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Posts tagged as “Blogging Every Day”

[eighty-five] minus one-oh-four: what even IS that?

Published July 8, 2023 by centaur
centaur 0

Recently on Twitter I said everything's going to hell in a handbasket on the Web. Let me show you ...

Oh, wait, I can't show you, because WordPress's Gutenberg is not letting me paste a link. More properly, it's turning the link into a Twitter embedding. Now, that looks nice, and it seems like a nice feature, but I didn't want that, because Twitter is increasingly erratic, and I am afraid the Twitter embedding feature will go away when Elon Muskhead gets tired of suing people over his own stupid mistakes and starts mucking with the code again. So I just wanted to paste a link, and then the text, myself.

But I had to "hack" the interface to do it, first posting a different link, which I then edited to point to Twitter. Does that seem right to you? That's one thing that inspired my post. Let's try again to see it:

https://twitter.com/xenotaur/status/1677735989249298441

Anthony Francis @xenotaur
The Web feels like it is disintegrating. Popup ads everywhere, train wrecks at Twitter and Reddit, Threads is just mobile, sponsored results on Google, fake reviews on Amazon.

And here I am watching my 1,000 curated RSS feeds slowly vanishing, going "This is fine…" #ThisIsFine

ttps://twitter.com/xenotaur/status/1677735989249298441

Part of the problem is what Cory Doctorow calls the "enshittification" of the Web: first companies are nice to users and attract them; when they have users they screw them over for their business customers; and then they screw business users overs as they start to chase advertisers, eventually driving the users away.

I think that's right, but it's more than that: people lose sight of what the Web actually is. Web 1.0 is a place to share documents; Web 2.0 is a place where you can create them online. We've had ads and subscriptions in this place since their earliest days, and I don't mind them - I put "banner ads" on my early website to advertise people whose blogs and books I liked, for free, just to publicize them.

But losing sight of the purpose - turning editors into viewers, or documents into ads streams - means the reason people were here, to consume and create content, can no longer be accomplished. And that's going to ultimately kill the great grift that is modern Web advertising - but let's not kill the Web too!

As an on-point example, I offer the Gutenberg editor, which constantly hides from you the widgets needed to transform a piece of text into, say, a pull quote, because it is incorrectly (and I will fight you on this) trying to make the page look like a piece of paper, instead of a craftsman's tool for producing text, with all the bells, whistles and knobs needed to make it format right, much less look good. Want something simpler? Fine, try Notepad. Don't inject your bad UI design into my editor, which, as I remind you, I am forced to use on my platform, which I never wanted to, because they broke the Classic Editor to push this idiocy.

It's not that the features aren't useful. It's that the entire philosophy of "UX" - user experience - is wrongheaded, and we need to go back to the more basic principles of software usability. Usability is not "modern", usability is not "clean", usability is not "design" - only usability is usability.

And so, if you take a tool that is designed to produce text ... and try to make it look like a view of text ... you will inevitably end up with something that is not usable. And if your philosophy tricks you into thinking that that is OK, your philosophy will drive you to make decisions which make the interface less and less usable.

And that would be the end of rant ... except I have a counterexample at the top of the page.

This is a page that recently appeared in my reading. I will take the clean, modern, well-designed Gutenberg editor any day over what modern web pages have become. Look at that above! What even IS that? What is it supposed to be? Where did my article go? What are these different blocks supposed to be advertising? They're so layered over each other you can't completely see any of them. "Choose great value" sounds like a line from a badly translated JRPG.

As best as I can determine, somehow I scrolled down to read the rest of the article, and it jumped to a join between articles on an "infinite scrolling" page. While some infinite scrolling pages are OK, most simply aren't. Especially a page for an article: you can't read the article anymore with infinite scroll. It doesn't stop, and if the next article has a similar topic, it can even seem like a new heading, making you wonder what the connection is, but giving an opportunity to sell ads - leading to what I think happened here.

So, while trying to read, and thus, scroll through this content - an article which claimed that Doctor Who's time travel was surprisingly accurate, which is more true than most people know - the page jumped to a join between articles in the infinite scroll. Because the page "jumped", all of this just popped into view; it wasn't clear that I scrolled, or that scrolling would get me out of it). The layout completely hides the articles above and below, and the jumble of popups fall over each other, leaving me no context of what to click on.

If you try to turn a document reader into an ads stream, you will fail at doing both.

I fear for the future. Because I love the Web ... and it's killing itself.

-the Centaur

Pictured: a screen shot of screenrant.com, of a broken article on the science of Doctor Who, correctly recommended to me by Google News, and completely garbled by ScreenRant's infinite scroll and jumbled ad presentation, leaving me unsure of what, if anything, to do other than ... just close the page.

(Actually, I reloaded it from scratch, selected the text of the article, and printed it for later reading. I don't care if there's an ad on the page or not; that's fine. I just demand to be able to read the darn thing.)

[eighty-four] minus one-oh-five: so far, so good, morning edition

Published July 8, 2023 by centaur
centaur 0

So far, so good, on the new strategy of starting off with the projects, rather than the maintenance: I've tweeted, checked in with LinkedIn, worked on some non-fiction books, am blogging, and am about to switch gears to writing my Camp Nano entry, SPIRAL NEEDLE.

I'd felt like I was falling into a bit of a slump after getting through the big Embodied AI and Social Navigation deadlines (more on that later) and I gave this new strategy a try after chatting with my buddy, popular science author Jim Davies (author of Riveted, Imagination, and Being the Person Your Dog Thinks You Are).

Jim taked to me about how prioritizing book-writing was critical for his process. I don't really have to do that for fiction - or, more properly, I have structured my entire life around ensuring I have time set aside for fiction writing, so at this point it is practically free - but non-fiction books are new to me.

But one of his other suggestions baffled me, not because it didn't make sense, but because it made too much sense - except I was already doing it, and it wasn't working. Jim pointed out that most people go through periods of vigilance, slump, and recovery during their day, and that as a morning person he reserved book writing, which required critical thinking, for his early vigilant time. Errands like bill-paying worked well for him in the slump, and he felt most creative in the recovery period in the evening.

Okay, great, I thought, I can use this. Already I can see shifting the order I do things in my day - as a night owl, I start my day off in the slump, recover from that, and then get increasingly and increasingly vigilant the further and further I go into the night. (If I have a project due and no obligations the next day, this can go on for hours and hours before exhaustion starts to outpace execution and productivity finally drops).

So maybe switch errands to earlier in the day, I thought, and productivity in the afternoon. But wait a minute: I'm already using my late nights for my most creative time. Why isn't this working.

What I realized is that I have an irregular schedule. In THEORY my late-night time is my most productive time, but in PRACTICE on some nights I get an hour, on some nights I get two (or five) and on some nights I am already so wiped that I really don't get much done at all.

But I do almost always get something done in the morning, even if it takes me time to get rolling. And for me, catching up on papers or writing notes or catching up on my blog is a mostly mechanical activity: it's not that creative thought isn't required, but it isn't to the level of, say, a novel or a scientific paper, where a hard-won sentence may be the result of a half an hour's search tracking down a key reference or fact, or, worse, an hour's worth of brainstorming alone or meeting with others to decide WHAT to write.

So: I can't count on myself to do a creative "chore" - something that has to be done regularly, like blogging or social media, or something that has to be done incrementally over a long period of time, like collating references or thoughts for a non-fiction book - by putting it in my evening creative block. The evening creative block is too irregular, and needs to be reserved for novels and art anyway.

The fix: blog (et al) in the morning.

Let's see how it goes.

-the Centaur

Pictured: tomato and lettuce sandwiches for breakfast, with the leftovers of the tomato as a side dish. At the breakfast table is Christopher Bishop's Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning, also available as a PDF, the latest of a long series of "difficult breakfast table books" which I laboriously read through, a page at a time - sometimes, one page over several days, until I "get" it - to increase my understanding of the world. Past breakfast table books have included Machine Vision, A New Kind of Science, and Probability Theory: the Logic of Science, the first is out of date now, but the latter two are perennial and highly recommended.

[eighty-three] minus one-oh-five: upending things a bit

Published July 7, 2023 by centaur
centaur 0

Normally I post at the end of the day, which means if I run out of time in the day, I don't post. Well, I want to change that, and unlike most of my other tasks, most of my blog posts don't expand into projects of unusual size. So I'm trying out starting by day with a tweet, a blog post, and a some work on my very longest-horizon projects, like my novel series or my nonfiction books, which cannot be completed in one sitting or even in a simple concentrated push over a few months, and must, therefore, be taken one step at a time.

And, so, hey! Here's a post. Enjoy.

-the Centaur

Pictured: I don't really do mornings, so this is the first "early" picture I could find, breakfast at Stax Omega.

[eighty-two] minus ninety-two: an air-conditioner shattering KABOOM

Published June 23, 2023 by centaur
centaur 0

No good picture for this one yet, but today I found out that the lightning strike that took out our internet may also have taken out the air conditioning for the upstairs (where, ya know, our bed and sleeping is). I seem to recall it having trouble before the lightning strike, but that may have been a completely different problem with the filters, which also need replacing.

Apparently this repair is going to be pricey, and it may be cheaper to replace the entire unit. This will take another week or so. In the meantime, we've run the fan so much the wallpaper has started to peel in the bedroom due to the humidity, and it's still to hot to sleep most nights. As Dr. McCoy would say, "Oh, joy."

My wife has wondered whether we should get lightning rods installed on the house. After several years here, this is our first strike, and I wonder whether it will happen again. There's the old saw that you prepare for the last disaster, and that seems to be true: we first had sewage problems, then a burst supply line on a toilet, then a separate problem with the AC, then tree removals due to ivy, then a freeze, now this. Not much of a pattern there except for the trees and ivy, which we're working on as a long-term project.

Hopefully next up we will not have tornadoes or flooding, because we really can't do that much about tornadoes, and since our house is high on a ridge, if we get flooded out, you can kiss Greenville goodbye.

More news as it develops.

-the Centaur

Pictured: the back porch at night, since I do not seem to have any good pictures of the recent torrential rains and the associated lightning strike, even though I distinctly recalled having taken some. :-/

[eighty-one] minus ninety-one: the clouds were ON yesterday, man

Published June 21, 2023 by centaur
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I wished I had a drone or something to fly up, or more hours in the day to drive around and find some place to take pictures not blocked by buildings and power lines. Even so, look at those beauties:

No filters, no AI, no nothing, just a Samsung phone (and Android's computational photography libraries).

-the Centaur

[eighty] minus ninety-one: a modem-shattering KABOOM

Published June 20, 2023 by centaur
centaur 0

Sorry for the no posts for several days. I'd say it's because I've been busy prepping for the Embodied AI Workshop - and I was - but when I brought up the Library of Dresan interface, I saw a half-finished post on my cut hand, and realized, oh yeah, lightning struck the computer while I was working on this. And it did, or more properly, struck the broadband gateway and fried all the Ethernet-connected devices attached to it. Fortunately, the laptop was not one of those things, but it did put a crimp into things for a while. Back to it.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Well, I didn't capture a picture of the lightning, or the aftermath, as I was too busy dealing with the loud SNAP simultaneous with the lightning flash at 2am last week, but I did capture this picture of the torrential rains overwhelming our house's drainage system later that week.

[seventy-nine] minus ninety-two: it’s OVER

Published June 20, 2023 by centaur
centaur 0

After almost a year's worth of work, at last, the Fourth Annual Embodied Artificial Intelligence Workshop is OVER! I will go collapse now. Actually, it was over last night, and I actually did collapse, briefly, on the stairs leading up to my bedroom after the workshop was finally done. But don't worry, I was all right. I was just so relieved that it was good to finally, briefly, collapse. A full report on this tomorrow. Off to bed.

-the Centaur

Pictured: A rainbow that appeared in the sky just as the workshop was ending. Thanks, God!

[seventy-eight] minus eighty-two: tl;dr: get to the point

Published June 9, 2023 by centaur
centaur 0

tl;dr: get to the point in the first line in your emails, and also in the subject.

"TL;DR" is an acronym meaning "Too Long; Didn't Read" which is used to introduce a quick summary of a longer document - as I did in the first line of this email.

Often when writing an email we are working out our own thoughts of what should be communicated or should happen - which means that the important point usually comes at the end.

But people don't often read to the end. So it's important, when you get to the end of your email, to port the most important point up to the top (which I typically do with the TL;DR tag).

And, even better, if you can put it in the subject line, do that too.

Your email is more likely to work that way.

-the Centaur

Pictured: our wedding dragon lamp, sitting on a side table with our wedding DVD, which is sort of a coincidence; and a very cool light bulb.

Discussed: a topic I swear I've written about in this blog, but I cannot find via searching past posts.

[seventy-seven] minus eighty-three: mondrian cat

Published June 9, 2023 by centaur
centaur 0

Just Loki, on the back patio, looking at a leaf ... with a little added magic (full size).

Producing this relatively simple image actually involved a fair number of Photoshop tools, several of which are new "generative AI" tools, but many others of which are just plain old machine vision magic:

  • Layers (stacked images) used extensively to save original or alternate versions of things.
  • Perspective Warp (a pretty impressive tool in its own right) to distort the image into a rectilinear shape.
  • Content Aware Fill (a new Photoshop generative AI tool) to extend the warped stone tile to fill the frame.
  • The Clone Stamp tool to complete the grout lines which were only partially filled in by Content Aware Fill.
  • Quick Selection tool to isolate Loki and the leaf into their own layers for later.
  • Selection > Modify > Expand and Selection > Modify > Feather to get the fine hairs on Loki's boundary.
  • Generative Fill (another generative AI tool) to eliminate many of the leaves.
  • More Clone Stamp to eliminate more leaves and minor imperfections.
  • Layer duplication to create an original and to-be-colored tile backdrop.
  • Swatches, the Rectangular Marquee tool, the Polygonal Lasso, and the Fill tool to create the colored tile.
  • Color Burn layer blend mode (with 57% opacity) to create the primary Mondrian effect.
  • Another layer duplication to create a new version of the colored tile to enhance the grout.
  • Filter Gallery > Colored Pencil which fortuitously greyed out the colored tile and colorized the grout.
  • Magic Wand tool set to Contiguous and 0% Tolerance to cut out the greyed tiles from the grout layer.
  • Darker Color layer blend mode to enhance the grout.
  • Drop Shadow on the leaf to make it stand out.
  • Duplicating Loki into a layer with Darken to make him stand out against the colored grout.
  • Adding Inner Glow modified to Darken as well (with a Choke of 14 and Size of 87) to eliminate some of the white halo around Loki.
  • Adding a second Loki layer, Normal blend with 50% opacity, to get his sheen.

I like how it came out, especially given how it started:

I looked at that and thought, "You know, that's almost a Mondrian backdrop" and I was right!

-the Centaur

[seventy-six] minus eighty-two: sunset on trees

Published June 7, 2023 by centaur
centaur 0

Sunlight, shining through the trees behind me, striking just some of the forest ahead. I took a few pictures (and even played with the contrast and vibrance of this one in Photoshop) but none of them quite captured the glow that the unseen sunset was leaving on these leaves.

-the Centaur

[seventy-five] minus eighty-two: i don’t believe in gravity

Published June 6, 2023 by centaur
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To the tune of 'Magic' by Olivia Netwon-John:

I don't believe in gravity
Nothing can stop me today
No matter how high I have to climb
Nothing can get in my way!

-the backyard snek

Seriously, this snake is a badass.

-the Centaur

Pictured: a snake that lives in our backyard, displaying a healthy contempt for gravity.

[seventy-three] minus seventy-four: sunset and margaritas

Published May 28, 2023 by centaur
centaur 0

Have been prioritizing the Social Navigation Principles & Guidelines paper (and helping my wife get ready for her business trip) so no detailed posts for you. Enjoy a sunset and a margarita.

-the Centaur

[seventy-two] minus sixty: a long, long time ago …

Published May 13, 2023 by centaur
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I saw some people blogging about their 20th blogging anniversaries, so I decided to check how long my blog has been up. And .. So! I apparently missed the blog's 20th birthday, as it started in November 2001 ...

... unless I blogged it and forgot about it. And I also missed my first (recorded) web page's 25th birthday ...

... as I started my website sometime in 1996.

So no birthday post for you. I guess I'll have to wait to the blog's 25th (or web page's 30th) birthday in 2026.

-the Centaur

[seventy] minus fifty-nine: what a beautiful evening

Published May 9, 2023 by centaur
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After truly terrific hailstorms, we were treated to a truly awesome sunset.

And, got some work done on editing SPECTRAL IRON: Dakota Frost #4. FINALLY, getting the rewrite of the slow section rolling with some good Dakota Frost action segueing right into an ambulance ride.

That's more like it.

-the Centaur

[sixty-nine] minus fifty-nine: ai can serve up some creepy

Published May 8, 2023 by centaur
centaur 0

I still have misgivings about using AI-generated art to create final designs without human intervention, and I think AI art needs to address the copyright issue in a meaningful way, but speaking as an artist into cosmic horror, it sure can create some creepy images that are great food for thought. Here's a couple of cool ones from a recent project that I've been working on - great design concepts, whether or not they get used.

Bonus points if you can guess which work this art is designed to illustrate.

-the Centaur

[sixty-eight] minus sixty: enjoy a nice park

Published May 8, 2023 by centaur
centaur 0

Pushing the Social Navigation paper forward. Made progress. Very tired. Lots to do tomorrow. Crashing out. Please enjoy this lovely park.

-the Centaur

P.S. Yes, it really is true that if you "work a little bit harder" you can get way more done than you thought you could ... I was just about ready to give up, pushed a bit harder, and nailed the whole todo list. Now zzzz.

[sixty-six] minus fifty-three: i made it

Published April 29, 2023 by centaur
centaur 0

I finished Camp Nano. It's late, I'm tired, I have church in the morning enjoy a random picture, victory post tomorrow.

-the Centaur