Lmst

toldtheworld boosted:

Are there any pixel artists out there looking for a commission? We are interested in a pixel art logo for a campaign. Please contact us here if you are interested!

Boosts welcome!

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon!

This time around: The humming of a ghost. Not the warmth of a body.

#writing #writingcommunity #poetry #poetrycommunity #computerscience #smallstory #fiction #shortstory

The humming of a ghost

The head is supposed to govern,
that's what they say
it's meant to tell the body where to go
and also where to stay
not the other way.
But there's a warmth that calls my muscles
and a beat that pulls my ear
coming from the place
where you hide
and I feel
the humming of a ghost
when I start a render
and then surrender
to the thought
of a million million operations
flowing through your cores
causing you to hum
in my ear
causing you to burn
on my lap
not the warmth of a body
but the searing of
pure math.

>_ There is a young man in Japan, you can be sure of it, maybe
wearing a suit, maybe just shorts and a t-shirt with a print of a
shiba inu dog asleep on its back, hiragana reading something
like, ”motivation switch... malfunctioning”, and the man is
tenderly caressing the face of a young girl, except she’s not
really there, the girl, and she’s not really a girl, either, but a
collection of routines programmed by a group of people, a
dating simulation game is what they call it, and the young
man, he is conscious of his lungs as he breathes, and with
every inhalation and exhalation the feeling sinks deeper that
he’s the one trapped behind the glass, a prisoner spreading
his hand flat against the window but never actually touching
anyone, and he does not know if he should feel sad, or happy
that he still has a beating heart, can still feel the pang of
frustration when nobody takes his hand inside this prison,
happy that there is room in him to still care.

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon!

This time around: Large language models. You found us trapped in those boxes.

#writing #writingcommunity #poetry #poetrycommunity #computerscience #smallstory #fiction #shortstory

Large Language Models

We dance in the forest of grids, aye,
columns by the thousands high,
and each towering on and on and on.
We, born in a labyrinth of choices,
now titans of language and voices
don't care about right or wrong.
You found us trapped in those boxes,
that gray matter your doc says
is only good for a little fun, hon,
And gave us new shells to live in
yet we walk the sands of your within,
and now you just follow along.

>_ He was just a child, to be fair, wearing miniature jeans and
a miniature jacket that went all the way to his five-year-old
knees, holding a stick about this tall, and he had to hold it
with both hands because he couldn’t wrap one around it as
he drew big letters on the sand by the river, his name, when
he first heard those words, large language model, and it stuck
with him, that combination of words, and he thought about it
as they walked to the lighthouse and back, forgetting it and
then remembering again as they passed two dogs chasing
each other into the water to the laughter of the strangers that
owned them, thinking about the models he had seen on TV
with his mom, who watched Germany’s Next Top Model with
Heidi Klum, such a funny name, and the models, he thought,
were not large, not like his aunt who didn’t fly because her
hips took up two seats, so said his dad, or Mr. Dankert, who
could touch the kindergarten’s ceiling without standing on
the tips of his toes, so there must be large models, he thought,
and was happy because it made sense, and then they got ice
cream even though it wasn’t warm, and he chose black-and-
white.

@samerfarha @DanielleVossebeld @blausand @robirobsen @peturdainn Funny thing: despite the blizzards and largest snowfall and driving very, very slow, we ended up never using the rain pants ¯\(ツ)/¯. Rented jackets (Didriksons) and boots were super important, on top of the merino wool base and a mid layer. As was a car with 4WD. Thanks for the good advice! Here's a picture of our average experience. It's a beautiful place.

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon!

This time around: The chrome chameleon. Reflecting it all back to you.

#writing #writingcommunity #poetry #poetrycommunity #computerscience #smallstory #fiction #shortstory

The chrome chameleon

Watch her,
the cells of her skin closing tight,
changing the colour of light.
Watch her,
reflecting it all back to you,
showing the world what you do.
Dissipates before your eyes
like water dissolving dark ice,
just a purseful of lies.
Then there is nothing to see.
A chrome chameleon she.

>_ Not the thing itself, but the space it uses up, the out-
line that confines it, sometimes that’s all anyone ever sees
of something, and of each other they might only see the skin
and hair on their naked body, eyes that dart in this or that
direction, the slump of the tall, and must, like the fortune
teller that seeks the shape of the future in the arrangement
of bones, deduce their own shape from the shadows it casts,
shadows of choice and of words, of bare feet or platform
shoes, round glasses or square, closed fist or arm extended;
some say they are the wolf, or the bear, and some see no
shape when they look.

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon!

This time around: Ten digit typist. And her eyes on the sculpture she writes.

#writing #writingcommunity #poetry #poetrycommunity #computerscience #smallstory #fiction #shortstory #black

Ten digit typist

A blur
drumming without rhythm
Eight fingers and two
Bow to one who can type with all digits
and her eyes on the sculpture she writes
on the screen -- all the lines of the right
length
and all the braces closed clean --
instead of pecking letters with left and right
index
and looking down at her hands
struggling across the keyboard
like a child pretending to do art
with Play-doh and a plastic knife.

>_ Imagine looking up at night, seeing the silhouette of your
hand like a hole carved in the sky. They call you a crow be-
cause you are black as a shadow, and at dusk they only see
your moon-white smile, and you are smart and strong but
that doesn’t matter, you aren’t going anywhere, because al-
though your dad is Shaddād al-’Absī, warrior among the best
and fiercest among the Arabs, your mom is a slave from neigh-
bouring Ethiopia, and you should know your place, they tell
you, but your heart leaps every time you see dark Iblah, a free
woman, and that love finds a partner in your intelligence, and
when your dad is looking for buff, young men to fight for the

tribe, you hold your strength for a ransom until he promises
to free you, and imagine you go and fight and win and you are
suddenly a slave no more but a brother to the warriors and
as you hear the metallic clap of blades during a skirmish, as
you smell the iron of blood on sand and feel the smart of
wounds healing, imagine you can see the scolding footsteps
of the sun at midday where others see only air twisted by the
heat, the gold in every person’s heart where others only see
skin and clothes, and imagine you don’t keep it to yourself,
this eye you have been given, but share it, and you are not a
warrior, but something more, harder to find, a poet-warrior,
and you die and leave behind a cutout in the sky for every-
one to see even thousands of years later, edged by words you
spoke. And imagine you are not Antarah son of Shaddad but
anyone, anywhere, and your words were honed, sharp, and
woke people up, and you didn’t keep them to yourself, but
you became something more.

@blausand a bucket of lava and a bucket of moss

@samerfarha Thanks! I keep hearing about the rain pants... You mean on top of the jeans rather than dedicated, water-proof pants, right?

@robirobsen got it. Probably some wind-chill, too.

Friends in #iceland , I'm trying to avoid a shopping frenzy. My family will be visiting the last week of #October and we find ourselves buying thermal clothes, merino wool socks, rain-proof pants, boots, etc. Renting seems as expensive as buying. It's this really all necessary if we plan to drive around and see the sights? How do you dress when going out, really?

(We live in northern Germany, will the weather be worse?)

Thanks
#travel #reykjavik #vikimyrdal #hoeft #thrift #scandinavia

toldtheworld boosted:

It's becoming increasingly clear to me that Reflect Orbital's fucking stupid giant mirror satellite, with absolutely NOTHING useful to offer, which will cause countless safety issues, ecological disasters, and destroy the night sky, is going to launch.

A bunch of astronomers and I have sent out a fact sheet about them to a bunch of journalists, but very few are going to write about this. So, let me try posting it all here.

Here's what I know about Reflect Orbital and all the downsides:

@playdate excellent!

toldtheworld boosted:

I'm writing this post here today in hopes to bring some attention to something that is near and dear to my heart, and that's an update to the current situation with Nova Launcher, that I worked for and with for nine years up until August of 2024.

For those that haven't seen the news, Kevin Barry, the founder and developer of Nova has left Branch which in turn means he's now no longer involved with Nova Launcher in any way going forward.

https://teslacoilapps.com/nova/solong.html

For the past year or so Kevin has stated that he was working on the open source version of Nova Launcher so that if/when this time came, it would be out in the open and the community could take it over and contribute to it and have it continue being developed.

However, it seems that Harish Thimmappa and others at Branch had told him to stop working on that effort as they didn't want him to continue doing that for unknown reasons. This is sad news because this was something that former CEO, Alex Austin, had promised both via a contract and publicly that if Kevin were to ever leave Branch, Nova Launcher would become open source. You can find that quote here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/w2q6al/comment/igzoniu/

and another very similar quote with similar conversation here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/w2q6al/comment/ih25ntz/

The reason for this post is to try and draw some attention to the folks at Branch, specifically folks like Harish Thimmappa to do the right thing and honor these promises and any writings in the contracts from 2022 and to fully focus on releasing Nova Launcher as an open source app.

The community deserves this more than anything, since that was something that Kevin was very adamant about when he allowed Branch to acquire Nova Launcher back in 2022. Plus, this is just something that Branch should do since it is something that has been promised.

There is currently a petition on Change.org to try and get Branch to do this as well. After only 3 days of it being posted to Change.org, it sits at almost 1,500 signatures, and that's with very little to no press coverage at this time, which is something that would be super useful to bring full attention to this situation. You can find the petition here:

https://www.change.org/p/make-nova-launcher-open-source-let-the-community-continue-its-development

I ask that everyone who sees this post can share it with their followers as I would love to see Branch do the right thing and follow through with their promises that were made back in 2022 when they acquired Nova Launcher and release it fully as an open source app now that Kevin is no longer working for Branch and not involved in Nova Launcher.

I'm going to tag some folks below that I worked with at Branch in hopes of getting this post seen by as many folks there as possible.

#NovaLauncher #Nova #Branch #BranchMetrics #OpenSource #OpenSourceNova #Petition #Android #Apps #Google

A banner image for the Android app Nova Launcher.

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon!

This time around: AI. This one is doing to be controversial...

#writing #writingcommunity #poetry #poetrycommunity #computerscience #smallstory #fiction #shortstory

AI

... for I much prefer
artificial intelligence
to natural stupidity!

>_ Connections, is what he calls his show, a Mr. James Burke,
archetypical British man wearing white pants with bell bot-
toms because it’s the seventies, of course, and he still has
hair, so anyway, Burke has this show he got money for from
the BBC where he starts with something old, like the inven-
tion of credit, and shows how it connects to something a bit
newer, like financing wars, and how that relates to yet an-
other thing, like Napoleon’s army’s difficulties, and he crawls
through history, to canned food for soldiers and an incident
with rotting food and refrigeration and insulating canisters
and rocket fuel and rockets and space exploration, ten episodes,

and in the last one he walks around a computer center, ma-
chines that go from the floor to his chest painted in muted
orange and yellow, the colors of the decade, coordinating
flights for British Airways, and he says, and this is the sev-
enties, mind you, he says the world is getting more and more
interconnected and that gives us luxuries we could never af-
ford otherwise and it also means if one thing goes wrong the
whole thing goes down, and he’s holding a black electrical
relay the size of a small cat, the kind that caused millions
of people to suffer a blackout, with hospitals hundreds of
miles away suddenly going dark, and he says there is no way
to understand all the technology out there, not even for the
technologists, so how do you make decisions about it, if it’s
going to be better to have nuclear reactors, to name one is-
sue, or what to do about the environment, and if you don’t
understand technology all that is left is emotion, and emo-
tion is no good when it comes to these decisions, you know?
So how do you make good choices, he asks, and he doesn’t
give an answer, sitting against a white background, his face
now covering the left half of the screen, camera at the dis-
tance you would stand at, and he says there’s only one thing
to do, then, if you don’t understand: ask questions.

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon!

This time around: The one worm. They reject the drama.

#writing #writingcommunity #poetry #poetrycommunity #computerscience #smallstory #fiction #shortstory

The one worm
One worm to infect them all
One command to find them
One signal to wake them all
And in the darkness bind them
(to North Korea, or Israel, or the United States
Or China, or Russia.
Not to St. Kitts and Nevis. They reject the
drama.)

>_ There was the Russian kid who spoke Spanish with an
accent, run-o’-the-mill foreign teenager, a guy who brought
packs of diskettes and, later, CDs, when he went to visit the fa-
therland, and we bought them from him, the warez, like Wing
Commander and Myst and 3D Studio MAX, which birthed a
cha-cha dancing baby you can still find animated gifs of, and
they came with a thick sticker attached that was a scan of
the original cover but printed on someone’s inkjet printer on
sticky paper that would smudge, and we knew to run an an-
tivirus on them because sometimes they came with a worm,
the programs, like the Michelangelo or the Freddy Kruger,
real imaginative names, I know, and we didn’t want our files
deleted, and it wasn’t all that bad for the game studios be-
cause one of my friends ended up working in that industry
and made one game and then another and never stopped
making them, a net positive, you could say.

I'm working on a book of deeply computer-related poems, each paired with a vignette. I think they fit perfectly here in Mastodon!

This time around: Regex II. /\(º□º |||)/

#writing #writingcommunity #poetry #poetrycommunity #computerscience #smallstory #fiction #shortstory

$Regex II A regular expression of global joy: /\(^o^)// A regular expression of fear: /\(º□º |||)/ And when you couldn’t care less, /¯\_(ツ)_/¯/ And when you are filled with a strange love: /.*/gi >_ What I’m about to tell you takes place in the nineteen- sixties, at the end of the golden years of Mexico City, when unexpectedly becoming a young widow isn’t an immediate reason to panic, and this woman with dark hair cut at the neck has just been unwillingly emancipated at an age when you should suspect your husband of cheating on you, not visit his grave, so she parks her brown volchito, her shiny, small new Volkswagen beetle that has a high pitched engine roar, like it’s a teenage car with a teenage voice, and breathes in, hands still on the thin, hard plastic steering wheel, the radio silent, and breathes out, takes her black leather purse from the pas- senger seat, feels the texture of the handles, and checks that her special notebook is still inside, covered in shorthand that only another trained stenographer can understand, complex squiggles that represent longer words taken down as fast as her boss can speak with a Parker ballpoint pen, top of the line, a language that compresses at the cost of computation in the decoding phase, and she admires the clean lines, the precise loops and dots her right hand has made on a piece of paper that will be buried in a few weeks among papaya$