I was JUST SAYING that Weeknotes should be a Sunday thing, and here I am posting them on Tuesday!
Wales Weekend
It’s ok though. We went to Wales on Friday and spent the weekend away in a cottage in the middle of nowhere with some friends. Lots of beers, wine, hot tub, shared meals, long walks in the woods and on the beach. It was great. Had such a wonderful time, we got back yesterday afternoon, and by the time that dinner, washing and housework were sorted, I just went to bed instead of faffing with my blog.
It was my first time visiting properly visiting Wales (I went to Cardiff for a meeting once and didn’t see anything more than an industrial park and the train station). The landscape there is wild, like an alien Landcape so far removed from where I grew up. Wales really is a different/foreign country.
It’s also the first November in .. 10 years? That I haven’t done Nanowrimo. It feels a bit weird, but I’m happy to cruise though the month, I’ve got lots to do anyways without adding an extra 1600 words a day on top of everything else I’ve got going on into my life.
On The Blog
Enchanted Knowledge Objects in LLM UI
I wrote a note about AI and LLM User Interfaces – the idea of ‘knowledge objects’ and using ꙮ symbol as a Machine Readable Markup to direct a models attention:
when we drop a document—a PDF, say—into an LLM’s context window, the document has a kind of gravity. It pulls and pushes the model toward certain ideas contained in the text, reshaping its context landscape and responses based on the content.
Because I’m so sword and sorcery pilled, the word that comes to mind is that Knowledge Objects are a kind of Talisman – objects imbued with specific powers and properties that can be intentionally wielded to amplify the will of its user.
Permanently Moved
No show as I was away obviously!
Only two more episodes left this year anyways, so lets eek season 13 out?
Quarterly zine; my gift to you ✉️
Photo 365
The Ministry Of My Own Labour
- Another writing session on PROJECT FORK
- Finessing language on a one pager for PROEJCT DIVE
- Half day on PROJECT ENTRY will make it up at some point in November
- New codename began – PROJECT COLLECT
Terminal Access
Tony Tran did ‘Promptober‘ last month. He was posting his results on social media, and in a Discord I’m in. You know, I’m all about doing creative work with rhythm and consistency so it was cool to see Tony’s project unfold over the month. My favourite is the middle Tolktober line.
Dipping the Stacks
The ‘ petertodd’ phenomenon — LessWrong
It’s important to note that the ‘ petertodd’ phenomenon varies between GPT models[1],
so it may be better thought of as a family of closely related phenomena.
Here’s What the Fight For Your Attention Really Looks Like
I was thinking about the gamification of our leisure time earlier this week while talking to a friend who’s an executive at an entertainment company lamenting that they didn’t have enough time to keep up with any trend over the last couple years let alone new ones
Mordheim: How I Learned to Stop Worrying About GW Release Cycles and Love a 25 Year Old Game
Despite it being basically out of stock for over 20 years, this isn’t some sort of retrospective. This game is alive and well, surviving in the dark corners of the hobby, its dense multi-story ruins furtively glimpsed in gaming clubs, Instagram posts and homes around the world. This game is still fed and nurtured by a surprisingly committed community who are still producing content for it, continuing to bolt on additional house rules, scenarios and factions to create some grim palimpsest homunculus of a game.
So, what are the “neumorphic” applications of GenAI video?
“Fortnite” is more than a game. It’s the single most important influence on popular culture
If you’ve spent the last year utterly confused by, well, everything in pop culture, chances are you just weren’t paying attention to where a significant chunk of it comes from now: “Fortnite”
Reading
I finished reading Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life by Kenneth Gross this week. It’s a truly remarkable essay/book. Gross sees puppets as more than objects—they are lifeless but seem alive. They reflect our fears, our need for control, and our questions about identity. Puppets, in his view, bring out truths that actors and real people can’t quite express. YUP
I burnt though Managing Oneself by Peter Drucker the “founder of modern management”. This short 2005 books seems like the UR book written for the emerging knowledge worker at the time.
Started reading: Playing with Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World by Kelly Clancy. A wide-ranging intellectual history that reveals how important games have been to human progress
Still on deck: Wisdom – Letters of St. Joseph the Hesychast, Puppets, Gods, Brands: Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan, Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing
Music
Infinite Icon – Paris Hilton
What a weird age we live in. Katy Perry puts out an absolutely terrible widely panned album powered by the fumes of former pop glory, meanwhile Paris Hilton drops an album of super camp wall to wall Y2K era pop bangers. What is going on?
A lot of folks in the Dark Forest chats are super mad that I like this album so much lol, but I don’t care. Maybe they should examine their own biases.
I came out of Taylor Lorenz’s book Extremely Online with a big respect for Hilton surviving the early 00’s – basically inventing the influencer playbook. The character she played on Simple Life has become strong armour. Plus 20 years on we can see the infamous sex tape for what it actually was – spiteful revenge porn – we even have a word for it now.
I think my fav song is probably the the late album track Stay Young.
Also addition, the piano driven balled about having ADHD is a perfect sing along song but the main thing I want to share about the song is the music video. What the hell is going on?
Remember Kids:
The future arrived here a couple of weeks ago and nobody noticed. Because that’s how the future always arrives. You don’t realise it’s here until you bump into it.
Normal by Warren Ellis
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