Charlie Loyd @vruba@everything.happens.horse

I mention this like once a week, but since she’s just died, let’s all go look at the ~20 cm Landsat image of Half Dome that Virginia Norwood made.

«Norwood had researchers load a breadboard version of the scanner onto the back of a truck. It amounted to “just a bunch of boxes,” she says. “We could use all the weight we wanted.” […] Having labored so long over the specs, Norwood wasn’t surprised by the high quality of the test images.»

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1025732/the-woman-who-brought-us-the-world/

@thedudeabidez88 This is lovely. I don’t know anything about Ingenuity’s imaging – does noise reduction happen before or after demosaicking?

@meetar @beep Hi, sorry to bother you, big fan, but I can’t find the Discord invitation?

Sometimes I think about learning Unity or Bevy or something and dedicating several years to doing this the way I want it done. Then I remember this is a spectacularly terrible idea. But I do have a text file of funny species names in case someone does.

I would spend my entire yearly entertainment budget on a modern, richly implemented, beautiful, highly replayable version of SimEarth (1990) or SimLife (1992).

@migurski @shashashasha so sweet
and so cold

Someone decided in 2018 or so that all “friendly” software would be eggplant-colored and I just want to ask them a few harmless questions.

@shashashasha @migurski , NEVER WORN.

@ingrid Anyway, all I’m saying is the set designer is going to be able to project some pretty ironic headlines over center stage.

@ingrid (The polio vaccine, the Montgomery bus boycott, the English translation of “the Second Sex”, “Tutti Frutti”, the début of “Howl”, the referendum in Vietnam – a whole bunch of the things that were about the be The Sixties were present and active in the world but the dots were not connected.)

@ingrid (I was thinking about this in a similar but less musical-theatreuh–based context and did some Wikipedia-level reading on what was going on in 1956 and honestly it’s kind of amazing what a nexus of American everything the previous 18 months had been.)

@ingrid http://raysolomonoff.com/dartmouth/

(For the avoidance of doubt: I’m not going to say Solomonoff was some kind of humanist saint, but I think a case could be made that his was one of the relatively less chicken-fried of the minds present for That Fateful Summer.)

@ingrid Ray Solomonoff’s scanned notes are online!

@nelson Horse beats human in race; experts believe horse hegemony may sweep across the world by Tuesday afternoon.

Coming up on 70 years of person A going “You see, software will never be able to do X!” and immediately being proven grotesquely wrong, then person B going “You see, this software is basically a person!” and immediately being proven grotesquely wrong, and so on like the world’s most evenly matched and annoying game of table tennis.

What’s the more familiar, less lit-class way to talk about Keats’s negative capability? Intellectual humility? Tolerance for uncertainty? The ability to begin without knowing or even having faith in the end? I need more of that and so does the world.