with all the deskilling and gell-manning (etc) we're gonna get from automated thinking machines, now is the time for the 'tools for thought' crowd to make tools that help you think things through for yourself.
tools to do *more* hard thinking.
it should feel effortful. cherish that feeling.
deadline extended to feb 20!! :-)
I've just published a new userscript that remembers the path of your cursor over the linked pages of Wikipedia, averaging and wearing them into the page, showing your browsing history over time
Install at greasyfork.org/en/scripts/5... or read more about it everest-pipkin.com#projects/des...
submit to our workshop so we can yap about creativity support & activity traces & understanding creative communities + processes + people better, together
herding-cats-ws.github.io
every time i moved my cursor in my browser today
yeah the vast majority of my posting has migrated to discord already. there’s a real porosity issue though – even the *existence* of an interesting discord is often opaque to people who aren’t already “insiders”. you need a more-permeable public social media space to gradually let new people in
a big part of the problem is drive-by replies from people with no relational “skin in the game”. a setting that restricts replies to only people followed by >=N people i follow might help – more generous than just “people i know already” but more restrictive than “randos from Discover”
also @sh1m.bsky.social and @jjyc.bsky.social!
congratulations, super well deserved!
poems are generated via the Savelost algorithm: given an input text, we repeatedly "compress" it by erasing a single letter at a time
a text embedding model is used to evaluate deletion candidates & choose the one that least disrupts the "meaning" of the original input
bsky.app/profile/maxk...
remember that day vividly, vividly remember that day vividly,vividly remember that day vividly,vividy remember that day vividly,vivid remember that day vividy,vivid remember that day vivid,vivid remember thatday vivid,vivid remember thtday vivid,vivid remember thday vivid,vivid rememberthday vivid,vivid remembertday vivid,vivid rememberday vivid,vivid rememberay vivid,vivid remembery vivid,vivid remember vivid,vivid remember vivid,ivid remember vividivid remember vividiid remember vividid remember vividd remember vivid reember vivid rember vivid reber vivid reer vivid ree vivid re vivid r vivid vivid vivid vivd vid vd d
Remember that poetry is like a baby Remember that poetry is like baby Remember that poetry is like baby Remember that poetry s like baby Remember that poetrys like baby Remember that poetry like baby Remember that poetrylike baby Remember tht poetrylike baby Remember th poetrylike baby Remember th poetryike baby Remember th poetryie baby Remember th poetrye baby Remember th poetry baby Remember t poetry baby Remember poetry baby Remember poetry baby Remember poety baby Remember poet baby Remeber poet baby Remebr poet baby Remeb poet baby Reme poet baby Ree poet baby Re poet baby R poet baby poet baby poet baby poe baby pe baby e baby baby baby bab bb b
remember to pass the throne to your younger brother remember to pass th throne to your younger brother remember to passth throne to your younger brother remember to passt throne to your younger brother remember to pass throne to your younger brother remember to pass throne to your youngr brother remember to pass throne to your young brother remember to pass throne to youryoung brother remember to pass throne to youryoun brother remember to pass throne to youryou brother remember to pass throne to ouryou brother remember to pass throne to uryou brother rememberto pass throne to uryou brother remembert pass throne to uryou brother remember pass throne to uryou brother remeber pass throne to uryou brother remebr pass throne to uryou brother remebrpass throne to uryou brother remerpass throne to uryou brother remepass throne to uryou brother remepass throne to uyou brother remepass throne to you brother remepass throne to yo brother remepass throne to y brother remepass throne to brother remepass throne to brother remepss throne to brother remeps throne to brother remep throne to brother reme throne to brother ree throne to brother re throne to brother r throne to brother throne to brother throne to brother throne o brother throne brother throne brother throne broter throne brotr throne bror throne bro throne br throne r throne throne thone thoe tho to o
remember that I myself tended that wound for you remember that myself tended that wound for you remember that myself tended that wound for you remember that myself tended that wound foryou remember that myself tended that woundforyou remember that myself tended that woundfryou remember tht myself tended that woundfryou remember th myself tended that woundfryou remember th myself tended that woundfrou remember th myself tended that woundfro remember th myself tended that woundfo remember th myself tended that woundf remember th myself tended that wound remember th myself tended tha wound remember th myself tended ta wound remember th myself tended a wound remember th myself tended wound remember th myself tended wound remember t myself tended wound remember myself tended wound remember myself tended wound remember mysel tended wound remember myseltended wound remember mysetended wound remember myseended wound remember yseended wound remember yseened wound remember yseeed wound remember seeed wound rememberseeed wound remembereeed wound remembereed wound remembered wound rememberd wound remember wound reember wound reembr wound reemr wound reem wound ree wound re wound r wound wound wound wond wod od o
😶🌫️ Remecarving: or, Forgettings
a collection of 829 computational poems, each depicting the gradual algorithmic *forgetting* of a sentence found in Wikipedia that exhorts the reader to remember
last-minute entry for NaNoGenMo 2025!
github.com/NaNoGenMo/20...
great paper! reminds me of some recent work in creativity support tools research on designing for "vertical movement" and "horizontal movement" between tools dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1...
so if you want a relatively straightforward prompting-based method i think unfortunately some kind of combinatory approach that incorporates an outside source of randomness/control is still as good as it gets
yeah, everything better seems to involve either:
- complex sampling techniques – e.g., beam-searching for diverse strings in token sequence space dl.acm.org/doi/full/10....
- finetuning – e.g., "forcing diffuse distributions" arxiv.org/abs/2404.10859; our recent COLM work arxiv.org/abs/2503.17126
also check out Luminate! rough process:
1. ask LLM for list of "dimensions" that stories might vary along (eg tone, genre, protag)
2. ask LLM for list of "values" each dim could take (eg protag -> young boy, old woman…)
3. generate stories with diff value combinations
dl.acm.org/doi/full/10....
i think a big driver of this (and reliance on AI in “evaluative” situations broadly) is that the evaluator’s goal is often less “make the right call” than “avoid being responsible for making the *wrong* call”
lmao
i'm kind of a doomer about this too but the x-axis *does* seem to mysteriously end right around the year 2020
A screenshot of an academic paper. It reads: Abstract A " 'quine" is a deterministic program that prints itself. In this essay, I will show you a "gauguine": a probabilistic program that infers itself. A gauguine is repeatedly asked to guess its own source code. Initially, its chances of guessing correctly are of course minuscule. But as the gauguine observes more and more of its own previous guesses, it detects patterns of behavior and gains information about its inner workings. This information allows it to bootstrap self-knowledge, and ultimately discover its own source code. We will discuss how-and why-we might write a gauguine, and what we stand to learn by constructing one. CCS Concepts: • Computing methodologies → Philo-sophical/theoretical foundations of artificial intelli-gence; Theory of mind. Keywords: reflection, probabilistic programming ACM Reference Format: Kartik Chandra, Amanda Liu, Jonathan Ragan-Kelley, and Joshua B. Tenenbaum. 2025. Gauguin, Descartes, Bayes: A Diurnal Golem's Brain. In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software (Onward! '25), October 12-18, 2025, Singapore, Singa-pore. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 9 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/ 3759429.3762631 1 A Way of Knowing From time to time, we all have crises of identity-moments of radical and overwhelming uncertainty about our selves. I' don't know whether the doubts that seize us can really be externalized in language, but if I were to try, I would express them as questions, questions like: Who am I? What am I? What kind of person? What kind of mind?
This may just be the best CS paper I’ve read this year. Just read the abstract and first para of the intro! The rest of the intro is really wild too, but very very good:
dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1...
i think of these as “target callers” and have been contemplating ways to autodetect them (see thread) bsky.app/profile/maxk...
when im forging the thesis: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!!
when it inevitably incubates the antithesis: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.
Submissions to the Experimental Games Showcase at GDC are now OPEN through October 24, 2025! Please send us the weird shit you're working on! More info about the session and where to submit can be found on our NEW website here www.experimentalgamesshowcase.com
ya i’ve only gone a couple times but it’s so huge that i mostly just find it draining
🫡🤠
tempted but not sure, soooo much travel coming up this fall. UIST + Portland + Northwestern for sure, plus maybe COLM EMNLP AIIDE NeurIPS. hbu
wait this is kinda profound tho. a trace of the true self remains in the false self
howdy
A anti-correcting spellcheck? Work in progress
#vispo #autocorrect #spellcheck #texteditors
