Tootfinder

Day 26: Emily Short
If you know who Short is, you know exactly why she's on this list. If you don't, you're probably in the majority. She's an absolutely legendary author within the interactive fiction (IF) community, which gets somewhat pigeonholed by stuff like Zork when there's actually a huge range of stuff in the medium some of which isn't even puzzle-focused, and Short has been writing & coding on the bleeding edge of things for decades.
I was lucky enough to be introduced to Short's work in graduate school, where we played "Galatea" as part of an interactive fiction class. Short uses a lot of clever parser tricks to make your conversation with a statue feel very fluid and conversational, giving to contemporary audiences a great example of how vibrant interaction with a well-designed agent can be in contrast to an LLM, if you're willing to put in some work on bespoke parsing & responses (although the user does need to know basic IF conventions). While I didn't explore the full range of Galatea's many possible outcomes, it left a strong impression on me as a vision for what IF could be besides dorky puzzles, and I think that "visionary" is a great term to describe Short.
If you'd like you get a feel for her (very early) work, you can play Galatea here: #30AuthorsNoMen

Approvata la legge italiana sull’IA, Bolognini (IIP): “Soddisfazione, confermata la proposta IIP”
https://www.istitutoitalianoprivacy.it/2025/09/17/approvata-la-legge-italiana-sullia-bolognini-iip-sod…

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but magic doesn’t exist.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a strip mall psychic or a Silicon Valley bro trying to sell it to you.

This could just as easily be the US government...
#LLM #AI #Copyright

While I'm reworking my backups, just wondering about how I shall do backups for my laptops.
In the past I was using pull backups so this was tricky; if the laptop wasn't reachable from the backup host it just skipped the daily backup. Could also result in partial backups if the laptop went away in the middle.
On the whole I consider laptops at constant risk of total loss and keep all important data on a fileserver, with syncs from/to local copies.(git or syncthing)
…

reality_mining: Reality mining proximity network (2004)
A network of human proximities among students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), as measured by personal mobile phones. Nodes represent people (students from the Media Lab and the Sloan Business School) and an edge connects a pair if the two devices made a Bluetooth handshake at the time. Edges are timestamped.
This network has 96 nodes and 1086404 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Unweighted, Timestamps

Milwaukee Friends, I will be at Enderis Park on Saturday Sept 20th (tomorrow!) 9am-Noon with my artwork for sale for super-cheap.
And if you say "I'm Anti-Fascist and believe in Free Speech!" you'll get a 50% discount!"
https://www.enderispark.org/events-1/harve

Harvest Fest 2025 | Enderis
Mum and pumpkin sales Art activities for kids New for 2025 - Harvest Fest Maker's Market!

Mass killings
Was looking through Wikipedia's list of mass killings in America (#guns #GunViolence #Shooting

reality_mining: Reality mining proximity network (2004)
A network of human proximities among students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), as measured by personal mobile phones. Nodes represent people (students from the Media Lab and the Sloan Business School) and an edge connects a pair if the two devices made a Bluetooth handshake at the time. Edges are timestamped.
This network has 96 nodes and 1086404 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Unweighted, Timestamps