Thank you for this interesting "dump" of thoughts! I have a few replies which for some reason came out backwards.
(6) I too started this incidental to another project (the diagrams) and now have ended up in this rabbit hole where it's become its own project.
(4) Creating this kind of "narrative" for the diagrams is definitely something I have considered. e.g. there could be a character who had written them all and we found them in a book in the character's lab. I have this recurring thought about them being found on a CRT monitor in a forest, half buried in the ground and covered in moss. But I haven't been able to get a CRT aesthetic working well with them and for now I'm sticking with the hand drawn look.
(1) Yeah I did consider labelling but I am not the arbiter of what makes sense haha. Also actually I think there are probably different axes in which you could create that kind of scale. Like sense versus truth for example. There is probably a whole article to write just around that.
Thanks again, I definitely will continue to share my work :)
Thanks! I'm the artist and it's nice to see this recognised. I have been worried with this project that people might think I should just use a LLM, but I think there is value in how controllable and explainable this is.
Inform looks very interesting, though I will apparently have to do a lot more reading before I can totally grok what it is and why.
I've been working on an idea I am calling the Story Empathizer. The struggle I'm having is that my idea is so abstract, it's hard to write an instance of it.
story = meaning + expression
In the world of computing, context is liminal. We write explicit answers to "what?" and "how?", and call them "data" and "algorithms". Those answers are entirely meaningful: defined. Context, on the other hand, is ethereal: untouchable. Context is the answer to "why?". It exists in our code like the waters of a river exist in the walls of the Grand Canyon: only present at time of writing. We encode our intentions into software just like a river carves time into earth. There is no inverse function: no intention decoder.
When we communicate with natural language, we start without shared context. If I want to be understood, I must share my context. I do that by writing a second story: a backstory. The reader uses that backstory to define the meaning of my expression.
With shared context, we aren't limited to reading. We have all the parts of the equation, and can use them to read, write, and empathize.
read: meaning = story - expression
write: expression = story - meaning
So what if we could move this process out of our brains, and into a computer? Well, that's the dream, anyway..
It could be one of the generated sentences, but I composed it via wetware, in order to get a more-meaningful-than-average utterance:
Meaninglessness (because a product of a random process)
is liminal (because it's betwixt and between, neither meaningful[0] nor meaningless[2])
because the context is shared (the vocabulary for the generator —the context shared between we meaningful creatures and the stochastic parrot program— are constraints, especially chosen by the artist to be evocative no matter how they are combined)
[0] compare SLN:
Just like the white winged dove
Sings a song
Sounds like[1] she's singing
Ooh ooh ooh
[1] there are many references to animal sounds sounding like human speech; here are two:
Ajax in the Little Iliad —having turned Athena's grey eyes green by managing to tank without asking her for buffs— is driven mad[2] by her shortly after he loses a prize to Odysseus: he interprets the greek cows, instead of saying "moo", as saying "μου" (mine), each claiming the prize for herself, not for him ... and so he kills them all.
In a less sanguine vein, Pechkin the Postman also has a nervous breakdown after thinking Khvatayka the Jackdaw is continually asking him "kto tam?" (both a fairly corvidesque sound and "who's there?" in russian) despite his efforts to explain that he's the postman bringing a magazine.
[2] in The Eden Express (1975), Mark Vonnegut points out that maybe he could've figured out he was going schizophrenic, if only he'd stopped to notice that everything had suddenly become meaningful.
I'm sure you've heard this many times, but thank you for sharing these blog posts. You're doing some _really cool_ stuff, and it's a treat to be able to read about the depth to which you've thought of these problems, and how creatively you've been solving them.
This is great, both the text generation and the diagrams.
Have you considered using wordnet to explore the space of related words? IIRC they encoded all sorts of relationships, from the obvious like synonyms and antonyms, to less common like metonyms etc.
Ha yeah I am actually a designer, although I'm very UX focused rather than UI - and I'm definitely not a typographer. I am cringing a bit at the kerning at the moment, it's definitely still a work in progress! I guess though that my goal was to recreate handwriting, rather than to create a font. My handwriting doesn't have great kerning either.
Do you have any sources for computer art outside of the USA or Western Europe in the 50s and 60s? I'm sort of reliant on what comes up in extensive internet search missions that go down all kinds of rabbit holes, but I should have made more of an effort to figure out what was happening outside of USA/Europe at the time. I'd love to take a look and will work out a way either to include it in this article or in a later one.
(6) I too started this incidental to another project (the diagrams) and now have ended up in this rabbit hole where it's become its own project.
(4) Creating this kind of "narrative" for the diagrams is definitely something I have considered. e.g. there could be a character who had written them all and we found them in a book in the character's lab. I have this recurring thought about them being found on a CRT monitor in a forest, half buried in the ground and covered in moss. But I haven't been able to get a CRT aesthetic working well with them and for now I'm sticking with the hand drawn look.
(1) Yeah I did consider labelling but I am not the arbiter of what makes sense haha. Also actually I think there are probably different axes in which you could create that kind of scale. Like sense versus truth for example. There is probably a whole article to write just around that.
Thanks again, I definitely will continue to share my work :)