One of the original promises of the net was that it would transcend territories, another part of John Perry Barlow’s declaration of independence which hasn’t worked out. I have a memory from the late 80s, when I was working for a small software company in Sydney, helping establish …

This is a blog version of my presentation for the GoGLAM miniconf at Linux.conf.au 2021 on Arkisto, a framework for describing and preserving research data assets with open source tools and standards.

I converted it from PowerPoint to Markdown with Peter Sefton's pptx_to_md tool (but had to bash …

I'm moving this blog and all the rest of *.mikelynch.org to a new host - things will be patchy and possibly broken for the next few days.

After skipping it last year (I did NaNoWriMo instead) I decided that I missed doing National Novel Generating Month and thought I'd do something relatively simple, based on Tom Phillips' A Humument, which I recently read for the first time. Phillips' project was created by drawing over the pages of …

A fun quality of Mastodon - a social communication platform I hang out on a bit too much - is that individual instantiations can fork its basic form and add odd twists which suit just that community. Oulipo.social notoriously bans that fifth Latin glyph which is most common in many linguistic …

Point 2 in this advice to new developers is

"Never use a plugin which you can't write yourself"

I think this is really bad advice, although his less extreme version -- that you should try to read and understand other people's libraries -- is actually good, and not really the same thing …

I didn't contribute to NaNoGenMo this year: on the spur of the moment, I decided to try writing 50,000 words of fiction, rather than generating it, and blogged briefly about it at Nannygoat Hill. I didn't even get around to feeding the results into a neural net, like I …

g CINA CONTENC MI CINE SI CENTENI SEE CONDENN DE CRE SU DE QUAENT ME CONNE CUNTUR DEACLETICE (FIUD SEE DED SEE SER SER SER SEENNN SER SER SEENN SER SER SEENDENNENCEN (_DER SER K of my own striking the more than the spirit of the morning of the Professor …

I trained a recurrent neural net with the same parameters as the most recent version of GLOSSATORY on the Gutenberg e-text of the 1811 edition of Francis Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue.

The output was even better than I expected. The following excerpts were taken at increasing temperatures (the …

This is the output of the neuralgae algorithm, which visualises a neural net's idea of some image classes and then classifies the result and repeats, looped into a GIF, and it's exactly the sort of fluid morphing between surreal forms I've been trying to get for two years.