masswerk

> then you close it

You mean, then you disconnect the presentation layer.

Netscape was actually selling a licence, which became free for endusers and eventually the entire browser was free, as the company concentrated on its Enterprise Server as a source of revenue. Netscape becoming freely available for endusers is pretty much what made the Web a mass phenomenon.

Yes, you could have done similar with GIFs already with Netscape 3 and IE 3 (I think, IE 3.1, or was this just the Mac version?). "Dynamic HTML" with z-layering became a thing with Netscape 4.0 and Internet Explorer 4.0, which became available in Summer/Fall 1997. With this, relative positioning and proportional text (at variable character width) wouldn't have been a problem.

(With the NS/IE 3 generation, you would have been limited to lines of prepositioned fixed-width characters in a table. So, not really applicable for this.)

I think, the decisive factor may have been badly managed CRTs tending to display greys with a somewhat reddish hue (esp. on Windows, not so much on Macs with a screen gamma of 1.8) and JPEGs generally enjoying better color support. (JPEG was displayed at sRGB or at any embedded IEC profile, which wasn't available for GIF, where the effective color was pretty much hit and miss. So, if you had HTML text with a defined hex-color, a GIF of the same color wouldn't match, while a sRGB JPEG would. Matching JPEG and GIF colors would have posed a similar problem. A reddish hue on grey looked kind of cheap and brownish text was probably the last thing Apple would have wanted.)

Yes, this is pretty much how we did such things already in the 1990s. The problem with this is that this only supports a predefined, rather limitted character set. But you could have expanded on this and may have loaded custom characters on demand (which would have been a rather small payload for a single character.) But there's yet another problem, namely color management, which isn't supported by GIF (which we need for the transparent background), and they probably really wanted to go with JPEG for this. (At that time, CRTs were still much around and those tended to show greys with a reddish tint when managed badly. Something Apple would have certainly wanted to avoid.)

BTW, here's a PoC (a website from 1998 written in about two hours [so not much of hassle even then] demoing pure JS rendering from a data file, all just classic table layout rendered in the browser, all styled text and the ticker are rendered from single-character images): https://www.masswerk.at/demospace/relayWeb_en/welcome.htm

PS: For the those seeking comfort in literature, we get some discussion on accomplishment in the work of Jane Austen, as in a worthy and virtuous entertainment for young gentlewomen, accomplishment for display, "true" accomplishment, as an ability to entertain oneself under conditions of intellectual austerity, means of intellectual independence, etc. Not to the least in "Pride and Prejudice", where accomplishment is discussed as a sibling and foil to Darcy's male conception of inner moral virtue, which, in fact, amounts to an socio-economic Regency scandal, as he entirely ignores his first-born duties in good-natured impulsiveness, bad decision making and short-sighted expenses, which an entire middle class depends on. (Is there a similar side to accomplishment?)

Notably, this was written at a similar time, when fortunes made from trade and a new kind of availability of manufactured goods was turning the (paper mache) table, in terms of what may be a good and fulfilled life and a worthwhile activity.

The first paragraph kind of reads like an inverse of Kant's criteria for a moral action: are you sure that there was no enjoyment, no pleasure was involved in this action or resulted from it? At the same time, it kind of establishes the ethics of self-entertainment, and by this, maybe, an imperative of joyless joy? It kind of echos 19th century 'accomplishment', a modest self-entertainment by the fruits of virtuos learning and training, while with kind of a consumerist twist, as this now involves the use and "modest" development of technology, which introduces an external, social dependency, which it at the same time tries to eclipse.

Meaning, I think, besides utilitarian one-time, one-purpose scripts, programming is essentially an at least potentially social activity, there's always a potential social horizon to it. Just like with any other activity that aims at a work.

> "It's not clear what exactly the end goals are, as the information appears to be publicly accessible anyway."

Another reminder that LLM productions are really a prompt on us to inflate this output with meaning. (And that LRHF is really the engineering that makes this likely to happen.)

For reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boggs_eumorphic_projection

Isn't this more like a 1997 website, though? ;-)

(I.e., all the webpages with a rotating globe with "News" spelled around it in the fashion of the animated Universal logo, embedded as an animated GIF [GIF89a].)

Goode homolosine projection, which enjoyed some popularity in the "Space Age", deserves a mention.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goode_homolosine_projection

It's the great desemantification machine: want to look, read, sound, feel just like the median, without personal traits or individual expression? This is for you! (And people used to talk about communism and everything being same. Well, tech-broism actually achieved this.)

Which is, BTW, a funny way of thinking of living creatures.

Of course. As we're told to prepare for the new times… :-)

On a more serious note, I think, if we're going to criticise the kind of distortions LLMs do to language and the construction of meaning, we should be able to come up with similar productions, just to demonstrate where and how this goes wrong.

(Much like the early Wittgenstein pointed out some constructs and declared, this is not a meaningful sentence, in fact, it's not a sentence, at all. And went on to define the limits for what a meaningful proposition may convey and what it can not, what we may expect and hope for in an expression and what we may not. In other words, is there even enough in the toolset of LLMs to construct meaning? Is traversing a semantic field in an apparently well-formed sentence already meaning or is it not?)

The construction of meaning is totally distorted, though. In the original, the first part is entirely motivated by the conclusion, and puts emphasis to this by a crescendo of counterintuitive observations. This is what made this memorable phrasing. In the version suggested here, there's just an incompetence attributed to the original author, underlined by repetitive phrasing, so that the supposed speaker may claim all the glory by uttering an observation, which is in and by itself rather banal. You wont think about this twice. Thus, the entire construct ends in a whimper (so it may fit the template) and there isn't really any reason to put it that way, or to say this, in the first place. Its perceived purpose may be rather to occupy space and time (at the cost of the recipient.)

I think, there's a systematic flaw in RLHF: constructs reinforced as effective or sophisticated style will always suffer overuse and significant overexposure. Which will be also very obvious when used out of the intended context, it's copied from. There will be always a "smell", something that causes us to turn our backs to these texts, and possible the supposed authors, as well.

There's also the problem that certain types of phrasing are perceived as effective, because they mark a pivotal point in the progress of the text and are, as such, used sparingly, but are now becoming everyday templates that incorporate whatever is available in the context. There is no way this passes the Turing test of a competent reader.

And there's yet another issue: in social research, there has been the concept of semantic position, indicated by deviation from the mean (or median). If you don't deviate from the mean, your semantic position is zero. There's simply no expression. In this sense, next token prediction really amounts to a desemantificiation of the context. There's really no sense in uttering any of these productions, no plausible motivation, other than for the purpose of raising you hand to be seen.

That's the flaw in RLHF: constructs tagged as effective or sophisticated speech become templates, are increasingly used out of context (e.g., "not just A, not just B, but C" is usually meant to provide some synthesis and further the progress of the text) and suffer from significant overexposure. (And gone is the em-dash…)

In contemporary YouTube-script wording:

> The Ecclasiast looked under the sun, but there was something he didn't understand. Something that wasn't right. Something that was not as it was supposed to be. And here is what the Ecclesiast didn't understand. Here is what nobody understood. Not then. Not in the years that followed. Not now. It was not the swift who won the race. Not the strong who won the battle. Not the wise who earned the bread. Not the men of understanding who gained the riches. Not the men of skill who gained the favor. And here is what I found: to any story of success, there is an element of unpredictability and chance.

(There are really just two possible outcomes: either the article is right or in, say, two years, we will be all writing and talking like this, as in humans learning from mediamatically reinforced human feedback.)

There was also an interesting, while mostly under the radar, in-the-middle: using the Flex [0] compiler, you could write and compile pure Flash Player files in AS3, which would be considerably smaller and leaner/more performant than both Flash and Flex. All it needed was a base Application instance at the root. This was not to the least, because this didn't import all the UI classes, meaning, you had to come up with your own elements (like scrollbars, scroll panes, buttons, etc), probably importing them as assets compiled in Flash or Flex. So, on the one hand, these custom GUI elements ideally had the same functionality, accessibility, etc as the generic ones, while, on the other hand, this came with degree of freedom, seldom found anywhere else. Which should make them interesting to review, especially, since this approach was much more abstract than working in Flash.

(NB, these files should be rather difficult to find and you really needed an original Adobe Flash Player to run them, as well as a platform, which still runs Flash Player. So this technology path is probably mostly lost.)

[0] Flex was Flash's "professional" sibling framework based on XML files, resulting in the same player format.

I prefer to think of this in terms of Umberto Eco's opera aperta (open work): if any text is a collaboration between author and reader/recipient, here, all the burden of meaning is left to the recipient. There's simply no meaning on the side of the "author", it's just a statistical extraction.

(There's also the problem of words/signs (just) referring to other words and/or cultural entities. There is no world nexus in this, therefore also nothing we conventionally refer to as meaning. On the other hand, it's utterly dogmatic, as all it refers to is the most probable construct, as a reference to references that are just another utterance, but supposedly a dominant one.)

Mind that even in their first example, "The results of the study were quite (important | significant | substantial | notable)", the meaning is by no means interchangeable.

"Important" refers to impact, "significant" to the statistical qualities of the underlying hypothesis, "substantial" to the work involved, and "notable" is a referential judgement by the speaker. The implied normalization of words and their respective meaning also marks one of the mechanisms how "slop" is typically creeping into the productions of "broad verbose interchange replicas" (it's all interchangeable, and a choice isn't really that, a choice, isn't it?).

Yes, the version of Snow Leopard people are referring to (and have fond memories of, me included) was 10.6.8.x. The point is really that it was given time to mature. (Back in the day, users used to explicitly refer to "10.8.6", and not just globally to "Snow Leopard". Similar to how people used to refer to 7.5.5 and 7.6.2 specifically.)

How do these 3D architectures scale regarding yield? (The naïve expectation would be that adding vertical layers should have exponential impact on yield.) Is this commercially viable, near term?

– ? –

I played around with one that, I think, was a type-in from Compute! Gazette. Since this was also the time of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, I remember devising a medieval handwriting font (so quite the opposite, but fun!)…

Regarding the shape of the letter "C", mind that of the 10 digits of the MICR E-18B font, the digits 2, 5, 6, 7, 0 don't have any "thickenings" at all, all thin, even strokes. That's 5 out of 10 or half of the traditional part of the set. So just "C" being similar may be actually an underrepresentation. (Maybe, a "true" MICR inspired font should have actually somewhat more modulation between characters.)

Every hand-knotted carpet has some error per design, since only Allah is perfect.

But, I guess, "resulation" may be a bit blotchy for a sign of humbleness. :-)

Sorry, I had to fix this.

(You're welcome anyway. And yes, I think, it's the sort of quirky article, an LLM can't come up with.)

*) "emulgate", maybe better emulsify, but this is a bit lateral to this? The point being, a homogenous preparation, which is more a superficial operation than an essential one, as the establishing ingredients remain the untouched.

> AI tools are pure rationalists, and are solely capable of reasoning.

Mind that the world isn't in the language, nor our connection with the world. (We know this for about 120 years, since we expelled the referens from linguistics.) Which brings us back to the synthetic judgement a priori… You may emulate this, as a superficial trait drawn from other traces of communication, but it's not what this is all about. E.g., I wouldn't expect true "lateral thinking" from an LLM output.

> My biggest fear from AI…

I'd add to this, it's not just empirical vs rationalist epistemology, it's also about empathy, anything referring to the conditio humana, which is really what any text is about, even a scientific one (why is it that we do want to know, what are the motivations, the regulating circumstances, etc.?).

If we're talking about concepts and communication, in text, I don't know what meaning of synthesis to apply (as long as there is meaning), other than the meaning this has had for centuries. I think, aggregation, extraction and emulgating is something else.

The very purpose of text is to transfer meaning, concepts, observations and complex thoughts to human readers for them to process. And we have built a complex framework around this and for this. The fact that many feel that this framework is violated should hint at there being a problem, a conceptual discrepancy. (And be it just that there's a man-in-the middle, who hasn't authorship, standing in between me as an author and those receiving what remains of the text. In its essential lack of agency, it's less of a mediating recommendation and more of an appropriation. But, maybe, if we're talking about a slip into a new dogmatic slumber, manufactured via an unseen authority that hasn't any authority nor position as an author, the problem goes deeper than this. And, maybe, the masquerading of LLM output as human cummunication and phrasing is part of the problem.)

The general consensus used to be that questions should be either closed (i.e., all the knowledge is disclosed in the interface) or open (any in-between doesn't help to organinze and conceptionalize thought) and that UI elements should signal this appropriately. Now, with autocomplete, there's a use case for this. But there seem to be two types of users, those who make ready use of this and those who ignore it completely, maybe hinting at the question being still open.

(We may observe how the implementation of datalist reflects this: it's still a simple textbox, i.e. input element, and the list is attached as an add-on, rather than being a list type of its own. It's not a list standing on its own, but an enhancement to the input field. So, rather don't use it as a control element for lists?)

PS: The point was really that, if you were to google "worst interface element", you got loads of articles about the combobox.