Link tags: bot

Why Not Mars (Idle Words)

I’ve come to believe the best way to look at our Mars program is as a faith-based initiative. There is a small cohort of people who really believe in going to Mars, the way some people believe in ghosts or cryptocurrency, and this group has an outsize effect on our space program.

Maciej lays out the case against a crewed mission to Mars.

Like George Lucas preparing to release another awful prequel, NASA is hoping that cool spaceships and nostalgia will be enough to keep everyone from noticing that their story makes no sense. But you can’t lie your way to Mars, no matter how sincerely you believe in what you’re doing.

And don’t skip the footnotes:

Fourth graders writing to Santa make a stronger case for an X-Box than NASA has been able to put together for a Mars landing.

Mona Sans & Hubot Sans

Two new lovely open source variable fonts from Github.

Roboto … But Make It Flex - Material Design

This version of Roboto from Font Bureau is a very variable font indeed.

Spear phishing with Slackbot for fun and profit – Eric Bailey

Sneaky social engineering in Slack.

things are a little crazy rn

Adversarial chatbots engaged in an endless back-and-forth:

This piece simulates scheduling hell by generating infinite & unique combinations of meeting conflicts between two friends.

My chatbot is dead · Why yours should probably be too · Adrian Z

The upside to being a terrible procrastinator is that certain items on my to-do list, like, say, “build a chatbot”, will—given enough time—literally take care of themselves.

I ultimately feel like it has slowly turned into a fad. I got fooled by the trend, and as a by-product became part of the trend itself.

Bottom Navigation Pattern On Mobile Web Pages: A Better Alternative? — Smashing Magazine

Making the case for moving your navigation to the bottom of the screen on mobile:

Phones are getting bigger, and some parts of the screen are easier to interact with than others. Having the hamburger menu at the top provides too big of an interaction cost, and we have a large number of amazing mobile app designs that utilize the bottom part of the screen. Maybe it’s time for the web design world to start using these ideas on websites as well?

Gendered AI: Gender Presentation and Distributions in sci-fi AI | Sci-fi interfaces

Thorough (and grim) research from Chris.

Tellart | Design Nonfiction

An online documentary series featuring interviews with smart people about the changing role of design.

As technology becomes more complex and opaque, how will we as designers understand its potential, do hands-on work, translate it into forms people can understand and use, and lead meaningful conversations with manufacturers and policymakers about its downstream implications? We are entering a new technology landscape shaped by artificial intelligence, advanced robotics and synthetic biology.

So far there’s Kevin Slavin, Molly Wright Steenson, and Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, with more to come from the likes of Matt Jones, Anab Jain, Dan Hill, and many, many more.

Malicious AI Report

Well, this an interesting format experiment—the latest Black Mirror just dropped, and it’s a PDF.

WALL·E | Typeset In The Future

A deep dive into Pixar’s sci-fi masterpiece, featuring entertaining detours to communist propaganda and Disney theme parks.

Tweeting for 10,000 Years: An Experiment in Autonomous Software — Brandur Leach

Taking the idea of the Clock of the Long Now and applying it to a twitterbot:

Software may not be as well suited as a finely engineered clock to operate on these sorts of geological scales, but that doesn’t mean we can’t try to put some of the 10,000 year clock’s design principles to work.

The bot will almost certainly fall foul of Twitter’s API changes long before the next tweet-chime is due, but it’s still fascinating to see the clock’s principles applied to software: longevity, maintainability, transparency, evolvability, and scalability.

Software tends to stay in operation longer than we think it will when we first wrote it, and the wearing effects of entropy within it and its ecosystem often take their toll more quickly and more destructively than we could imagine. You don’t need to be thinking on a scale of 10,000 years to make applying these principles a good idea.

Infovore » Pouring one out for the Boxmakers

This is a rather beautiful piece of writing by Tom (especially the William Gibson bit at the end). This got me right in the feels:

Web 2.0 really, truly, is over. The public APIs, feeds to be consumed in a platform of your choice, services that had value beyond their own walls, mashups that merged content and services into new things… have all been replaced with heavyweight websites to ensure a consistent, single experience, no out-of-context content, and maximising the views of advertising. That’s it: back to single-serving websites for single-serving use cases.

A shame. A thing I had always loved about the internet was its juxtapositions, the way it supported so many use-cases all at once. At its heart, a fundamental one: it was a medium which you could both read and write to. From that flow others: it’s not only work and play that coexisted on it, but the real and the fictional; the useful and the useless; the human and the machine.

DasSur.ma – The 9am rush hour

Why JavaScript is a real performance bottleneck:

Rush hour. The worst time of day to travel. For many it’s not possible to travel at any other time of day because they need to get to work by 9am.

This is exactly what a lot of web code looks like today: everything runs on a single thread, the main thread, and the traffic is bad. In fact, it’s even more extreme than that: there’s one lane all from the city center to the outskirts, and quite literally everyone is on the road, even if they don’t need to be at the office by 9am.

Untold AI: The Untold | Sci-fi interfaces

Prompted by his time at Clearleft’s AI gathering in Juvet, Chris has been delving deep into the stories we tell about artificial intelligence …and what stories are missing.

And here we are at the eponymous answer to the question that I first asked at Juvet around 7 months ago: What stories aren’t we telling ourselves about AI?

Andy Budd - De l’imaginaire à la réalité : panorama de la robotique on Vimeo

A thoroughly entertaining talk by Andy looking at the past, present, and future of robots, AI, and automation.

Mozilla betrays Firefox users and its nominal principles

That’s a harsh headline but it is unfortunately deserved. We should indeed hold Mozilla to a higher standard.

JSRobot

Learn JavaScript by playing/programming a platform game.

SSL Issuer Popularity - NetTrack.info

This graph warms the cockles of my heart. It’s so nice to see a genuinely good project like Let’s Encrypt come in and upset the applecart of a sluggish monopolistic industry.

InspiroBot

I am an artificial intelligence dedicated to generating unlimited amounts of unique inspirational quotes for endless enrichment of pointless human existence.