Damian’s notes

Browsing the Tangible Media site and here’s something I didn’t know about: a microfilm blueprint embedded in a punched card encoding the metadata identifying the image. A highly tangible digital–analogue crossover format!

I am old enough to remember when different charsets for different locales was the norm and Unicode was a controversial and ambitious project to create one character set to represent all languages. UTF-8, the very clever encoding format for Unicode is ubiquitous now but is actually so new the original default for web pages was the relatively parochial ISO 8859-1. Here is a very clear 37-minute tutorial on why UTF-8 and what it is, with bonus coda on the cunning way Korean Hangul script is represented in Unicode.

Bricolage Grotesque is a free and open source variable font by Mathieu Triay with (it says here) French attitude and British mannerisms. It’s great for headlines and display text. And it has a fabulous brochure website.

The form of the ‘But doctor, I am Pagliacci!’ joke we delight in seeing remixed online is from the character Rorschach in Watchmen by Alan Moore—though the story goes back to the 19th century at least, often naming famous clowns like Grimaldi, Carlini, Grock. The name Pagliacci isn’t one of those, as it turns out, but the name of an Italian opera about clowns.

Anyway … here’s a version where life imitates art.

China’s massive rollout of wind and solar farms boggles the mind, and also creates a whole new type of landscape photography.

Fascinating aspect of online culture, is how poems and retellings 40 or 200 years old get swept up and remixed to make new jokes that are almost impossible to explain to someone who’s not seen the previous 15 iterations.

After elaborately setting up my development environment so I can run the server in the debugger I go to place a breakpoint on the implementation of the non-working service and discover the method consists of nothing but a TODO comment.

jq is a command-line tool for extracting information from (streams of) JSON objects using a pretty simple filter syntax. Useful tidying up the output of messy APIs or extracting info from them in scripts.

So far as we can tell the new version of GPT was taught to write ‘literary’ English through adversarial training with other LLMs. The result is bizarrely plausible looking gnomic utterances which on closer examination are just gibberish—but which are convincingly impressive to other LLMs.