building @inanimate_tech / blogger
London O London
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- Following 1,459
- Followers 17,265
- Likes 17,583
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news.inanimate.tech
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Get Daft Punk to make a comeback for the finale then they fly up the Eiffel Tower and one of them takes their helmet off and it’s Celine Dion and the other one takes their helmet off and it’s also Celine Dion
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I made an AI clock for my bookshelves! It composes a new poem every minute using ChatGPT and mysteriously has this enthusiastic vibe which I am totally into instagram.com/p/Cp44-AMNyd9/
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Sudden realisation that while I was watching the London 2012 opening ceremony weeping with pride at a million vital deep cut references the rest of the world would have been looking at it all like wtf
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I made an AI clock for my bookshelves! It tells the time with a new poem EVERY MINUTE composed by ChatGPT. And it has... weird vibes??
tl;dr it's on Kickstarter as of right now
I want to tell you the story because I didn't mean to do this...
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Honestly, screw commuting and screw Pret. I love working from home
But why not have a coffee truck that drives around the suburbs like an ice cream van? I’m sure we could come up with a “flat white” jingle for it to play.
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The centre is always exactly wherever you are, right? Equidistant to the cosmic background in all directions. An easier app to code lol
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I had to mute a big name a few days ago after reading their take on a Current Issue which was casually anti-semitic. Like, come on, how has that been normalised
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Word to the wise: UK clocks go back 30 Oct. USA clocks go back 6 Nov. Don’t arrange any Skype calls that whole week, it’s not worth the pain
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Hand on heart I did not include this kind of motivational positivity in the prompt!
I did describe the room from its pov, so it sometimes refers to books or the rug, or its own self as a small e-ink screen
Tbh I can’t look away. I need to get lunch but it’s compelling & magical
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Like, it’s on the actual App Store!
It’s super janky!
But you can get it
Top tip: the central black hole of the Milky Way is 26,000 light years year. It moves across the sky depending on your location and the date
apps.apple.com/gb/app/galact…
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Kinda hard to read, but I wanted to share...
My wild AI tool-use moment today (with @langchain) is that I rigged up a new "ask the user" tool. The AI can now come back with questions if it needs more info. And it does!
A tiny proof of concept but this pattern opens up so much
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State of the art techniques to get GPT to return JSON
- logic: Responses must match this JSON schema
- demonstration: For example…
- appeal to identity: You are a chatbot that speaks perfect JSON
- cajoling: Remember always return JSON!
- threat: if you don't I SWEAR I'm gonna–
If anyone from @OpenAI is listening, then what would be insanely useful would be `gpt-3.5-turbo` but instruction-tuned to always reply in JSON according to a Typescript interface in an opening system message 🙏
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Caused a surprising amount of office controversy by revealing my belief that the I Ching can access deep truths and it doesn't matter how
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The entire BBC In Our Time archive browsable by Dewey-Decimal code? Yes please
I made a website to find old episodes of In Our Time to listen to. There are almost a thousand, it’s my starting point for any new topic
Very early, suggestions welcome
genmon.github.io/braggoscope…
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From May 2018, everyone in the EU will have new data rights under GDPR. Look at them, it's like v1 of an internet constitution
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Whoa. iOS 13 will ARTIFICIALLY RE-POINT YOUR EYEBALLS in video calls so you're looking right at the other person instead of where you're actually looking, which is the screen
Hey Apple, so long as we're doing this, how about fixing my hair and maybe also the bags under my eyes
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It's 2047. Amazon Prime membership is now paid as a percentage of your income and includes healthcare
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What if your browser could zoom out from a page to see the connections?
Not 100% sure where I'm going with this yet... something about pages vs overviews which will marry up with previous hyperlink/presence sketches (somehow). So I wanted to get the underlying code working
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omg so someone just adapted cursor-party and added (among other features) teeny eyes to the cursors that point to where you're going
it is... surprisingly connecting? I am now convinced that all multiplayer cursors need teeny eyes 🥹
ellesho.me/page/
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Clever of Johnson to do a speech at a police academy with police behind him, talking about police...
because now googling "boris johnson police" no longer brings up that awkward story of the police being called when he was yelling at his partner in June theguardian.com/politics/201…
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If anyone from @OpenAI is listening, then what would be insanely useful would be `gpt-3.5-turbo` but instruction-tuned to always reply in JSON according to a Typescript interface in an opening system message 🙏
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no kings, no apps
> Documents are created by "tearing" a piece of "paper" off of a "stationary pad". That is, double-clicking the stationary icon creates a new document icon. There are also no "applications", only "tools" that must be present for you to work with the documents.
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I mean… where is this even coming from. I feel so nourished. BY A CLOCK
Anyway if you like this then check out my blog. Here are the top posts of 2022 👉
interconnected.org/home/2022…
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I can’t even write apps
So I wrote this together with ChatGPT 🤝
I wanted this app! Maybe 2 or 3 other people do too! Now we have it
Being present to the position of the galactic center is we whirl round it is… profoundly grounding
Here’s my writeup
interconnected.org/home/2024…
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Huh this is blowing up. DM me if you're an industrial design agency/product co with a credible path to retail, perhaps there's something here... 🌸🌼🌸
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Apropos of nothing I approve of this as-yet-unnamed fashion trend, and I would totally watch some kind of Gillian Anderson and Jeff Goldblum team-up TV vehicle, silver foxes fight crime on the moon while being extra stylishly dressed or whatever
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What if hyperlinks told you how busy it was at the other end? Just some playing with big yellow circles to do that
What if, when you hovered, the people at the far end saw you peeping 👀
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5 minutes after Google went down, we were swapping jokes. At 30 minutes, we were getting concerned. At 2 hours, somebody thought to visit Google HQ in person: in its place, a black void, absent not just of light but the very idea of light. It was only after a week that the signal
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I don't understand why we're going ahead with Brexit so I'm going to peacefully sit in Parliament Square and say just that.
WEDNESDAY 6.30pm till 8pm
I made a t-shirt and everything. If you're around, come join me.
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When I'm writing, I draft and draft again... but I rarely revise in-place
Instead I re-write, copy-and-paste blocks of text, and re-arrange
Conventional tools make it hard to experiment with revisions -- and lose the comments from early readers
So I want a side-by-side editor.
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People who are closest to the exponential keep on leaving to do wild things. If they start leaving to do art or get their affairs in order, then we worry
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Whoa. What’s wild is that I met an existential risk expert years ago who was genuinely concerned about economic p-zombies as an inescapable end mode, and it sounded absurd to me then
Yet you just described it happening…
I wrote up the convo here
interconnected.org/home/2020…
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I always bake my bread for 49 minutes, because Siri doesn't understand my accent and if I say "50" it sets the timer for 15
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Please meet Stella Autumn Webb, born 14 November 2018. Angela and I are smitten 😍
instagram.com/p/BqUgscXgGfu/
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Trying to figure out when the timelines split. The opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics I think
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Okay okay okay
OKAY okay!!! Tons of people want one
Lmk your email address. If there’s enough interest then I’ll do something with AI Clock and drop you a note with whatever happens next
aiclock.substack.com/?r=33px…
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Brand's "shearing layers"/pace layers diagram is so powerful -- I come back to it, year after year, in so many contexts. It's the best way to delve into so many different areas.
Which makes me ask: what was the reference point *before* this diagram? Does it have a history?
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No I can't believe I watched all 19 mins of this YouTube of a dulcet-toned Irish man narrating his construction of a 1:9 scale diorama of the arrest in Malibu in 2006 of a drunk Mel Gibson
AND YET
so will you
piped.video/watch?v=2UoHb0zi…
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"15 bars in F major without singing an F, and then on the word ‘starman’ [Bowie] hits two of them, an octave apart" lrb.co.uk/v34/n07/thomas-jon…
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Hello new followers! My blog is called Interconnected. It has been my space for having ideas in public since Feb. 2000
In 2021, I wrote 128 posts on topics like design, tech, cognition, AI, UFOs, frozen heads AND SO ON. Sometimes serious sometimes stupid 💃
An intro thread...
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Ahaha today's blog post hit Hacker News and...
...ambient togetherness really doesn't scale to 500 simultaneously readers
One commenter
> I love the cursors! It’s 1992s idea of cyberpunk. It’s so chaotic and distracting. It’s like trying to read a newspaper on a windy day.
🙃
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I’d like to rebuild my network of small UK design/tech studios — teams to go to when I land product invention projects
Capabilities: design thinking, visual/UX, but also full-stack dev and chops to handle weird deep code, for exploration and rapid prototyping
Who should I know?
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Apparently if you ask @midjourney v5 to synth pure black... and then take those images and crank the contrast waaaaay up... you get these GORGEOUS hidden florals and splashes 😍 The AI can't help itself
Discovered by Charles Jamison on Prompt Whispering
facebook.com/groups/58608518…
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I'm heading up @RGA's new accelerator. This is going to be a ton of fun wired.co.uk/article/rga-acce…
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"If you drop a map of your country on the floor, there will be a point on the map that touches the actual point it refers to."
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Just had a mini career/personal highlight that I’m not sure I can talk about publicly and tbh in the scheme of things, the only person that it matters to is me, but… 20 years in the making and I’m feeling a little overwhelmed 🥲
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I am massively in love with You Are Atlas
Now please somebody else visit the site so I can close my browser and get some dinner
youareatlas.com/
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AMAZING. Tunnel systems built by 4 ton giant sloths, inhabited for centuries
Giant sloths in South America excavated ENORMOUS tunnels during the Pleistocene. These remarkable megaburrows preserve the claw marks from the beasts that engineered them. More details and image credits here discovermagazine.com/planet-…
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Look, 2020 is awful. But I was born in 78 and spent the first 11 years of my life being given books about various types of apocalypse and having nightmares about mushroom clouds. I honestly assumed I’d be blown up or living in a radioactive wasteland by now.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Maybe the multiplayer apps on my phone should be badged with the people inside them? And look noisy if the app is busy?
But only my work apps
And I should have to swipe-to-commute a reaaaallly long way to get to the screen
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so last year I built an AI agent called Lares that controlled a (simulated) smart home
I re-built it this year, and I want to share what I learnt
let me set expectations here: this is super simple. anybody building AI agents will FAR surpass this, like instantly
HOWEVER
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Impressed with the online passport renewal by @gdsteam. Transparent application tracking! Take my new photo with my phone!
I don't think "digital service" quite describes what's special here--it's more like humane bureaucracy? More like this pls
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Using keywords to cover up a bad story AGAIN today nitter.app/theandymaturin/status/…
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I am voting to discard
the backstop
that we agreed
with the EU
and which
you were probably
relying on
for jobs and food
Forgive me
I am a disaster capitalist
so rich
and so cold
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Yesterday on the bus a small child thought my Apple AirPods were a new kind of cigarette and that I was smoking with my ears
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That's not the worst of it, it will sometimes fib about the time in order to make the rhyme work. Priorities!
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Warren Buffett's new letter to the shareholders has been posted berkshirehathaway.com/letter… -- always a great read, Hemingway x macroeconomics
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ok, realtime multiplayer text selection is now live across my entire blog
AND cursor chat.
all anonymous. easter eggs to be discovered by unsuspecting readers.
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At 9.31 AM GMT exactly today the Sun will be 100% eclipsed by clouds. This phenomenon will not occur again in the UK until tomorrow probably
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Web feeds are a better way to read the web. But if you don’t already know what it is, it’s hard to start.
So I made a Getting Started guide that anyone can link to (and also wrote about why web feed/RSS usage is important)
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what do we do when we can run hand recognition in the browser using super advanced computer vision??
MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER HIGH FIVE
that's what we do.
come high five with strangers
🎈 high-five.labs.partykit.dev
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I made a lighting rig controlled by head tracking!
because
..I don't know why because. anyway, it's multiplayer so you can use it together
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How do we collaborate with AIs? What if they were just like our human colleagues, cursors and all? Well not exactly human
I’ve been sketching NPCs-as-dolphins — you build a little pool, summon them, and that’s where they hang out
(NPCs = non-player characters)
AND THEN...
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If I can store decades of photos on my phone, taking more high res ones all the time, there is literally no reason that every single webpage I visit shouldn’t be compiled into a searchable, personal Internet Archive. Having “open tabs” is such a relic
All visited tabs should be permanently available in cache + The browser should index the content of them, make it searchable + it should read the tabs for me and collect them by topic and suggest interesting things I might have missed
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super nerdy but I have been mucking around with web components, which are great now
here's something that looks like straight HTML... but it's realtime and multiplayer
kinda into the idea of sprinkling the web with aliveness, without having to make every website into an app
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Is there a consensus name for the live, multiplayer presence bar at the top of Google Docs, Figma, Notion, etc? ("Avatar stack"? It's usually user photos.)
And has anyone done a UX review collecting + comparing them all?
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All the chatty brands have gone quiet. Like that thing in movies where the birds stop singing
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Here’s something else I made! Kickstarter has a few days left if you’d like to back 🤘
I made an AI clock for my bookshelves! It tells the time with a new poem EVERY MINUTE composed by ChatGPT. And it has... weird vibes??
tl;dr it's on Kickstarter as of right now
I want to tell you the story because I didn't mean to do this...
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dragged everything from my desktop into a folder named "Unfiled" and dragged that into a folder of other similar folders going back to 2002
2018 I'm ready for ya
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And if the biz can't afford as many content moderators as are needed to keep society safe, then do something else. Otherwise it's no different from any other business that dumps costs on others, like waste in rivers to avoid cleanup or selling bad meat to avoid food standards
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Ok what if you could zoom out from a webpage to see the hyperlinks...
and each page hid an elf, and you could ask the elf about who it had seen on the page,
and the elf always answered in rhyming couplets.
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My theory is that it’s as Norbert Weiner predicted way back in 1948: if you put human labour in competition with the machine, you force humans to accept the same conditions of the machine (Weiner calls it “slave labour”).
Quote here: interconnected.org/home/2021…
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It's MONDAY! so top tip for today: go to a location and perform tasks that when coordinated with the tasks of other humans will create value. You may be compensated with money and this can be exchanged for goods and services
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I mean, the vision could have been to boot up a high-tech manufacturing economy, or lean into the green transition to create jobs and whole new industries, but sure let’s overheat the housing market and make the rich richer in one of the most unequal countries in Europe 🙄
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This is possssibly a teeny bit niche, but I would totally be into a special edition Apple Watch that just had historic BBC 2 clock idents as faces meldrum.co.uk/mhp/identzone/…
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IKEA making (gorgeous) @Sonos speakers at only $99, shipping in August
Multiple things to like about this, but for me the biggie is that the speakers have NO MICROPHONE. Hallelujah.
theverge.com/2019/4/8/183001…
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Just a note that OpenAI uses a really crisp definition of AGI in their charter
It’s not a buddy you can talk with, or a post-singularity intelligence, or machine sentience
It’s a computer that can do jobs cheaper than people, without minute-by-minute instructions
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What if, for just one night before lockdown ends, we turn off all street lights, factory lights, commercial premises lights etc - and do it on a clear night too with no moon - so we can all look up and take a look at the stars ✨
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The first 26 mins is this incredible hard ramp from domestic upper middle class Los Angeles to synthetic reality, consumer holograms, and a @GreatDismal cameo
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Hey so I'm heading up product and design at a fun, super early stage startup HQ'd in London. We're hiring designers and also a for a few other spots...
...but mainly I want to build up my network of startup people in this space. WHICH IS: 🧵
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jpeg is a progressive format. at 50% loaded, it's visible but blurry
could we have a progressive format for structured text?
like, string-encoded json is invalid till fully loaded.
it should always be valid against a grammar, even at 50%?
for streaming UI, text outlines, etc.
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Pretty sure I knew this story about @greatdismal. But I am VERY much taken with the phrase “an object from the other side of the bridge” to talk about our world vs fiction instagr.am/p/CBQ2gpbpoOG/
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I like that they’ve just written 1000s of step-by-step guides to achieve everyone on your phone (which you can read by asking). Embed them, RAG the right one in against a user request, run the steps out via function calls. Such a straightforward approach and minimal code
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