I've been reading a bunch of books this year about the history of philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century and the linguistic / analytical turn it took in England under the influence of Wittgenstein and A J Ayer, most recently Claire Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman's Metaphysical Animals …

So I have opinions about the Google engineer who thinks that his chatbot is sentient, because of course I have. One of the things about people who work with computers is that we have opinions about AI which are not necessarily grounded in anything real about either intelligence or computers …

One of the frustrating things about web3 is that people who talk about it seem to be lumping together a bunch of things - intrinsic decentralisation, crypto, disillusionment with corporate social media, virtual reality - which don't really have much in common. The term 'web3' is obviously meant to make this iteration …

A bit hesitant to blog about web3 because, like cryptocurrency, it seems to be a topic which drives people to a kind of monomania even if they're opposed to it. But I've poked fun at bitcoin on this website in the past so here goes.

I have been trying to …

VQGAN+CLIP is a method for generating images from text phrases using a GAN image generator and the CLIP image recogition system: I tried feeding it the first few numbered paragraphs from Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which I was thinking about because I recently watched Derek Jarman's excellent film about the …

I got myself a gemini. Gemini is a protocol for serving hypertext, with emphasis on the 'text': it's more like Gopher than the web, with an emphasis on simplicity and privacy, and no inline links or images.

Although I'm certainly old enough, I didn't have much experience of the pre-web …

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 …

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 …

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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 …