Four short links: 27 November 2018
Open Source, Interactive Fiction, Evolving Images, and Closed Worlds
- Open Source is Not About You (Rich Hickey) — As a user of something open source, you are not thereby entitled to anything at all. You are not entitled to contribute. You are not entitled to features. You are not entitled to the attention of others. You are not entitled to having value attached to your complaints. You are not entitled to this explanation. Tough love talk. See also this statement by the author of the event-stream NPM module, who passed maintenance onto someone who added malware to it. If it’s not fun anymore, you get literally nothing from maintaining a popular package.
- Ganbreeder — explore images created by generative adversarial networks.
- 2018 IFComp Winners — interactive fiction is nextgen chatbot tech. Worth keeping up with to see how they stretch parsers and defy expectations of the genre.
- The Architecture of Closed Worlds (We Make Money Not Art) — One of the most striking lessons of the book is that it is extremely difficult to create a miniaturized world without inheriting some of the problems of the surrounding world. No matter how much control was exerted on the synthetic habitats, no matter how ambitious the vision, the breadth of engineering and human ingeniosity, the results were marred by surprisingly mundane obstacles: gerbils outsmarting the machine, bacteria loss, fingernails and skin infiltrating collectors, or simply the difficulty of implementing behavioural changes. The physical version of online social networks that are shocked to discover their userbase includes pedophiles, racists, stalkers, murderers, nutters, and malicious folks.
