It’s been nearly six years exactly since I met Dr. Linda McIver from the Australian Data Science Education Institute, and I’ve been a fan of her work ever since. Now I’m proud to share that I’ve joined ADSEI’s Governance Board, and I’m excited to help Linda with her mission to build problem solving, critical thinking, data literacy, and STEM skills in Australian students. Expect to hear more from me about this topic in the future!
Category: Computers
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Joining the ADSEI Board
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Double rejection? In 2002?
On this day twenty-three years ago, Rodd and I both got rejected for jobs with the same company in Sydney. Who would it have been? We have no clue, but we’re having fun trying to remember. It would have been a tech company. I would have been applying for frontend or PHP developer at that time, and Rodd was mostly applying for Unix sysadmin jobs. Anybody want to guess?
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Links I’ve been enjoying lately
- 1995 Was the Most Important Year for the Web – 1995 was the year I graduated high school, and while I’d briefly looked at Compuserve at home, it was at uni that I really got into the Internet in a big way. I’m really loving this series.
- ‘An Overwhelmingly Negative And Demoralizing Force’: What It’s Like Working For A Company That’s Forcing AI On Its Developers – Yep. I’m glad I’m not working in tech right now.
- Lunar Quilts capture crafters, astronaut’s take on return to the moon – Gorgeous! I love these. (Quite frankly, I’m surprised these works are being displayed at the Kennedy Center. Quilting? Women astronauts? Feels a bit woke, doesn’t it? 🙄)
- TOAST MALONE – That one helped us win pub trivia last week, as it enabled me to quickly identify the singer’s name from an anagram. 😂
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Highlights from the w-g archives
- in 2017 I attended a Google Women Techmakers event and played around with TensorFlow and Style Transfer, arguably the first time I ever encountered “generative AI.” It was a simpler time, and I didn’t think to question whether the artists whose styles we were applying had consented (mostly because they were all obviously public domain).
- in 2012 I won Second Prize in the Knitted Socks category at the Sydney Royal Easter Show competitions, finally breaking out of the Highly Commended ghetto. They did me dirty with that display, though.
- in 2009 I won Highly Commended for my Na Craga cabled sweater at the Easter Show, and I was Not Happy about it.
- in 2003 I was still a newbie knitter and kicked ass at an intermediate knitting class, which eventually led to my introduction to Albert and the Morris family, and later me chucking my tech career to go work at Morris & Sons (then called Tapestry Craft).
- in 2001 I ordered groceries off the Internet for the first time ever!
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An email from a ZX Spectrum game developer!
Remember my post where I shared some of Rodd’s old ZX Spectrum games? Yesterday I received an email from Professor Paul X. McCarthy who was one of the original developers of the “Famous People Play Poker” game. He shared some more details and kindly agreed to let me post them on the site for posterity.
I stumbled upon your blog tonight and wanted to thank you for making the post about old ZX Spectrum cassettes. My close friend Kieran Sharp and I were responsible for creating the Famous People Play Poker game you featured while we were at school together and over the years have lost all copies since. That was our first company Jolly Good Software.
We were offered a distribution contract to Spain and other European countries by Ozisoft but turned it down as we thought the contract was too restrictive (ridiculous i know!) So this is one of the few copies that were sold probably through David Reid Electronics in Sydney where I worked as a part time computer sales assistant while at school.
It brings back very fond memories of working long hours for almost a year on this game and being immersed in the then very nascent development and publishing scene – mostly of course in the UK.
And to answer your question, who were the famous people you got to play poker against? From memory there was a progression based on how well you did through these characters each with its own 8 bit soundtrack and pixel art we painstakingly created by hand.
1. The Statue of Liberty
2. Mona Lisa
3. Mad Hatter
4. Beethoven
5. Clive SinclairThanks for sending them on to ACMI. That’s brilliant! I’ve some friends there too, so delighted to hear they and the others are in good hands.
I replied to Prof. McCarthy thanking him for getting in touch, and apologising for slamming their cover art (I called it “crappy” 😬) in the original post. He said:
No worries! It was retro chic before its time 😊 and not printed using conventional processes.
Artwork typography done by hand printed on a ZX Printer on heat sensitive silver paper (no laser printers readily available then) and printed with yellow background on Sydney’s first generation colour photocopiers that Canon researchers in Sydney later built the global postscript rendering engine for at CSIR[O] in Ryde.
Very cool! That means I’ve now spoken to developers of TWO of the different games featured (including Veronika Megler from The Hobbit). I’m hoping some more might come out of the woodwork…
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Links that have been occupying me lately
- AO3 is entering a new era – some fascinating number-crunching here on the stats around what’s happening in the world of fan fiction. I’ll confess I’ve read a ton on AO3, and I was motivated enough to look up the full report. I also didn’t realise the impact that AI-scraping is having on the fanfic community, but it makes sense.
- Coming Soon: From ‘The Sims’ to ‘World of Warcraft’, You’ll Be Able to Play Your Way Through ACMI’s ‘Game Worlds’ Exhibition – Oh, fun. We’ll have to plan a trip to Melbourne.
- Why are we still using 88×31 buttons – Nostalgia! The bit about IAB ad sizes reminded me of my “Responsive Ads: This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things… Yet” talk. It also reminded me of Amazon’s “Phone Tool Icons,” these little badges employees can earn that get displayed on your page on the internal company directory. Some people were obsessed with those. I remember back in 2020 I tried to get a new one approved to award to people who managed to record their Summit talks with a perfectly white backdrop. (Everyone had to scramble and record at home during Covid lockdown, and for some reason Amazon PR were super fastidious about your backdrop not having any visible shadows or texture on it. Like, we’re all paranoid about the global pandemic and finding toilet paper and homeschooling kids, but you’re totally right, a perfectly smooth white background is the #1 priority. 🙄) But it got rejected, because whoever approves the Phone Tool Icons hates fun. Anyway, I pinged a friend there yesterday to see what size they are, and turns out they’re 120×30, so they’re not actually Micro Buttons anyway.
- Do One Thing – Everything is awful, and when I’ve run out of stupid Internet things to distract myself with (like fan fiction and video games and micro buttons), I find myself seeking out these posts with suggestions of how to cope.
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A tale of two dresses 👗👗
Earlier in the week, I popped into Made590 to pick up a couple shirts… and whoops, a new Liberty dress was right there. It was Tana Lawn and it felt like silk, and I looked great in it. 😍
I sent the photo to a couple friends, and one of them went by a few days later to pick one up for herself. That night she said, “You know it’s AI-generated, right?”
Wait, what? Liberty of London? The famed 150-year-old “purveyor of craftsmanship,” that prides itself on its “dedicated in-house design studio” who are responsible for “hand painting and creating our beautiful prints”? THAT Liberty of London?
Yep, them. Check the “Editor’s Notes”:
For Avalon Scenes, the design studio approached Tom Furse, an artist and musician who specialises in creating artwork with AI in controlled environments. Harnessing the cutting-edge potential of AI technology, this design conjures a display of surreal landscapes morphing into psychedelic flower forms…
Well, that sucks. I had a good long think about it. It really is a lovely dress. I am not against algorithmic art entirely, and I can see cases where I’d be fine with this – like if the model was trained only on Liberty’s pattern archive. But I could find zero mention of the technology used, not on Liberty’s site or the artist’s website or Instagram. (The artist is actually a musician that seems to dabble in AI, so I doubt he’s training his own models for this.) I contacted Liberty through both their website and Facebook page to ask for details, explaining that I was concerned about whether the model used for their AI-generated fabric was trained on any stolen artwork, and how the environmental impacts of the project lived up to Liberty’s stated corporate social responsibility goals. I got a reply back asking “Which AI-generated fabric specifically are you asking about?”
Not good.
I decided to return the dress today for one featuring Australian plants photographed straight from the shop owner’s garden. Made590 were lovely about it, and I can’t fault them – most people wouldn’t feel as strongly about this as I do. But right now I’m in the “no ethical use of AI” camp, and I’d rather pay artists for their art. I’m so disappointed in Liberty – ACTUAL LIBERTY OF LONDON – jumping on the AI trend bandwagon. Ugh. I’ll update if they ever send me the details, but for now I feel a lot better about my pretty new dress.
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Links I’ve been reading lately
- Hayao Miyazaki Would Hate You Fucking Losers – Harsh, but true. I can’t believe how many people I know jumped on posting those images on LinkedIn. So gross.
- How to make a book – Another great post from Mike Monteiro’s Good News. I immediately sent it to my sister, who is a freelance editor. It also made me think about whether I have a book in me.
- Michael Shannon Loves Music Like We Love Music – As a card carrying member of the R.E.M. fan club (not kidding), I unabashedly love this. I wish they would tour Australia!
- Knitting Through Digital Decay: A Collection of Digital Preservation Jumpers No One Asked For (But Here They Are Anyway) – LOVE this! I really need to get back to the project I started to knit a modern fairisle that incorporates the DOCOMO emoji.
- South Korea releases long-awaited report into overseas adoptions of thousands of children – I’m glad that some of these kids are starting to get answers. Heartbreaking, though…
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AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism
Ahhh, yes. And it’s all over Facebook. I had to unfriend a former colleague this week for posting a shitty image of a Muslim man walking a British police officer on a dog leash, who actually tried to defend that (as somehow being related to child abuse?) when I called him out for it. It’s awful and dehumanising and racist. Leni Riefenstahl would’ve loved Gen AI.
AI imagery looks like shit. But that is its main draw to the right. if AI was capable of producing art that was formally competent, surprising, soulful, they wouldn’t want it.
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Love this.
From Meanjin to Warrane, Apple Maps adds more than 250 Indigenous placenames in Australia. Hey, this is pretty good. I just checked on my iPhone and I was able to see Warrane now included for Sydney Cove, as well as a label for Eora Nation. Apple have done something similar in NZ, and they have shared details on grants and partnerships with indigenous groups in both countries. I’m still salty with Tim Cook for that inauguration bribe, but this seems like an unambiguous Good Thing, and we need those these days. (I switched from Google Maps some time ago.)
