text-mode:

Emoticons/emojis created by overlyaing several text characters on top of eachother. These instructions are from 1976, and might have been around as early as 1972.

This technique was possible on the amazing 1970s PLATO computer, and probably never again after that? You could also move the text-chars around on a pixel level. Pictures/info from platopeople.com.

How were these things done? Well, on PLATO, you could press SHIFT-space to move your cursor back one space — and then if you typed another character, it would appear on top of the existing character. And if you wanted to get real fancy, you could use the MICRO and SUB and SUPER keys on a PLATO keyboard to move up and down one pixel or more — in effect providing a HUGE array of possible emoticon characters.

(via shitty)

hello typepad: Google’s Turn to the Dark Side

I found myself in a sticky situation a while ago where I was being asked to build some custom data visualizations for a client. Google has a very robust chart API; it’s used all over the place. About a year ago, as part of their move toward providing SVG-based charting tools, Google deprecated its existing image-based chart API, without really offering a satisfying explanation. (It certainly wasn’t a matter of the limitations of HTML5!)

This was a problem. I was trying to build a fairly complex visualization employing dynamic scatter charts. It’s not just that Google’s SVG-based solution isn’t identical to its PNG-based predecessor in terms of output visualization - it removes a lot of the functionality from its PNG-based solution, for no apparent reason that I can tell.

How can we take a company seriously when, in the process of modernization, it makes its products meaningfully less functional? It isn’t just that Google builds goodwill and community among developers by providing services like these. It also has an effect on end-users - they risk damaging their reputation as a company that provides a lot of great tools that power the Web as we know it, a reputation that informs their overall corporate identity much more than you might initially think. (Let’s also not discount the fact that it’s easier, when designing software, to sell a client on the Google name vs. a third-party solution - say, the excellent Raphael visualization library - that they may not have heard of. Client stakeholders are, after all, the ones eventually responsible for using maintaining the things that get built.)

The Chart API, Reader, the Finance API. They represent such a tiny fraction of their business that it feels especially petty and arbitrary to see Google kill them off and deprecate them for vague, abstruse reasons. I kinda wonder if Google even listens anymore when people who know what they’re talking about - which David most certainly does - offer criticisms like these.

(via dayan)

(via dayan)

quietbabylon:

One of my favourite recurring tropes of AI speculation/singulatarian deep time thinking is mediations on how an evil AI or similar might destroy us.

Here’s a recent example, Ross Anderson on human extinction as quoted/linked by Kottke. It’s a discussion about how a benign AI might be poorly designed and lead to our downfall. What happens is the AI is given a goal that is proximate to helping people but not identical to (because no one even knows what that means).

The scenario imagined is one where there is a button that humans push if the AI gets an answer right and the AI wants to get a lot of button presses, and eventually it realizes that the best way to get button presses is to kill all the humans and institute a rapid fire button-pressing regime. (This, by the way, is the same instrumentalist train of logic that leads to sexbots.)

You would have this thing that behaves really well, until it has enough power to create a technology that gives it a decisive advantage — and then it would take that advantage and start doing what it wants to in the world.’

And all I can think is: we already have one of those. It is pretty clear to anyone who’s paying attention that 1. a marketplace regime of firms dedicated to maximizing profit has—broadly speaking—added a lot of value to the world 2. there are a lot of important cases where corporate profit maximization causes harm to humans 3. corporations are—broadly speaking—really good at ensuring that their needs are met.

I don’t think that it’s all that far fetched to suggest that maybe they’re getting better and better at ensuring their needs are met. Pretty much the only thing that the left and right in America can agree on is that moneyed influence has corrupted American politics and yet neither side seems able to do much of anything about it.

What if the private pursuit of profit was—for a long time—proximate to improving the lot of humans but not identical to it? What if capitalism has gone feral, and started making moves that are obviously insane, but also inevitable? 

For a very long time, the AI dedicated to maximizing profit saw the path forwards through innovation, new products, better living for customers. But then at some point it realized that is had the ability to just reshape the planet in its image. So it did that instead.

Imagine these thoughts—hastily thrown together to make a point about the devil we fear, vs the one we face—accompanied by about a million caveats having to do with long histories of systemic racism/sexism/colonialism and many other important isms that make making claims about the relative benefits to humans from the private pursuit of profit very difficult and likely to fall apart under careful scrutiny.

ekstasis:

Brasilia-on-Hudson

Context is important and organically grown cities are necessarily responsive to context, they’re built over time and their parts are small enough to be destroyed and rebuilt time after time without major disruption. “Disruption,” though,was precisely the point of huge Modernist installations. Just like our modern “disruptive innovation,” Modernism had the feeling of technological inevitability, the better mousetrap. Disruption, then, meant consolidation, smoothing and cleaning. Faced with the appearance of disorder, something like Empire State Plaza sought to simplify and brighten, which it did. Unfortunately, it aerated a dense, mixed-use neighborhood, replacing it with a structure people often have trouble simply entering or leaving.

That right there is what you call a key graf. The whole thing is nearly as trenchant though, and you should check it out. I remember reading someone extolling the virtues of technological disruption in a Facebook thread about MOOCs the other day, and having a strong reflexive disgusted/weary response, before clicking away to avoid another pointless Facebook political shouting-past-eachother-fest. This effectively articulates that disgust and weariness, but, y’know, constructively.

(via barthel)

magnificentruin:

manifesto

And that’s the thing: Flickr feels like a permanent home. While sharing is great, it turns out that as we progress in our digital lives, as we take more and more photos and share them more and more places, we eventually want to go back and see them again. (Which explains the popularity of services like TimeHop.) We want to revisit them. We want to relive them.

And I think that gets at why the web was so adamant about Yahoo saving Flickr. It wasn’t just that we wanted yet another app update. It’s that we didn’t want to give up on what we already had. In short, we wanted to go home again.

I really want to see Flickr come back and do well, but I don’t think I buy this impulse on any sort of mass level. The lack of a desire for a permanent home, and an accumulated and (inter)linkable public history of our online and offline lives seems to me to be one of the major ways in which the new web has passed us old-timers by.

That desire was a product both of our privilege, and of the unique conditions of the time, and I don’t think it’s coming back anytime soon. I’m not even sure I want it anymore, because I’ve seen how dangerous and depressing the new conditions of a corporatized, spammer/troll/abuser infested, government and employer surveilled, and mass-social web make it.

I might still be privileged enough that I could get away with most of what we used to in the early days, but few others are, and until those negative forces are neutralized, we won’t have a neighborhood where enough people want to set down permanent roots and make a home to make such undertakings worthwhile.

The Talking Heads Talk Software (by ✖ Daniel Rehn)

How many of these are there?

atane:

guardian:

Heavy metal fans in Botswana are known for their distinctive style, dressed head-to-toe in black leather - whatever the weather. Photographer Frank Marshall has documented this tight-knit subculture. Check out the full gallery here.

Photograph: Frank Marshall/Rooke Gallery

(via oldtobegin)

derasso:

capnskull:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/53854808/K-Power-Issue-02-1984-Mar   you can read the actual article from 1984 here

My god, and the Talking Heads Talk Software. Who did these people know??