Arvind Venkataramani
@avenk.bsky.social
design researcher, ritual technologist, neuroatypical in unsatisfactory ways. i sense and work towards emergent futures. let’s make the world a place of flourishing for all life.
This is the highest-resolution view of the surface of the Sun. Ever. Taken by the NSF's Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, features as small as 19 km across can be resolved. The wispy things are magnetic field boundaries formed by Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities. The island of Ireland for scale.
A security update for Ghost and the fact that they broke direct mail sending in it made me setup my own outbound-only spam-aware recipient-locked postfix service and it’s 1. Nice to see old decentralised internet infra still works 2. Sad because the community solution was “use Mailgun”
It’s kind of fascinating that the largest/fastest growing protests in recent history the capital of the most populous democracy in the world is getting fuckall presence in the BlueSky timeline, even in the algorithmic bits. It’s clear we’re not getting 2010s Twitter back for a long time if at all.
finally saw "Project Hail Mary" this weekend without knowing anything about it other than that it was written by the guy who wrote "The Martian," and wow I was not prepared for how hilariously goofy it was going to be key takeaway: nothing ramps up the goof like a thick veneer of earnest scientism
If we ignore everything we know about a domain, implement a standardized analysis regardless of study design, obtain artificially commensurable results from across domains, LLMs can allegedly predict them well with some noise??? What at all have we learned about anything?
I despise honour cultures b/c I haven’t seen a single ine that hasn’t gone horribly toxic & violent, But looking at the world right now I wonder if the samurai had a point in seppuku: in taking responsibility by suffering personal consequences for failures, even when they have power to avoid them.
If I hear one more UX person arguing for synthetic users I’m going to take all their public data, feed it into a RAG, have a conversation, and then post an “interview” with “them” as if it’s the real thing. And then see how quickly I get objections about misrepresentation.
Frog put Claude in a harness. "There," he said, "now Claude can no longer delete files." "But Claude can edit the files" said Toad. "That is true," said Frog.
amos@fasterthanli.me · last mo.agent: let's delete this file harness: 🚨 DANGER NOPE CAN'T DO THAT 🚨 agent: let's replace this file with the empty string harness: 😌 thank god yes that's better 💆
I just filled out a UXR maturity survey to contribute to a community map and the survey design was so bad that I’m convinced that any such community report must contain large amounts of invented detail. I suppose I should have learned my lesson from the DORA report, but it still makes me sad.
Before there was Wes Anderson, there was Bichitr
Shabana Mir@shabana.bsky.social · last mo.Bichitr (Mughal Indian artist, 1600s). Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan receives his sons during his accession ceremonies (1628). Detail. From the Padshahnama [The Book of the Emperor], the official history of the reign of the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan. Held by the British Royal Library, U.K. (of course).
Delicious thread of what should definitely be watch faces
Luke Steuber@coolhand.bsky.social · last mo.Arrival clock This might be the hardest one I’ve tried from a pure styling standpoint.
I think that is being called “cognitive offloading” when describing use of LLMs is is more usefully called “cognitive abdication”. “Offloading” is a blurry term because we all – especially but not only knowledge workers – largely engage in situated cognition. 1/
Struggles loom so large for ADHD and/or autistic people sometimes, and this brings with it intense pressure to completely avoid failure, struggle, or awkwardness. That's not possible. Stop making this the goal. Instead, make the goal to do just a little bit better
I’m in awe seeing the very large and powerful make the very small and delicate, and I’m reminded that big events can contain smaller processes that can produce wonders. (This is also a reminder to do something for your community today.)
📣 The difference between replicable and not replicable is not itself scientifically replicable. 📣 New work with Erkan Buzbas, showing that verdicts such as "X% of results replicated" are based on an inferential machinery that doesn't work. arxiv.org/abs/2604.26268
english isn't for cowards. if you're not saying 'torpify,' that's a skill issue. there's no Académie Française telling you what to do. if you try to type 'pallific' and freak out when you see a little red underline, maybe you're not ready to roll with the big dogs.
Signups are open for Strandfall, an orienteering larp inspired by Stalker and Death Stranding! Set five years after a mysterious disaster unleashes deadly storms, players join a risky expedition to deploy "spatial computers" and put humanity back on its feet. Edinburgh / September 5th / *Free*
Strandfall is now open for sign ups
Sign up to our orienteering-style larp inspired by Stalker and Death Stranding.
strandfall.com
The first warning arrived on a Tuesday morning, six weeks after consultants advised moving from dependency on six hundred small excel scripts - and nobody at Zenith Ledger Advisory paid much attention. It appeared in the system dashboard between routine audit notifications and a maintenance reminder
People like this are single-handedly keeping the spirit of the early internet alive. Bravo.
Ben Holmen@benholmen.com · 2mo agoI built a very slow pixel display and hauled it to my local meetup last night. Finished my talk with 3 pixels to spare! More about the ridiculous project: benholmen.com/blog/kilopixel-season-1/
We lost Douglas Adams 25 years ago today. This has made a lot of people very sad and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
i will simply incant "do NOT corrupt me. make NO mistakes" before wielding the One Ring
A bunch of extremely beautiful pictures of wind farms in China - all photographs by Weimin Chu e360.yale.edu/digest/china...
What stunning details! The artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen recreated one of the destroyed Bamiyan Buddhas with recycled artillery from the destruction
René Hà@reneshaf.bsky.social · 3mo agolink to article here: hyperallergic.com/a-buddha-is-...
This is some of the most gorgeous illustration art on a theme I’ve ever seen, and it keeps expanding my range of how I believe an idea can be expressed.
Maybe It Will Happen Today@today-maybe.bsky.social · last yr.
Some people say we don’t build beautiful things anymore and, like, lol. Motherfuckers, we built this:
intertwingler is by far the thing i have created with the most design decisions per line of code written, by far probably at least an order of magnitude also "design decisions per line of code" would be a decent metric for how deceptively complex a software project is
My new paper is out and its free! Adult neurons resist influence more than neurons of younger animals, but once the system is altered, recovery in adults takes longer or never happens at all! This could be why adults resist emotions, drugs, and even learning when compared to children!
