The em-dash=LLM thing is so crazy. For many years Microsoft Word has AUTOCORRECTED the typing of a single hyphen to the proper syntax for the context -- whether a hyphen, en-dash, or em-dash.
I would wager good money that the proliferation of em-dashes we see in LLM-generated text is due to the fact that there are so many correctly used em-dashes in publicly-available text, as auto-corrected by Word...
Which would matter but the entry box in no major browser do was this.
The HN text area does not insert em-dashes for you and never has. On my phone keyboard it's a very lot deliberate action to add one (symbol mode, long press hyphen, slide my finger over to em-dash).
The entire point is it's contextual - emdashes where no accomodations make them likely.
Yeah, I get that. And I'm not saying the author is wrong, just commenting on that one often-commented-upon phenomenon. If text is being input to the field by copy-paste (from another browser tab) anyway, who's to say it's not (hypothetically) being copied and pasted from the word processor in which it's being written?
Check out the History of the Germans season on the Hanseatic League [0]. The bulk goods trade was in the Baltic / Northern Europe was actually huge. The Hansa themselves traded all the way from London to Novgorod. Anyway, it's an absolutely fascinating subject and period.
This is a super cool visualization format, and really tremendous work from the authors. I got to interview Steve (via the web) in the summer of 2023. It was really humbling and amazing. I'm glad the author got to share this extension of his work with him!
When other architects aren't familiar with his genius, I explain that he taught Drop City how to build domes - which is the architectural equivalent of teaching Johnny Ramone how to play a power chord. RIP to one of the absolute giants.
Steve did so much more than teaching Drop City to build domes.
He invented zomes - like domes, but made up of parallelograms rather than triangles so that they can be stretched to create vertical walls.
He invented numerous unpowered solar technologies including skylights that closed and opened automatically based on temperature, and unmotorized solar trackers. Due to the constraints of the time, these all depended on freon, but had Steve been working in the 21st century other safer refrigerants could have done the job as well.
He envangelized about the possibilities of passive heating systems, like Water Wall (which he used in his own home).
He believed passionately in the importance of solar technology not being taken over by large corporations, a belief that sadly didn't end up structuring the industry.
He invented an osmotic heat pipe, stolen from him by the Hughes Corp. and used to cool flight suits in fighter jets.
In 1981, I (a 17yr old from London travelling the USA by bus) spent a night on Steve's patio arguing about cross-subsidies (e.g. cities helping to pay for the cost of electrical and telephone systems in rural areas). We didn't agree but it was a cracking night.
In 2019, I sat on the same patio with a much diminished but still sizzling mind, and now lived only 60 miles away from him. Although it was not unexpected, I was still sad to see at the end of TFA that Steve finally died earlier this year. He was a giant of the alternative technology movement of the 60s/70s and early 80s, and stands as one of my heroes in life to this day.
Oh man, thank you for sharing. To be clear I am quite aware just how broad and incisive Steve's intellectual range was, and his commitment to using it for the betterment of humanity. The details you added are proof positive of that.
He was one of the true greats, and thank you again for sharing.
My sway setup is everything as all black as I can get but with any accents as small and bright - neon green and eye bleeding magenta - as possible. So Fluorescent speaks to me.
I remember as a kid using 3.11 and win 95 and cycling through the themes, trying them all out for a day or two to decide which I wanted to use. You know, important decisions. Anyway, in an eternal black mark on my character I didn't even consider Hot Dog Stand.
It's actually pretty boring. When I say "accent color" I mean a single pixel border around the selected container. The waybar is text, and the text is all bright green on a black background. The active desktop has a single pixel magenta stroke around it. I've thought about turning that into just magenta text as well. Every window element I can make #000000 black without making things more confusing is.
Default text in the terminal is green, and if I select it with a mouse it's magenta. It's more of a "terminal" vibe than the win 3.1 Fluorescent vibe. I said that because they share garish colors.
Also, I'm always on the lookout for even more minimalist graphics to use in my config, if anyone has hyper-minimal things they like about theirs...
I’m using cwm with no bar. Just xclock and xbatt (an icon that reflect the battery percentage) in a corner. The only decoration is a border around the windows. Keyboard driven, but some menus are accessible by clicking on the desktop.
Great read. They also talked through the podcast and made specific reference to Ernie and his use of Affinity through Lutris on the recent episode of their podcast. [0] It was a good listen.
edited to add: I am however surprised that Ernie didn't just go for VivaDesigner [1], as it does seem to be a more drop-in InDesign replacement and is Linux native...
Thanks for pointing out VivaDesigner—I’m surprised in the many obsessive searches to find something like this, it never came up! (I will note that there are a lot of pretty obscure layout programs out there. At my first newspaper, I was brought in to help with the transition to CCI, which was a full-stack publishing tool popular with newspapers of the era. As a result of this, I was introduced to their old system, by Harris, which relied on Windows NT 3.1. Fun times.)
This project is probably a no-go with it (for kicks, I did try importing a PDF of the final doc) but I will keep it in mind in the future from an analysis standpoint.
The other point I’d make is kind of a tipping-point argument. While VivaDesigner can export into IDML it looks like, Affinity has gone just mainstream enough that it won’t be turned away at print shops, which is a real risk. PDFs can get you most of the way, granted, but some print shops want to edit the file, which makes sense.
Oh my goodness! I - really did not- expect to reach the author himself! Hello sir, your work is rad and am excited to see the zine!
My partner and I run our design studio on Linux these days and so we're always on the hunt for software to better replace the PC / Mac software we walked away from, so I explored running Affinity a couple years ago and couldn't get it going properly. Then last year I had to put together a big important document, so I had extra motivation to find a replacement.
I tried almost literally everything that was Linux native over a few weeks when I was getting started. I was impressed with VivaDesigner, but decided to just use LaTeX in VSCode - ahich was both awesome and terrifying for what wound up a 390pg document. And would be a huge PITA for this purpose.
Back to your post specifically - I can imagine how insane the old system you helped replace was.
And yes, I think that the "tipping point" is an important consideration. Maybe in Germany where Viva is based they might not think twice if you bring in a live file, but it does seem like Affinity is far and away the leading challenger in the states. I'm sure it's a miniscule share and Adobe is still the 8,000 pound gorilla.
Quick add: I tested VivaDesigner on some old InDesign docs and I found it did not handle color blend modes very well, which is kind of an essential for a risograph project like 404’s. Nonetheless, the fact that it was able to open an InDesign doc more or less intact makes it a useful tool for a switcher.
Different mod schemes (ctrl-click and such) than InDesign, but I'm sure I can get used to that, adjust the settings, or patch it. Might have worked for them though, good suggestion!
Does Scribus have the customizable bindings like GIMP, where you can download someone's helpful remapping of the Adobe keys to GIMP? I'm pretty sure you can make it even closer.
I downloaded my archive and completely ended my GPT subscription last week based on some bad computer maintenance advice. Same thing here - using other models, never touching that product again.
Oh, it was DUMB. I was dumb. I only have myself to blame here. But we all do dumb things sometimes, owning your mistakes keeps you humble, and you asked. So here goes.
I use a modeling software called Rhino on wine on Linux. In the past, there was an incident where I had to copy an obscure dll that couldn't be delivered by wine or winetricks from a working Windows installation to get something to work. I did so and it worked. (As I recall this was a temporary issue, and was patched in the next release of wine.)
I hate the wine standard file picker, it has always been a persistent issue with Rhino3d. So I keep banging my head on trying to get it to either perform better or make a replacement. Every few months I'll get fed up and have a minute to kill, so I'll see if some new approach works. This time, ChatGPT told me to copy two dll's from a working windows installation to the System folder. Having precedent that this can work, I did.
Anyway, it borked startup completely and it took like an hour to recover. What I didn't consider - and I really, really should have - was that these were dll's that were ALREADY IN the system directory, and I was overwriting the good ones with values already reflecting my system with completely foreign ones.
And that's the critical difference - the obscure dll that made the system work that one time was because of something missing. This time was overwriting extant good ones.
But the fact that the LLM even suggested (without special prompting) to do something that I should have realized was a stupid idea with a low chance of success made me very wary of the harm it could cause.
> ...using other models, never touching that product again.
> ...that the LLM even suggested (without special prompting) to do something that I should have realized was a stupid idea with a low chance of success...
Since you're using other models instead, do you believe they cannot give similarly stupid ideas?
I'm under no misimpression they can't. But I have found ChatGPT to be most confident when it f's up. And to suggest the worst ideas most often.
Until you queried I had forgotten to mention that the same day I was trying to work out a Linux system display issue and it very confidently suggested to remove a package and all its dependencies, which would have removed all my video drivers. On reading the output of the autoremove command I pointed out that it had done this, and the model spat out an "apology" and owned up to ** the damage it would have wreaked.
** It can't "apologize" for or "own up" to anything, it can just output those words. So I hope you'll excuse the anthropomorphization.
Was this with the little turle as your cursor? Seeing the "older" kids who could manipulate that program/language to make stopmotion movies might have been the moment that set me on the path of "technology enthusiast" for the rest of my life. The scene of the dimmed computer lab with a whole group gathered around someone's monitor to watch the newest creation is forever etched in my memory.
It was! I even remember it was Terrapin LOGO - which amazingly seems to still be around. [0]
None of us ever made anything as good as a stop-motion. It didn't even occur to me to do anything that cool. But I was obsessed with geometry and patterns, and benefit from a group of us being allowed up into the middle school to use the computer at lunchtime recess.
When I was older and got official "Enrichment" classes after school I tackled the same pattern and figured out how to do it with a minimum of repeated line segments. I also figured I might as well do triangular and square tilings. But those were boring, as there isn't a repeated edge problem to solve.
That’s really cool! In adulthood I’ve learned about Seymour Papert and LOGO but I was never exposed to it when I was young. We did have early 90’s Macs in grade school.
I would wager good money that the proliferation of em-dashes we see in LLM-generated text is due to the fact that there are so many correctly used em-dashes in publicly-available text, as auto-corrected by Word...
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