Links, January 10, 2025

New ANSI-collection

I’m not sure what’s going on here, but it’s beautiful and has me pining for the BBS era:

Six Sines

An open source frequency/phase/amplitude-modulation synthesizer from prolific baconpaul, who just did the six nines 0.999999 release. I’m teaching myself how to do audio programming and material like this is great.

Droste’s Lair

In Droste’s Lair, the user manipulates mathematical structures through direct interactions: dropping dominoes on chessboards and dragging items between lists.

As someone who’s built user interfaces for logic-based programming for things like rules engines I love this sort of stuff, especially when it’s so playful and evocative.

They squandered the holy grail

A bit about the history of computing, why I’ve tended to remain in the Apple camp with my computing devices, why contemporary software fails on the original promises of computing, security modeling, and how disappointing / disturbing Apple’s new “intelligence” features are in light of all that, and the nature of product vs detail:

One of the best ways to understand a product is to start taking things away. If you take color out of a word processor, you still have a word processor. If you take bold or italic formatting out of a word processor, you still have a word processor. If you take font selection out of a word processor, you still have a word processor.

If you take away the display output from a word processor, you have a typewriter instead of a word processor. Thus, the core of a word processor is being able to see on the screen what you would see on the page before you hit print.

Here’s a new way to lose an argument online: the appeal to AI

There’s a good chance you have seen somebody using the appeal to AI online, even heard it aloud. It’s a logical fallacy best summed up in three words: “I asked ChatGPT.”

I’ve seen people who I thought were smart enough to know better make these arguments. While you may be tempted to skip this based on already agreeing with the premise, it’s worth a read because of its analysis of trust:

How one establishes trust is a thorny question. As a journalist, I like to show my work — I tell you who said what to me when, or show you what I’ve done to try to confirm something is true. With the fake presidential pardons, I showed you which primary sources I used so you could run a query yourself.

But trust is also a heuristic, one that can be easily abused.

Davies on the Unaccountability Machine

I like Fred’s book reviews because, quite frankly, I don’t make as much time for reading as I’d like, I have quite the backlog already, and our interests and philosophies align somewhat. Maybe I’ll read this one someday, maybe not, but I’m glad I read the review.

I’m making a point of arguing this because of the conclusion being “if you want a big complex organization, you’re just gonna have to accept accountability sinks.” There is no fundamental reason why the accountability sinks should generally end up harming the people they currently harm, why the victims are who they are, especially when the author just sought fixes to maximization. Why accept that without questioning the value of growing more complex if it cannot be done without a glaring lack of justice?

This is a topic that’s dear to me, something I seek out projects for and prioritize in my work, and simultaneously something I feel I’m on the losing end of a battle around.

Who has permission to know things?

Moreover, in complex social structures such as corporations, this way of thinking about knowledge can be remarkably resilient to objective reality.

While this piece is focuses on the experience of minority groups in corporate environments, what it describes resonates with the experiences of myself and many people I’m close with in corporate environments: decision makers with their heads in the sand, entirely insulated from the consequences of their dictates:

when I presented this, it became clear that it still didn’t count as knowledge as such, and that the CDO’s vague idea still held more weight than actual, demonstrable evidence. It was made clear to me, in no uncertain terms, that my inability to make the CDO’s approach work was a defect in me, and I was instructed to continue attempting to make the method work without changing anything

Lie About Your Birthday

But your birth date, like your phone number, is personal information that scammers can use to steal your identity or target you for fraud. Think back: How many times have you been asked to verify your date of birth in serious situations, like when recovering your login from your bank, or getting your medical information from your doctor office?

The purpose of a system is what it does, therefore the system of verifying identity based on public information is meant to make our identities fragile. For the purposes of any non-medical business, my birthday has been April 1 for some time now.