TOPOGRAPHY is a Bitsy game about online friendships, the golden age of tumblr, closeness and closure.
@shapr it’s like erlang with ruby-ish syntax. far easier to pick up. i haven’t touched prolog since 1997 or so (AI class in college).
@shapr i did them all in just elixir this year, posted them to elixirforum, and read everyone else’s solutions — mostly to learn elixir by using it. the Stream module gets a lot of use in other solutions — have to learn how to use it more.
@kensanata thanks for the blog post. minor nit: you left a tt-test-tt-test in one of the command line examples.
i believe the usermod command works fine; you just have to log out and log back in for the system to pick up on the change.
Mask of the Rose is a romantic visual novel and prequel to all our other games set in the Fallen London universe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QujJ4oVaFKI
Mask of the Rose takes place in 1862, mere months after London was stolen by bats. Londoners are still adjusting to life underground. The old street signs are being erased. New ministries and new festivals are being established. The mysterious Masters of the Bazaar seem to be in charge.
You share your boarding house with a few other lodgers: Archie, a medical student discovering firsthand that Death works differently here. Griselda, a close aide of the new Masters. Horatia, the landlady with a soft spot for the Neath’s native inhabitants. Harjit, the local constable looking for a missing person of his own.
Möbius Front ‘83’s soundtrack by @matthewseiji is out now!
Try self online!
You’ll get 20 minutes to play around with Self.
Chris Double has a simple, short bank account example that you can use to get a feel for the environment.
Here’s a playlist that goes into more depth.
Some quotes:
The conflict of interest between advertisers and users has always been evident to the designers of commercial search engines. In 1998, a few months before the incorporation of Google, graduate students Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page presented their prototype of a web search engine at an academic conference. In an appendix to their paper, they commented, “We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.” Indeed. More than two decades after this prophecy, all major search engines, Google first among them, now operate precisely on the business model of surveillance-fueled targeted advertising.
These search engines’ algorithms are optimized for profit. The advertising industry governs the bulk of research and development in the field of information retrieval. Computer scientists and engineers often measure the “relevance” of potential results and test the “performance” of candidate algorithms according to evaluation benchmarks and validation data sets dictated by industry priorities. The predominant systems are designed to maximize ad revenues and “engagement” metrics such as “click-through rates.” Consequently, these systems tend to promote content that is already popular or similar to what users have seen or liked before. Whether the predictions of popularity and similarity are based on simple correlation and regression analysis or on complex machine learning models, the results tend to be predictable and like-minded.
In fact, from the very beginnings of informatics—the science of information—as an institutionalized field in the 1960s, anti-capitalists have tried to imagine less oppressive, perhaps even liberatory, ways of indexing and searching information. Two Latin American social movements in particular—Cuban socialism and liberation theology—inspired experiments with different approaches to informatics from the 1960s to the 1980s.
What happens the day after the revolution? One answer is the reorganization of the library.
In the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Fidel Castro appointed librarian María Teresa Freyre de Andrade as the new director of the Jose Martí National Library in Havana. A lesbian and long-time dissident who had been exiled and jailed by the previous regimes, she had long been concerned with the politics of librarianship. In the 1940s, she had articulated her vision of a biblioteca popular, a “popular library,” distinct from a merely “public” one. Whereas the public library may be a “rather passive” one where “the book stands still on its shelf waiting for the reader to come searching for it,” the popular library is “eminently active” as it “makes extensive use of propaganda and uses different procedures to mobilize the book and make it go in search of the reader.”
In many Latin American countries, including Brazil after the 1964 military coup, authoritarian regimes took violent measures to silence dissidents, such as censorship, imprisonment, torture, and exile. Some of the most vocal critics of these measures were Catholic priests who sought to reorient the Church toward the organizing of the oppressed and the overcoming of domination. A key event in the formation of their movement, which would become known as “liberation theology,” was a 1968 conference of Latin American bishops held in Medellín, Colombia.
The Medellín experience inspired a group of liberation theologians, largely from Brazil, to try to envision new forms of communication among poor and oppressed peoples across the world. Their objective was conscientização, or “conscientization”: the development of a critical consciousness involving reflection and action to transform social structures—a term associated with their colleague Paulo Freire, who had developed a theory and practice of critical pedagogy.
Informatics of the Oppressed by Rodrigo Ochigame :
Information is power. In pyramids, power is concentrated, so also information, which is hidden or kept to be used at the right time, with a view to accumulating and concentrating more power. In networks, power is deconcentrated, and so is information, which is distributed and disseminated so that everyone has access to the power that their possession represents.
— Chico Whitaker
cc @dredmorbius