Andrew Turley

The crayon art I draw was partially out of spite for the modern idea that "art" is hyperealistic perfection with no flaws. I feel like this idea is what partially pushes AI; nobody wants to start out with flawed, rudimentary art out of fear.

But art isn't meant to be perfect, polished, artificial.

Ok, technically not Neolithic

"Quest For Fire" leaves a lot of room for interpretation

(Yes I'm aware that these people have very specific ideas of *who* should be having more babies, and this policy is consistent with with that aim)

"Why won't these people have more babies?" asks the political party dedicated to making it more difficult to raise children

Read the thread, it's good bsky.app/profile/fito...

one of the reasons that transphobia gets so intense is that "social transition", a term which is often treated as a joke or a bandaid for meds, is actually really important
it is about (literally not in an uwu way) making space for people outside of what what We treat as "a man or a woman" 1/

This bookshelf is all you need to become a software developer

I was reading about how Kabuki theater used to basically feature a bunch of ripped-from-the-headlines acts until it was cast in carbonite by the occupying forces after WWII

Anyway we need to bring back saucy topical local theater

Mostly trying to get @oldsound.bsky.social to yell at me

Borges' "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" is a story about promoting in enough context to get a latent space to throw up a recognizable chunk of output

obviously there are also massive self-inflicted demographic and education issues in the US, but I suspect having access to unlimited compute created toxic incentives for western tech corps. brute force is probs not a winning long-term strategy here

[arrested development did it work for them no but it just might work for us].gif

A 15 pound asshole just tested your theory on my stomach and says that, yeah, it's great

That car is HAWT

40 years on and we may finally see the AppleScript dream of usefully linking your software together come true

pls ad astra?? no per aspera!! only ad astra

The early history of COBOL | History of programming languages

Oh right, since ACM stopped being absolute dinguses and made the digital library open access, I can now point you Jean Sammet's "The early history of COBOL" absolutely free

dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Chuck Moore's story about the creation of Forth (all the motivations and ideas behind it) keep popping back into my head as I think about how AI coding systems are our most recent attempts to use more concise and natural language to describe what computers should do colorforth.github.io/HOPL.html

An LLM is a token generator, so yes, it is a very energy-intensive autocomplete system, and if you give it enough prior words it can quickly spit out some very useful next words

I talked a lot of shit on "prompt engineering" but I'm going to admit that "feed a ton of context in before asking a question" is basically indistinguishable from prompt engineering

My takeaway from this and my own experience is that these systems work poorly (but confidently) if given minimal context

On the other hand, the more context you give them, the better they'll perform

The risk is people thinking it's a magic box that always gives the correct answer

So many other things to cover in this story but I'm just gonna add the stupidest take and say that "Blayne Newton" is a terrible name

[legally barred from pursuing this line of discussion]

Somebody's going to come here to point out prior art and I want that person to know that I intentionally refuse to dwell in the valley of shame

Cursed ideas ...

Eventually consistent systems architecture

Append-only architecture (no updates in place, only appends)

Something like a CRDT but for software architecture

Again, cursed, not a place of honor etc ...

Fun fact: when I run DEI workshops about trans stuff (it happens occasionally) one of my strategies is to start by getting people to talk about cyclists and their experiences. This usually works to build empathy, but occasionally it turns out that people actually hate cyclists more than trans people

Here's Laurie Spiegel introducing Music Mouse in the 1980s - CDM Create Digital Music Eventide has posted a fantastic archival video in advance of their remake of Music Mouse. In this 1987 episode of Midnight Muse, composer and programmer Laurie Spiegel explains the software and takes ...

How Laurie Spiegel thought about Music Mouse in 1986-1987, from the introduction she wrote accompanying the software and an interview:

[new blog post]

Butlers or Architects?

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/02/butl...

"What if my eager intern was also Hunter S. Thompson?"