ritchie

For example, on visiting Dockyard and the convicts forced to labour there, Trollope resented bitterly the convicts’ rations as being far too generous. “He [the convict] has a pound of meat; he has good meat too, lucky dog, while those wretched Bermudians,” he wrote, “are tugging out their teeth against tough carcasses!” The tough conditions under which the convicts lived, he felt, were far too lenient since they were better than those of labourers in Britain. Bermuda’s landscape did not overly impress him either. The cedars he described as “small, stunted” and “bushy” although the oleanders quite pleased him. But his main criticism was against the climate which made him “always anxious to be supine, lying down whenever I could find a sofa; ever anxious for a rocking chair, and solicitous for a quick arrival of the hour of the bed…” His physical reaction to the climate did not make him sympathetic to that of the locals, however: “The people, both black and white, seemed to be only half awake. The land is only half cultivated, and hardly half is tilled of that which might be tilled.” What did he think of Bermuda’s postal system? Strangely, he does not mention it—not once. Neither does he mention Perot, who must surely have hosted Trollope when he was staying in the City of Hamilton. But he was rude about Bermuda’s system of government with its governor, council and house of assembly, and by implication about the island’s female and black inhabitants: “…but now I am hardly sure whether a population of ten or twelve thousand individuals, of whom much more than half are women, and more than half the remainder negroes, require so composite a constitution. Would not a strict governor, with due reference to Downing Street do just as well?” Why, he asked, should “such a little spot as Bermuda” have its own constitution?

also I am immediately finding out that you do not have to hand it to anthony trollope www.thebermudian.com/heritage/her...

wow wait this book goes hard

Port
vec3 w,p;for(float z,d=.1,i,f;i++<1e2;o+=.03/abs(mix(p,w,.1).y+vec4(0,1,2,3)/1e2)*d,z+=d=.3*(length(cos(p.xz))-.4))for(p=z*(FC.rgb*2.-r.xyy)/r.y+1.,w=p,f=0.;f++<5.;)w+=sin(w.zxy*f-9.*exp(-d/.1)+t)/f;o=tanh(o);

getting emotional wishing that david graeber hadn't died 5 years ago, because you know, he would probably be helping out right now

is that good

this is a stancil screenshot, alt text for my muted word friends

his internal what?

Picture of a physical desktop. There is a USB thumb drive on it labeled "3D Files" and immediately next to it, a cutout photocopy of the USB thumb drive labeled "2D files."

S/o to this joke I played on our lab tech in 2019

A rabbit in overalls and a goat in pants are sitting on the ground drawing pictures. The rabbit is saying “ART POSES A THREAT TO CORPORATOLRATIC SYSTEMS BECAUSE A PURPOSE OF ART IS TO REMIND THE INDIVIDUAL OF THEIR INHERENT AUTONOMY.”, the goat adds “THEIR HUMANITY.”

Make Art (1/4)

i need more people to watch battlestar galactica so I sound less crazy when i’m yelling about how the plan is for some of them to escape the burning wreck of the earth and leave the rest of us behind

But yeah your points make sense and I agree in principle - the wildly Byzantine tooling in web dev is one of the worst and most widespread offenders for this

If you’re spread really thin across a lot of kinds of software development you may not build up the familiarity and deep understanding required to build and use skills like error familiarity - which obviously isn’t great, but I do think it is realistic

But I think in a lot of current practical software development people do end up pulling in and using a bunch of tools they half understand (and vibe coding can jack this up even more) and that’s where staying close to the norm in terms of how you’re building things is a locally beneficial strategy

And that you can quickly hit a ceiling trying to pattern match your problems to other people’s problems or hoping that the compiler tells you what’s wrong rather than actually developing a good understanding of what your code is doing.

It feels like error familiarity would be highly correlated with experience and deep understanding - I agree with both your points that using tools built on top of tools built on top of other tools adds a lot of fragility

Someone I know keeps saying that once you understand Stancil as an eve online AND a League player, everything about him makes complete sense

OK now it's a panel!!

Current project on how you can reinterpret large corpora of statistical tables as sources of collective creative imagination

very cool pre-writing / text editor tool

sketching over and over - not to solve the problem but to internalize the representation of the problem

information may affect or find different people differently

we have a maturana reference!!

split in the user study between the responses of novice and experienced participants - novices accepted the suggestions of the tool, but experts were very argumentative in response to the tool's suggestions, which helped them articulate why their alternative design was better!

Prof Nakakoji's dissertation work - trying to get users unstuck from design fixation she created a system for supporting kitchen layouts

is this perhaps the best slide so far in terms of graphic design?

Overviewing the many different facets of creativity and the creative process -- is creativity a property of an artifact or of a person?

oh wait, prof. nakakoji is giving a brief talk

At least if I’m the end user of a bad electron app and it breaks I can google the error message and have more hope of getting context on what’s going on - if it’s a sleek custom implementation of a subset of electron and it breaks it will be harder to figure out

I am torn! I agree it probably results in higher quality individual pieces of software (and definitely less bloat) to avoid using unnecessary frameworks just because it’s a more standard way of doing things - but pragmatically I think it makes things like maintenance more finicky

OK that's all the talks I'm not gonna skeet the panel discussion

more ASTs!!!!