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 …

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.