Inside the Little Plastic Castle

from someone who's a realist-for-now yet also wants to believe.

Adam Engst on Can Agentic Web Browsers Count?

tl;dr No, given a readily available data set on a webpage, they can't.

The sweetest and scariest part was his sympathy for Copilot's very anxious inner monologue as it tried to come up with answers while working to a deadline that nobody had created.

When it comes to system prompts, the anxious tone of Copilot’s internal responses suggests a “ship now, apologize later, if you’re caught” system prompt that, if reflected in a real-world workplace, would be problematic. Obviously, AIs don’t have feelings that can be hurt and won’t complain to HR, but such a culture tends to encourage people to cut corners and make poor decisions that compromise quality and customer service. If Copilot is any indication, the same is true for AIs.

99pi.org/adapt

Kurt Kohlstedt has spent ten years creating audio and print stories for the design podcast, 99% Invisible. He also co-authored the 99% Invisible City book.

Last year, 99pi’s Kurt Kohlstedt suffered a severe injury that incapacitated his right arm and dominant hand. In the aftermath, new everyday challenges led him to research, test, and evolve accessible design solutions. These experiences set the stage for Adapt or Design, a twelve-part project of 99% Invisible in three acts, available at the short link 99pi.org/adapt

The Adapt or Design series includes many groan-worthy puns related to hands; six essays exploring assistive designs for people with one functional hand; three design hacks and mods that helped Kurt manage long-term rehabilitation; and three final essays diving deep into adaptive writing technologies including a free one-handed "mirror keyboard" for Windows PowerToys.

While the first article posted in April, I just heard about it via the 99% Invisible podcast 630, where Kurt and Roman talk about all these things.

The Secret History of Font Piracy

Today LinusBoman talks about font theft. Back in the 1990s I worked in a desktop publishing service bureau. Font foundries were still using a pricing model based on industrial customers with several blocks worth of printing presses and thousands of books. Font piracy was so widespread as to be fundamental. Good times—Linus brings it all back with an excellent news hook: how the unavoidable you wouldn’t steal a car message that scolded at the start of every VHS or DVD used a pirated font. Pro captions, silent title cards subdivide the video into eight sections.

Watch on YouTube
( or stream 21 minutes here )

Linus Boman is so my type of design nerd. More about him at TimesNewBoman.com

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Kevin B Parry animates himself doing impossible things

Watch on YouTube

( stream six minutes of amazing here )

Audio is instrumental music. I invite you to write image descriptions; here are the first three:

1. Kevin in red hoodie stands in corner, falls slowly to ground — at moment of impact human becomes eight red balloons, bouncing lazily
2. Big cardboard boxes in empty room. Kevin stands behind one of them, jumps into the air and then into the box. His body sinks in and he’s suspended by his armpits — at the same time as his legs push up from inside another box
3. Leaning on a counter, Kevin slides his right hand along the corner towards the camera, and then his hand detaches and begins to slide all the way to the end of the counter, where he drums his fingers. Then the fingers slide back to his arm.

Watch Kevin on all the platforms: https://lnk.bio/kevinbparry/

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Visual ASMR

Anthony Howe of HoweARTdotNET sculpts stainless steel into "kinetic sculpture," installed outside and set in motion by the wind. Most comprise a circular metal structure atop a 10 to 20 feet curved column. The circle supports four to eight rings that rotate perpendicular to the circle. Each of these rings is decorated with assorted shapes, including discs, commas, sticks, flaps, and blades. The rings are staggered so that the motion seems infinitely various; the shiny stainless steel creates cascading light and sparkles as it moves, along with the illusion of interlocking gears moving forward and backward at the same time.

If you’re at all photosensitive, scroll on by — do not open this "details" arrow

Many static pictures to admire at https://www.howeart.net

55 seconds of very flashy kinetic sculpture video, no audio

pudding.cool hosts remarkable visualizations of a wide, wide range of data. As their front page boasts:

The Pudding is a digital publication that explains ideas debated in culture with visual essays makes cool shit on the internet. You might have seen our story on women’s pockets, but we’ve also made stuff about mapping famous people and celebrity name spelling.

The point of the site is making aesthetically pleasing data visualization, and the design withstands being zoomed up to 175%. I can’t speak to its accessibility otherwise. What’s revved me up this time is

Who gets shipped and why?

Extensive data visualization of relationship patterns in fanfic on the AO3. They quote thinkers I’ve enjoyed in the past — Kristina Busse and Joanna Russ among many — and as a treat, they host a random relationship generator at the top of the page.

( 125 word snippet )

https://pudding.cool/2024/10/fanfic

The OED Cares About Fannish Language

The Oxford English Dictionary was an early fandom for me — our family squabbled over who got the magnifying glass when the Compact OED arrived in 1971. (It squeezed 20 volumes into two by making the print tiny — essentially a paper microfiche.) So I was charmed by Dr Catherine Sangster’s article "Looking back at Geek Dictionary Corner"

( 125 word sample )

https://www.oed.com/discover/looking-back-at-geek-dictionary-corner

https://nineworlds.co.uk

And there’s more…

Seminar: The influence of pop culture on mainstream language

Thursday, November 21, 2024
1700 UTC (11:00 a.m. central US & Canada)

Join editors Dr Catherine Sangster and Fiona McPherson, and guest speakers Prof Dr Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer and Dr Fraser Dallachy for a discussion on the language of science fiction, fantasy, gaming, and other specific fandoms:

• How and why language that develops in these communities is adopted more widely
• How does the OED monitor these developments, and decide what should (or should not) be recorded
• Interesting examples
• The influence of World Englishes varieties and other languages
• Q&A time – bring your questions to the panellists or send them in advance to oed.uk@oup.com

Sign up to watch live https://events.oup.com/oup-academic-marketing/OED-pop-culture.

Will probably show up on OxfordLanguages’s YouTube channel.

When I was a kid I played with my Kenner Girder & Panel building set, delighting in the mysteries of cantilevers. Taking it apart and putting it together again was very gratifying. I was amazed today to see a full-size girder & panel set on the way to the library.

Lustron homes were mass-produced, all steel with baked-on porcelain finish inside and out. Designed to meet the post-World-War-II demand for housing (financed by the racist G.I. bill), they arrived in a truck and could be erected in a week.

( Before )

( Right now )

Of the 2500 prefab houses made before the company went bankrupt, 16 were in Madison, most in neighborhoods near my house. The owner of the nearest had no success renting it, and sought a demolition permit. The city asked that he take the house apart and make it available to other Lustron owners. and that’s why there’s a small-house construction set on Chatham Terrace.

Visit the WBM archive of http://www.lustronlocator.com to see if there’s one near you.

No detailed descriptions of rape, but many survivors describe their cruel dismissal by the police and courts.

( overview and lots of quotes )

Prompted by sunshine_challenge, I’m trying to clean up my tags. I apply them liberally, and the result of ten years of blogging is more than 650 tags. YIKES.

I have three tag sets that are conceptually related, and probably too granular, and I seek insights on how to better merge them.

( Data herders welcome )

I was hopeful this very various anthology would spark some new ideas, as its mission statement is at the intersection of design-as-theory and design-as-practice.

If you have university access, you can read it online http://www.tandfebooks.com/doi/view/10.4324/9781315560076

For Interlibrary loan: Print and ebook

Three chapters made this jumbled collection worth reading; here's how you can almost read them if you don't have university access: ( essentially the same articles available on the web )

Font Squirrel is a great place to go when you're looking for a new font for a project, website, or reading application.

Like many font sites, you can browse by style like "serif" or helpful tags like "corporate" or by language like "Hebrew."

But you don't even have to search for "FREE" because all the fonts on the site are ready to download, most of them with webfonts as well as desktop, application, and ereader licenses. Many are as lovely as the ones I pay hundreds for at commercial foundries.

They also have an "almost free" section listing bargain fonts.

https://www.fontsquirrel.com