Since there's been a big influx from Twitter, here's an updated and shorter version of a Mastodon primer I wrote back in 2018.

For more detail on how federation works, see Elilla's Futuristic Mastodon introduction for 2021.

Get off mastodon.social

There's mastodon.social, which is run by the lead …

Everyone's coming (back) to Mastodon this weekend thanks to a certain social media acquisition. Here's an old blog post of mine which I wrote after a similar influx in 2018 but which I should update at some stage.

I haven't been posting as many daily links thanks to being at …

This is the presentation I gave last week at eResearch Australasia in Brisbane. There's a page of links to the tools and references mentioned here. The slides were converted to blog form with Peter Sefton's pptx_to_md converter.

PDF version | Powerpoint Version

Hi - I’m Mike Lynch, and I work at …

I am doing Looptober again this year. Last year I used it as an opportunity to clean up my SuperCollider toolkit. This year I've been trying to use the modular synths as much as possible but I'm still at the stage where getting started takes fifteen minutes of faffing around …

What system of ideas which you first encountered indirectly through artists you admired was the most disappointing when you got to actually know about it? For me it's Gnosticism.

Me, aged 21: Wow, Philip K Dick, Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas Pynchon, Octavio Paz and Sonic Youth are all into the …

An interesting blog post argues that we are living through a golden age of programming language research. I like the point that dynamic languages such as Perl, Python, Ruby and Javascript have done more to popularise functional programming concepts than anything else put together.

Photographs of the Nakagin Capsule Tower …

Today's a one-off national public holiday to mourn Queen Elizabeth II. Since I'm no longer on Twitter I feel a bit insulated from the usual wave of discourse which events like this set off: the nearest I've come to it is seeing someone pose in a bandana on Facebook with …

Ranjit commented on my drawing of Glossatory's definition of GARTER: "I find this one particularly evocative! Please do an oil painting next" so I colourised the original and fed it to StableDiffusion with different degrees of desaturation, and the prompt text "A man in a green boat holds a ladder …

• Camestros Felapton on whether there's an inherent political tendency to subgenres of science fiction and fantasy, with bonus Judge Dredd mention
• A post doing the rounds about how hard it is to run a mail server. I think this is too paranoid - there's no need to posit an oligopoly, things …

A blog post about the latest image generator, StableDiffusion, which coins the term 'AI veganism' for the the ethical case against using this sort of thing, which I think is a poor analogy even by the standards of tech bloggers.

There's a public beta here. Unlike DALL-E the source code …