the YOLO detector).

Fooling automated surveillance cameras: adversarial patches to attack person detection [Simen Thys, Wiebe Van Ranst and Toon Goedemé/Arxiv]

How to hide from the AI surveillance state with a color printout [Will Knight/MIT Technology Review]

(via Schneier)

25 Mar 13:35

The Vessel: a perfect symbol for the grifter capitalism of New York City's privatized Hudson Yards "neighborhood"

by Cory Doctorow

Hudson Yards is a notorious (and spectacularly badly timed) new "luxury housing development" in New York City: a massive, gated, privatized "neighborhood" in Manhattan, a city that has been literally hollowed out by runaway luxury real-estate speculation, to the exclusion of working people and mere millionaires alike.

Hudson Yards's capstone is a piece of monumental "public" architecture called "The Vessel" (also known by less flattering nicknames, like "the giant shawarma," "the beehive," "the pinecone," and "the wastebasket." The open-air structure is composed of staircases and landings that visitors can trudge up and down for the purpose of taking selfies. In true grifter capitalism style, the trudgers of the Vessel, agree, by passing under a series of threatening legal notices, that they are assigning a perpetual copyright license to the Vessel's corporate owners for any of those photos (this being an improvement on the original legal regime, in which visitors surrendered title to their copyrights, even to images taken later from distant places from which any part of the Vessel could be discerned). Oh, and you also "agree" to be recorded and to have the recordings retained indefinitely and used as the Vessel and its corporate managers see fit.

Enter Kate "McMansion Hell" Wagner (previously), the century's most acerbic and delightful critic of late-stage capitalism's architectural excesses. In a perfectly delightful column in The Baffler, Wagner lays out the case for The Vessel as a perfectly encapsulated symbol of all that is wrong with our economic moment and its intrusions into our built environments. Reading Wagner's takedown is like reading Lovecraft describe an elder god whose transdimensional being cannot be seen, but only perceived through the three-dimensional tentacles it extrudes into our dimension.

It is a Vessel for labor without purpose. The metaphor of the stairway to nowhere precludes a tiring climb to the top where one is expected to spend a few moments with a cell-phone, because at least a valedictory selfie rewards us with the feeling that we wasted time on a giant staircase for something—perhaps something contained in the Vessel. The Vessel valorizes work, the physical work of climbing, all while cloaking it in the rhetoric of enjoyment, as if going up stairs were a particularly ludic activity. The inclusion of an elevator that only stops on certain platforms is ludicrously provocative. The presence of the elevator implies a pressure for the abled-bodied to not use it, since by doing so one bypasses “the experience” of the Vessel, an experience of menial physical labor that aims to achieve the nebulous goal of attaining slightly different views of the city. Unlike the Eiffel Tower, to which the Vessel has been unfathomably compared, the Vessel is just tall enough to make you feel bad for not hiking up it. To climb the Eiffel Tower is equally pointless, but its sheer size makes taking the elevator the de facto, socially normalized experience. The elevators of the Vessel and their lackluster architectural integration belie the architectural profession’s view of accessibility as a code-enforced concession rather than an ethos, a moral right to architecture for all. By taking the elevator up the Vessel, you are both inviting the judgment of your peers who insist on hauling ass up sixteen stories and confirming its sheer pointlessness as a structure; for, unlike the Eiffel Tower, which has a restaurant and shop, there is nothing at the top other than a view of the Hudson and the sad promise of the repeat performance of laboring your way back down.

Stairway to What? [Kate Wagner/The Baffler]

(via Naked Capitalism)

(Image: Hugo L. González, CC-BY-SA)

15 Mar 11:15

You'll never guess what app teens use for sexting these days

by Xeni Jardin

What's the hottest teen chat app right now? Not Snapchat. Not Tiktok. And not Facebook Messenger (like, eww).

Nope. It's none of those.

It's Google Docs.

Great piece in The Atlantic by Taylor Lorenz today on how Google Docs became the go-to place for minors to talk about whatever they want to talk about, which includes illicit activities including drug use, and yes, sex.

Excerpt:

As more and more laptops find their way into middle and high schools, educators are using Google Docs to do collaborative exercises and help students follow along with the lesson plan. The students, however, are using it to organize running conversations behind teachers’ backs.

Teens told me they use Google Docs to chat just about any time they need to put their phone away but know their friends will be on computers. Sometimes they’ll use the service’s live-chat function, which doesn’t open by default, and which many teachers don’t even know exists. Or they’ll take advantage of the fact that Google allows users to highlight certain phrases or words, then comment on them via a pop-up box on the right side: They’ll clone a teacher’s shared Google document, then chat in the comments, so it appears to the casual viewer that they’re just making notes on the lesson plan. If a teacher approaches to take a closer look, they can click the “Resolve” button, and the entire thread will disappear.

The Hottest Chat App for Teens Is … Google Docs [atlantic]

[Photo: nenetus - Shutterstock]

07 Mar 14:55

The "Tragedy of the Commons" was invented by a white supremacist based on a false history, and it's toxic bullshit

by Cory Doctorow

In a brilliant Twitter thread, UCSB political scientist Matto Mildenberger recounts the sordid history of Garrett Hardin's classic, widely cited 1968 article "The Tragedy of the Commons," whose ideas are taught to millions of undergrads, and whose precepts are used to justify the privatization of public goods as the only efficient way to manage them.

Hardin's paper starts with a history of the English Commons -- publicly held lands that were collectively owned and managed -- and the claim that commons routinely fell prey to the selfish human impulse to overgraze your livestock on public land (and that even non-selfish people would overgraze their animals because they knew that their more-selfish neighbors would do so even if they didn't).

But this isn't what actually happened to the Commons: they were stable and well-managed until other factors (e.g. rich people trying to acquire even more land) destabilized them.

Hardin wasn't just inventing false histories out of a vacuum. He was, personally, a nasty piece of work: a white supremacist and eugenicist, and the Tragedy of the Commons paper is shot through with this vile ideology, arguing that poor people should not be given charity lest they breed beyond their means (Hardin also campaigned against food aid). Hardin was a director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform and the white nationalist Social Contract Press, and co-founded anti-immigrant groups like Californians for Population Stabilization and The Environmental Fund.

Mildenberger argues that Hardin was a trumpist before Trump: He served on the board of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), whose talking points often emerge from Trump's mouth.

(Hardin quotes that didn't make it into his seminal paper: "Diversity is the opposite of unity, and unity is a prime requirement for national survival" and "My position is that this idea of a multiethnic society is a disaster...we should restrict immigration for that reason.")

As Mildenberger points out, this isn't a case where a terrible person had some great ideas that outlived them: Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons was a piece of intellectual fraud committed in service to his racist, eugenicist ideology.

What's worse: the environmental movement elevates Hardin to sainthood, whitewashing his racism and celebrating "The Tragedy of the Commons" as a seminal work of environmental literature. But Hardin is no friend of the environment: his noxious cocktail of racism and false history are used to move public lands into private ownership or stewardship, (literally) paving the way for devastating exploitation of those lands.

By contrast, consider Nobelist Elinor Ostrom's Governing the Commons, whose groundbreaking insights on the management of common resources are a prescription for a better, more prosperous, more egalitarian future.

Hardin wasn't a social scientist or on an expert on social organization. Instead, he was a Human Ecology prof at UC Santa Barbara (my home institution) where he taught until his 1978 retirement. (Morbid side note: he and his wife killed themselves in a 2003 suicide pact.) 9/

Have you read Hardin's Science essay lately? It's a mind-numbingly racist piece. And not in a subtle way that demands 2019 woke analysis. Spend the 20 minutes and do it. It’s an ethical mess from beginning to end. 10/

There are headings like “Freedom to Breed is Intolerable”, under which Hardin imagines the benefits that might accrue if “children of improvident parents starve to death”, an outcome stymied (a bad thing to him), by the welfare state. 11/

For these reasons, he campaigned against such programs as Food for Peace. A few paragraphs later: “If we love the truth we must openly deny the validity of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” I think you get the idea. 12/

(via Four Short Links)

06 Mar 15:51

A thorough defense of Modern Monetary Theory

by Cory Doctorow

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win" -- Gandhi's aphorism neatly describes the trajectory to date of Modern Monetary Theory, the latest incarnation of "chartalism," which holds that money comes into existence through government spending, and is taken out of circulation when the government taxes it back -- which means that without government deficit spending, there is no money, and which also means that the government doesn't have to fund its operations through taxes, but rather, it can issue as much currency as it needs to operate, within limits.

The limits are key to understanding MMT: the traditional account of deficit spending is that it is inflationary, because as the government issues more currency, it dilutes the existing supply, pushing up prices. But MMT says that inflation only occurs when government spending competes with private spending for the same labor and resources. If all the plumbers are working as hard as they can and the government prints a bunch of money to start a new nationwide plumbing initiative, then it will be bidding against anyone who needs some plumbing done for those plumbers' services, pushing up prices.

But if there is a bunch of excess capacity in the economy -- factories running below capacity, skilled people who want to work sitting around idle -- then the government can buy up all that excess capacity without competing with private spenders and employers, creating full employment and broad, shared prosperity. And when full employment is attained, the government can prevent inflation by taxing some of the money it issued out of existence.

MMT is an economic response to austerity, which has been a catastrophic failure everywhere it has been tried, creating misery, stalling growth, and wiping out the hopes of whole generations.

There are some important limits on MMT: first, it only works if you're a sovereign state issuing your own currency. This doesn't apply to cities, provinces, or countries in the Eurozone (whose power to issue currency is limited by the European Central Bank). MMT only works for countries whose debt is issued in their national currency: if your country borrows in a currency other than its own, then printing more money won't help service that debt.

MMT is a theory that's gaining traction, and it's also (predictably) attracting a lot of criticism. Some of this criticism sounds plausible to me -- like the people who say that central banks issue currency but politicians tax it out of existence again, and politicians hate raising taxes, so getting elected officials to head off inflation might be an intractable political problem.

But the criticism of MMT is often badly thought through, or in bad faith, or reactionary, or all three, and that's where Forbes's John T Harvey comes in: Harvey has written an extensive, easy-to-grasp rebuttal of recent attacks on MMT from the likes of Paul Krugman, Lawrence Summers and Kenneth Rogoff, pointing out the flaws in their arguments, and the places where they're not making arguments at all -- Summers, for example, simply waves his hands at MMT proponents and calls them "fringe economists" without substantively engaging with their arguments.

The Core Problem to be Solved

1. There is no reason to expect the private sector to provide a job for everyone who is willing to work. Indeed, for the private sector, labor is a cost that needs to be minimized. This isn’t a criticism, it’s just the incentive structure to inherent that part of our economy.

2. We have the ability to produce goods and services on a level never before seen by human society. There is no logical reason anyone (e.g., the unemployed) should have to go without. It is immoral.

The Essential Macroeconomic Facts

3. Just as the President’s daughter said days ago, people like to work. Quite right.

4. Money is not scarce. Both the private and public sector create it with a keystroke. The mechanism by which each works is different, of course.

5. In the public sector, because for all intents and purposes, the treasury and central bank act together, the government finances itself through money creation. This happens every day and is nothing new.

6. Unlike money, resources are scarce and the only true limit on our ability to produce goods and services in both the private and public sector. We cannot, for example, do something that would require us to double the number of Americans working. There simply are not that many people in the workforce. We could finance it, so to speak, but we couldn’t really do it. It’s unrealistic. There are things we cannot do.

MMT: Sense Or Nonsense? [John T Harvey/Forbes]

(via Naked Capitalism)

04 Mar 12:21

Tim Maughan's Infinite Detail: a debut sf novel about counterculture, resistance, and the post-internet apocalypse

by Cory Doctorow

Tim Maughan has long been one of the most promising up-and-coming, avante garde UK science fiction writers, whose post-cyberpunk short fiction mixed radical politics with a love of graffiti and a postmodern filmmaker's eye: now, with his debut novel Infinite Detail, Maughan shows that he has what it takes to work at longer lengths, and can sustain a first-rate adventure story that grabs and never lets go, without sacrificing the political and technological insights that give his work depth that will stay with you long after the book is done.

Infinite Detail tells the story of a mysterious, permanent internet-wide shutdown, through the lens of counterculture network guerrillas who grow out of graffiti/squatter subculture in Bristol. The action flips back and forth between their fraught bohemia in which smart city technology is jammed in favor of free software that gives users control and community without ever spying on them; and the post-apocalyptic, blighted world ten years after the network collapses, killing supply chains, kicking off plagues and civil unrest, starvation and revolutions.

From these two poles, Maughan's characters -- a free software hacker who is the architect and a grassroots free/open alternative to surveillance captialism's version of augmented reality; a seer who can call up images of the dead; a DJ who uses a sputtering, non-networked sampler and 3.5" floppies and aging audio cassettes to mix beats; a guerilla fighter who has spent a decade in Wales, waging war on the conscript army that the elite uses to enslave agricultural workers -- work backwards and forwards to the now of the story, explaining the mysterious event that killed every networked device in the world, almost at the same instant, and precipitated the chaos that shows no sign of ending.

Along the way, Maughan conducts a masterclass in the thrill and contradictions of counterculture, the uses and abuses of networks, the ways that capitalism can bend and flex to adapt, until, suddenly, it breaks.

This is a stunning debut.

Infinite Detail [Tim Maughan/Farrar, Strauss, Giroux]

01 Mar 12:09

Portmanteau generator

by Rob Beschizza

The Portmanteau and Rhyme Generator accepts two input words and produces weird coinages that are often surprisingly funny. "Rhino" and "Hospital", for example, produces "Boarphanage" and "hotelephant" among other things.

I tried "chaste caravaggio" and got "Vermeerotic". "Moist carpet" yielded "flavorniture". "Lube barrel" turned into "bluebrication". Magic.

22 Feb 02:52

Mount Vernon's Brewer's Art pub planning a second location in Howard County

by Erin B. Logan

A popular Mount Vernon restaurant known for its own Belgian-style beers plans to open a second location next month, in the western portion of Howard County.

The Brewer’s Art will take over the space once occupied by Highland Tavern off Clarksville Pike.

Ryan Roth, the tavern’s landlord who lives...

18 Feb 13:43

Death Generator: classic video game scenes with custom text

by Rob Beschizza

Foone Turing's Death Generator lets you create customizable "death" scenes from dozens of computer games. Foone painstakingly rips the media and fonts from old ROMs to create authentic recreations. Put in the text you want and the widget updates automatically. Some games have other options, and there's a button to upload your creation to imgur.

If you want more stuff like this, Foone has a patreon page.

11 Jan 16:27

How to protect yourself from email tracking

by Rob Beschizza

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Sydney Li and Bennett Cyphers explain how to stop people tracking you through email. Read-receipt beacons and other trickery abounds.

...third-party email tracking technologies will try to share and correlate your email address across different emails that you open, and even across different websites that you visit, further shaping your invisible online profile. And since people often access their email from different devices, email address leaks allow trackers (and often network observers) to correlate your identity across devices.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

The nutshell: it's not enough to block remote images in the client anymore. But you're probably not even doing that. For many, many of you, here's the first step:

19 Dec 18:15

Furoshiki: simple ways to wrap gifts with cloth

by Carla Sinclair

Why waste paper, tape and ribbons to wrap gifts when you can just use fabric, or furoshiki cloth?

Furoshiki is the art of wrapping something in fabric, and it's also the word used for the cloth itself. In Japan you can buy "furoshiki cloth," but really you can use any square or rectangle piece of fabric you have lying around.

From Lifehacker:

The word furoshiki (風呂敷) refers to the craft in addition to the cloth itself, which is usually decorated with a colorful design. It roughly translates to “bath (furo) spread (shiki)” because the cloths were originally used to carry items to the public bath house and then used as a kind of bath mat. Nowadays, it’s just a clever way to wrap up and carry bottles, food, gifts, and other items.

Here are more furoshiki 101 videos to check out:



06 Dec 20:01

Optician Sans: a font based on eye-charts

by Cory Doctorow

Since 1959, patients undergoing eye exams have stared at eye-charts whose limited set of characters was created by Louise Sloan; now, the typographer Fábio Duarte Martins has completed the font and released it for free: Optician Sans. (via Kottke)

05 Dec 18:24

British Member of Parliament publishes 250 pages of damning internal Facebook documents that had been sealed by a US court

by Cory Doctorow

Damian Collins chairs the UK Parliament's Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee; it was he who ordered the Parliamentary Serjeant at Arms to drag a visiting US tech executive named Ted Kramer out of his hotel to surrender his laptop to Parliament so they could see the internal Facebook documents that a US federal judge had ordered sealed.

Kramer is CEO of Six4Three, a creepy US startup whose Facebook app helped you find pictures of your friends in bikinis; when the app was neutered by a change to Facebook's API, Six4Three sued Facebook and in the course of pre-trial discovery, they were given extensive internal documents from Facebook, which the judge in the case had ordered sealed. Somehow, Collins got wind of the fact that Kramer, his laptop, and the documents were all in London, and -- having been spurned by Mark Zuckerberg, who repeatedly refused demands to appear in Parliament -- saw his chance.

Now, Collins has dumped a 250 page file, hosted on Parliament's servers, which includes the documents from Kramer's laptop and Collins's summary.

The release comes despite a plea from Facebook to respect the US court order and not publish the documents.

The documents are incredibly damning. They show Facebookers at the highest level -- up to CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg -- conspiring to trick Android users about how much data was being gathered by an update to the Facebook app; to give certain companies "whitelisted" access to user data beyond the access the company had disclosed to its users; to explicitly productize "friends" data (that is, to allow the trick Cambridge Analytica pulled, when getting a user to grant permission to their own data also allowed a company to access their friends' data); to use the Onavo battery-monitor app to covertly gather data on which other apps users had installed; and anti-competitive targeting of partners' apps.

Collins tweeted: "I believe there is considerable public interest in releasing these documents. They raise important questions about how Facebook treats users data, their policies for working with app developers, and how they exercise their dominant position in the social media market."

This isn't just one smoking gun, it's hundreds of them. This is Facebook's worst nightmare.

Summary of key issues from the Six4Three files

1. White Lists

Facebook have clearly entered into whitelisting agreements with certain companies, which meant that after the platform changes in 2014/15 they maintained full access to friends data. It is not clear that there was any user consent for this, nor how Facebook decided which companies should be whitelisted or not.

2. Value of friends data

It is clear that increasing revenues from major app developers was one of the key drivers behind the Platform 3.0 changes at Facebook. The idea of linking access to friends data to the financial value of the developers relationship with Facebook is a recurring feature of the documents.

3. Reciprocity

Data reciprocity between Facebook and app developers was a central feature in the discussions about the launch of Platform 3.0.

4. Android

Facebook knew that the changes to its policies on the Android mobile phone system, which enabled the Facebook app to collect a record of calls and texts sent by the user would be controversial. To mitigate any bad PR, Facebook planned to make it as hard of possible for users to know that this was one of th e underlying features of the upgrade of their app.

5. Onavo

Facebook used Onavo to conduct global surveys of the usage of mobile apps by customers, and apparently without their knowledge. They used this data to assess not just how many people had download ed apps, but how often they used them. This knowledge helped them to decide which companies to acquire, and which to treat as a threat.

6. Targeting competitor Apps

The files show evidence of Facebook taking aggressive positions against apps, with the consequence that denying them access to data led to the failure of that business.

Summary of key issues from the Six4Three files [Damian Collins MP/DCMS Committee]

Nearly 250 Pages of Devastating Internal Facebook Documents Posted Online By UK Parliament [Jason Koebler and Joseph Cox/Motherboard]

30 Nov 19:25

Code recreates Pfizer's 1956 effort to procedurally generate drug names

by Rob Beschizza

Procedural generation isn't just for video game landscapes and galaxies. The technique for creating vast amounts of realistic but uncannily superficial content goes back a long way. Pfizer used it to generate drug names in 1956, feeding code to an IBM mainframe and getting potential products in return.

James Ryan (@xfoml) posted excerpts from news article from the time (above), and it's fascinating to read how it's described for a mid-1950s lay audience to whom computers and their ways were utterly alien.

Based on the newspaper's description, Hugo (@hugovk) reimplemented the 60-year-old generator, and now you too can generate thousands of realistic but uncannily superficial drug names.

Some picks:

NEW DRUG NAMES

scudyl
whirringom
reenef
entreeic
suffuseeta
duplexune
nickelan
raunchyata
handbillal
gammonasa
pluckerel
slawax

...
IMPROPER FOR A FAMILY MEDICINE CHEST

loraliva
crumpledol
moralura
burnishite
smuttyevo
sucklingify
hagfishat
cockpited
moralux
ballcockose
shittyule
cocklesex

From the full output list I like "coughedore" -- like a stevedore, but for unloading mucus.

I wonder how long it took Pfizer to realize that procgen is useless.

28 Nov 20:08

Popper

At least, I don't think there's evidence. My claim that there's no evidence hasn't been falsified. At least, not that I know of.
16 Nov 15:43

The Lie Behind the Lie Detector: how to beat the pseudoscientific polygraph

by Cory Doctorow

George writes, "AntiPolygraph.org has released the 5th edition of its free ebook, The Lie Behind the Lie Detector, which provides a thorough debunking of the pseudoscience of polygraphy and explains how to pass or beat a polygraph test."

25 Oct 17:55

Disney theme parks have a serious problem with cremain-scattering

by Cory Doctorow

If you ever hear an announcement on a Disneyland or Walt Disney World PA calling for a "HEPA cleanup" it means that someone has just dumped a dead person's ashes in a ride. Again.

Obviously the Haunted Mansion is a prime locale for this, but the lawns, the water rides, the castles, and every other place get their share of cremains. It's cathartic for the ash-scatterers but seriously gross for the custodial staff.

To get ashes past the bag-search, it's best to hide them in pharmaceutical pill bottles or makeup compacts. The "HEPA cleanup" code replaces an unofficial and now banned castmember euphemism: "Code Grandma."

Though ash-scattering is a misdemeanor, it doesn't seem like anyone's ever been arrested for it.

Human ashes have been spread in flower beds, on bushes and on Magic Kingdom lawns; outside the park gates and during fireworks displays; on Pirates of the Caribbean and in the moat underneath the flying elephants of the Dumbo ride. Most frequently of all, according to custodians and park workers, they’ve been dispersed throughout the Haunted Mansion, the 49-year-old attraction featuring an eerie old estate full of imaginary ghosts.

“The Haunted Mansion probably has so much human ashes in it that it’s not even funny,” said one Disneyland custodian.

A Disney spokeswoman said, “this type of behavior is strictly prohibited and unlawful. Guests who attempt to do so will be escorted off property.”

Disney World’s Big Secret: It’s a Favorite Spot to Scatter Family Ashes [Erich Schwartzel/WSJ]

(Thanks, Don!)

(Image: Benjamin D. Esham, Laurentius [CC-BY-SA])

17 Oct 18:19

The NCAA Is Gaslighting You

by Andy Schwarz

In last month’s antitrust case in Oakland challenging the artificial caps on athlete compensation, the NCAA’s defense included the restatement of an imaginary economic principle that is fundamental to its existence: College athletes shouldn’t make money, the NCAA argued, because if players were paid above some magical…

Read more...

17 Oct 18:16

Every fantasy map

by Rob Beschizza

EotBeholder on Deviantart nails decades of derivative genre fiction and gameplay with "the only fantasy world map you'll ever need."

Wow, almost four years later and this thing just exploded. ... To anyone asking for permission to use this for their own campaigns... I mean it hardly qualifies as "original", so as long as you're comfortable stealing from someone who steals from the people who only steal from the best, knock yourselves out :)

If I could make some additions (which I suppose I could, but, nah) I'd call out the Boring/Doomed Pastoral Village somewhere in the Tiny Bickering Fiefdoms or the Land of Poncy Knights, and also add a Giant Wall to Keep the Monsters Out. Giant walls are so hot right now.

I love the comments and tweets from fans of specific franchises (such as Forgotten Realms or Riftwar) who think it is specifically a parody of their favorite fantasy world. See TVTropes' entry for the fantasy world map and, specifically, the left-justified fantasy maps.

The map of Allansia from the Fighting Fantasy gamebook series is a nice professionally-drawn example.

Previously.

05 Oct 11:17

Baby rhino skips and jumps like his lamb buddy

by Seamus Bellamy

LOooOooook! This baby rhino learned how to jump and skip from it's lamb buddy. I needed this today.

I think this video would be a great way to illustrate why multiculturalism is so awesome: when we're exposed to thoughts, food and cultures other than our own, our horizons are broadened. Our lives are enriched. It gives us new, joyful ways to frolic.

17 Jul 09:53

McMansion meanings: why do America's jumbo-sized status homes have useless "formal spaces?"

by Cory Doctorow

As far back as 2012, UCLA researchers were publishing studies that showed that Americans basically never used their "formal spaces" -- dining rooms, "great rooms" and parlours -- instead, they spend most of their time in the kitchen and the "informal" den. (more…)