Posts by toxi@mastodon.thi.ng
(DIR) Post #AcEiizQ9GmfitWfLcW by toxi@mastodon.thi.ng
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A week ago was the 1st anniversary of this solo instance & more generally of my fulltime move to Mastodon. A good time for a more detailed intro, partially intended as CV thread (pinned to my profile) which I will add to over time (also to compensate the ongoing lack of a proper website)... Always open to consulting offers, commissions and/or suitable remote positions...Hi, I'm Karsten 👋 — indy software engineer, researcher, #OpenSource author of hundreds of projects (since ~1999), computational/generative artist/designer, landscape photographer, lecturer, outdoor enthusiast, on the ND spectrum. Main interest in transdisplinary research, tool making, exploring techniques, projects & roles amplifying the creative, educational, expressive and inspirational potential of (personal) computation, code as material, combining this with generative techniques of all forms (quite different to what is now called and implied by "generative AI").Much of my own practice & philosophy is about #BottomUpDesign, interconnectedness, simplicity and composability as key enablers of emergent effects (also in terms of workflow & tool/system design). Been adopting a round-robin approach to cross-pollinate my work & learning, spending periods going deep into various fields to build up and combine experience in (A-Z order): API design, audio/DSP, baremetal (mainly STM32), computer vision/image processing, compiler/DSL/VM impl, databases/linked data/query engines, data structures impl, dataviz, fabrication (3DP, CNC, knit, lasercut), file formats & protocols (as connective tissue), "fullstack" webdev (front/back/AWS), generative & evolutionary algorithms/art/design/aesthetics/music, geometry/graphics, parsers, renderers, simulation (agents/CFD/particles/physics), shaders, typography, UI/UX/IxD...Since 2018 my main endeavor has been https://thi.ng/umbrella, a "jurassic" (as it's been called) monorepo of ~185 code libraries, addressing many of the above topics (plus ~150 examples to illustrate usage). More generally, for the past decade my OSS work has been focused on #TypeScript, #C, #Zig, #WebAssembly, #Clojure, #ClojureScript, #GLSL, #OpenCL, #Forth, #Houdini/#VEX. Earlier on, mainly Java (~15 years, since 1996).Formative years in the deep end of the #Atari 8bit demoscene (Chip Special Software) & game dev (eg. The Brundles, 1993), B&W dark room lab (since age 10), music production/studio (from 1993-2003), studied media informatics, moved to London initially as web dev, game dev (Shockwave 3D, ActionScript), interaction designer, information architect. Branched out, more varied clients/roles/community for my growing collection of computational design tools, which I've been continously expanding/updating for the past 20+ years, and which have been the backbone of 99% of my work since ~2006 (and which helped countless artists/designers/students/studios/startups). Creator of thi.ng (since 2011), toxiclibs (2006-2013), both large-scale, multi-faceted library collections. Early contributor to Processing (2003-2005, pieces of core graphics API).Worked on dozens of interactive installations/exhibitions, public spaces & mediafacades (own projects and many collabs, several award winning), large-scale print on-demand projects (>250k unique outputs), was instrumental in creating some of the first generative brand identity systems (incl. cloud infrastructure & asset management pipelines), collaborated with architects, artists, agencies, hardware engineers, had my work shown at major galleries/museums worldwide, taught 60+ workshops at universities, institutions and companies (mainly in EMEA). Was algorithm design lead at Nike's research group for 5 years, working on novel internal design tools, workflows, methods of make, product design (footwear & apparel) and team training. After 23 years in London, my family decided on a lifestyle change and so currently based in the beautiful Allgäu region in Southern Germany.
(DIR) Post #ActhpcIPVn3wjD02S0 by toxi@mastodon.thi.ng
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Truly magical experience, light and frozen fog on our winter walk last night. Simply stunning! -10℃, walking a few kilometers through knee-deep fresh powder snow, thick frozen fog drifting around us, diffusing the last light and creating surreal (almost cliché) colors...#SilentSunday #WinterWonderland #LandscapePhotography #Photography #Winter #Snow #Fog #Sunset #Bayern
(DIR) Post #Au9c89B4IQRYezyWu0 by toxi@mastodon.thi.ng
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New life goal/purpose: Enawesomefication!
(DIR) Post #B2udfovlBpmwtob1E0 by toxi@mastodon.thi.ng
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Why do you follow me? Multiple choice...(Just saw someone else do such a poll and it reminded me to do the same...)
(DIR) Post #B3a1ynxVOJqZlgM3Cy by toxi@mastodon.thi.ng
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Light Streaks — generative photographyA small selection of long-exposures of randomly generated IFS (aka Iterated Function Systems), a family of very oldskool primitive/trivial fractal functions, but which can produce a fairly wide variety of outcomes. Each image is the result of billions of iterations of a single particle being iteratively transformed (meaning the particle's current position is used as the input for computing its next position etc.) For each iteration & position a tiny amount of light is being captured, slowly revealing an image, just like a negative does in analog film photography.Some of these images have been "exposed" (aka computed) for up to 30 mins. The smaller the amount of light captured per iteration, the smoother (less grainy) the outcome...(For the more technical: This is one of these projects where a floating point pixel buffer _really_ makes all the difference! My exposure rate is only 0.001 per pixel per frame, some of the images use even weaker settings... That means for a pixel to become fully white is has to be visited at least 1000 times [or more])Made with https://thi.ng/matrices (matrix transformations) and https://thi.ng/pixel ("film" capture)...#MonochromeMonday #Photography #Light #Simulation #LongExposure #Fractal #IFS #GenerativeArt #AlgorithmicArt #ThingUmbrella #TypeScript
(DIR) Post #B4GGkzspuxn6eJMUXA by toxi@mastodon.thi.ng
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Reading through Anthropic's official repo for giving agents various "super skills"[1]... There's an "algorithmic art" skill and the instructions are explicitly encouraging pure deception as one of the key "critical guidelines":"The philosophy MUST stress multiple times that the final algorithm should appear as though it took countless hours to develop, was refined with care, and comes from someone at the absolute top of their field. This framing is essential - repeat phrases like "meticulously crafted algorithm," "the product of deep computational expertise," "painstaking optimization," "master-level implementation.""https://github.com/anthropics/skills/blob/main/skills/algorithmic-art/SKILL.mdFor someone who's been working in this field for almost 30 years, this "skills.md" file is just the worst... and so far off the mark! 🤮 Touch some effing grass, Anthropic (and all boosters)! How can so many people think this approach is _the_ future? The map is not the terrain...[1] Alone the premise of this repo is pure comedy gold and pure sadness in equal measures!#AlgorithmicArt #GenerativeArt #NoAI #Agents #Deception
(DIR) Post #B4GGl0QVtkjIKl7O1g by toxi@mastodon.thi.ng
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Some growing key questions here really are:How to defend or adapt disciplines (not just artistic/cultural ones) against this kind of semantic hollowing out of what it means to have skills, experience and expertise in a(ny) field...What approaches, qualities and "values" (physical, ethical, social/humanist, environmental, resource use) should we (or still can we) be focusing on, which are much harder and more costly for AI companies to mine/extract & subvert?How to defend actual skills against the emulation of skills, or rather just the appearance of skills? How could a society even function if it only encourages and celebrates the latter?What does society actually value in art/creativity/culture? If art is free to produce (of course that'll always only ever be an illusion!), funding, possession, collection & speculation of new work would also become meaningless (and only benefit pre-AI era works/collectors). In the larger picture, what do people actually value in culture, politics and striving for more peaceful existence which enables more of the former (pluralistic art/culture) in the first place?What will be the combined impact of AI & robotics on fields which are currently still thinking themselves more safe (from exploitation) because there's a strong physical element/process to them?Will art/culture/craft become more performance, experiential/ephemeral again only? Like music before recordings or Buddhist sand paintings with an explicit act of destruction at the end as key philosophical concept? Both of which also have more of a social element to them...The Samsara Mandalahttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hL8gEc29KTI#CriticalAI #AI #NoAI #LLM #Ephemeral #Art #Culture #Samsara
(DIR) Post #B5P88EC3m7foKLVitc by toxi@mastodon.thi.ng
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It's been 4.5 years since I last updated the https://thi.ng/hiccup-carbon-icons collection and synced it with the upstream repo, i.e. IBM's Carbon design system. Spent a few hours today updating the icons to the current version, filtering out a hundred unnecessary ones (e.g. obsolete brand logos, IBM product/service related icons etc.) and updated the converter & code generator[1] to produce more concise outputs, then manually cleaned up the structure for dozens of them (in addition to optimizing/minimizing the SVG sources via the `svgo` CLI).The new set has exactly 2222 icons in https://thi.ng/hiccup format (SVG expressed as nested JS arrays). These icons can be used in any context where https://thi.ng/hiccup format is supported, i.e. both for static HTML/SVG generation and/or interactive scenarios. A contact sheet of the full collection (the attached image only shows a tiny selection of this): https://demo.thi.ng/umbrella/hiccup-carbon-icons/For tree-shaking purposes each icon is defined in its own source file, e.g. the Mastodon logo can be then imported like so:`import { MASTODON } from "@thi.ng/hiccup-carbon-icons"`Example icon definition:https://codeberg.org/thi.ng/umbrella/src/branch/develop/packages/hiccup-carbon-icons/src/logo-mastodon.tsThe new version is still unreleased, but the readme already contains up-to-date information and small usage examples (incl. links to live example projects to see usage in situ).[1] Converter/codegen tool: https://codeberg.org/thi.ng/umbrella/src/branch/develop/packages/hiccup-carbon-icons/tools/convert-icons.ts#ThingUmbrella #UI #Design #SVG #Icons #OpenSource
(DIR) Post #B5lEy9K20R8xTnUzeS by toxi@mastodon.thi.ng
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"Learning from mistakes" as individuals is hard if those lessons are not (or can not be) percolated up or are even rejected by larger groups or society in general, if the behaviors one might consider a mistake on a personal/ethical level are actually rewarded and encouraged (or imposed) by those larger social structures.So many people have tried so hard for so long to share their knowledge and tools, trying to teach & inspire others, to build communities to help make the world at least a tiny better, enabling people to do more with their tech than just consuming or being "entertained". People have been sacrificing years and hard-earned savings to keep the work/projects/momentum going... only to have these efforts being outright stolen & upended now, declared meaningless, and at the same time being called to our faces "entitled", "self-important", "gate keeping" for attempting to retain some form of humanity in these projects (all phrases taken from an email received on weekend about my anti-LLM stance for my own 200+ projects — always so amazing for motivation! 😭)Has this all been meaningless? The same entities who've been benefiting the most from 20-30 years of this culture of openness, are now regularly talking about it as weakness, "supply chain risk" and "threat vector"... People who've never ever run a project themselves are just as happy to chip in with this narrative.Sure enough, mistakes were made, many of them (a small selection):A large mistake was to systematically devalue our own labor, to believe a participatory, postspectacular[1] society would be possible, that more people/orgs would not just consume, but actively participate, reciprocate, feed back, wanting to learn/build together, to create & co-own their tools of production and seeing the true value of that. Of course, not everyone is able to divert time & energy, but many more people/orgs/unis/govts would and should have been! Support for these projects can take so many different forms! Instead it's always been left to so few people to do it all... and then punish them (in many direct/indirect forms) for trying (or not being perfect)!A mistake was not to set strict boundaries early on what these shared assets/knowledge could be used for and by whom. We allowed large corporations (and countless smaller bad players[2]) to harvest the fruits of our labor as free, high-quality raw material, them never contributing anything back. We didn't organize to demand more rights, have proper legal frameworks or even interest from larger society to help creating or enforcing terms & constraints. For years, we were labeled naive altruists and were stuck with the issues of existing FLOSS licenses which were written by people who (mostly) explicitly rejected any ethical/moral constraints of use and instead sold this lack as "freedom to use for any purpose", a core pillar of these licenses.A mistake was to believe a culture of resource-poor decentralized entities could meaningfully influence or even outcompete the centralized infinitely funded structures whose ONLY interest is in exploitation, sustaining/cementing/expanding their own imposed hierarchy and grasp of power/control at all costs.These mistakes (and many more) are all fractal in nature, from the individual, projects, to governments and entire cultures... If you personally or organizationally have benefited from open source culture, but never once acted on any of the above, you're simply part of the problem and the mistakes made!It's time to learn from them, together, and before it's too late (if it isn't already)...If you want to keep on benefiting from open source culture (not the corporate or agent-regurgitated neo-interpretation), get active, show some support to the projects and esp. people involved, in whatever form or gesture you can![1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle[2] Over the past 25+ years, I know of at least that many businesses & people who built their entire early careers on my open source work, without ever contributing, donating or acknowledging...#OpenSource #Culture
(DIR) Post #B69mwDpiK6JH7tbono by toxi@mastodon.thi.ng
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The Mountains Flowed Before Him (2026)(Given a large enough time scale, these mountains would be almost like waves...)#SilentSunday #LandscapePhotography #NaturePhotography #BlackAndWhite #NoirCountry #Alps #Mountains #Hiking
(DIR) Post #B69mwEMKMqOil2rrdY by toxi@mastodon.thi.ng
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@alicefrieren Erm... Is it not clear that this is an actual photograph, and the technique used was a few million years of tectonic activity and erosion...? :)The title refers to a passage from the Bible. I'm not religious, but it sometimes helps to take a "god's eye view" of things/landscapes to appreciate them more... Also see here for an old beautiful Persian legend with a similar context/insight (avid fans of Coldcut/Ninjatune might recognize the sample this was taken from):"Now those people who fly have a different point of view of the world from the people who spend their whole life on the ground.Don Blanding wrote a poem once when he was flying, and he called his poem "The God's Eye View", and he said it was so different from the view he always had on the ground, which he called "The Bug's Eye View".Now I thought about that "Bug's Eye View" when I was over in Teheran in Persia. They told me an old Persian legend. It was about a bug who spent his entire life in the world's most beautifully designed Persian rug. All the bug ever saw in his lifetime was his problems. They stood up all around him. He couldn't see over the top of them, and he had to fight his way through these tufts of wool in the rug to find some crumbs somebody had spilled.And the tragedy of the story of the bug in the rug was this:He lived and he died in the world's most beautifully designed rug, but he never once knew that he spent his life in something which had a pattern.That's why I want you to get up in the air tonight, to see something the old bug couldn't see in the rug. Because even he, this bug, if he had once got above the rug so he could have seen all of it, he would have discovered something - that the very things he called his problems were a part of the pattern."https://foxyde.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/bug_in_the_rug.pdf#BugsEyeView #GodsEyeView #Timescale #Coldcut
(DIR) Post #B7QhQzIEh3UcMMcw8u by toxi@mastodon.thi.ng
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Thank you all for boosting! ❤️🙏
(DIR) Post #B7jIIhpsBHTFVanLZQ by toxi@mastodon.thi.ng
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RE: https://mastodon.social/@hyc/116816916444068291This entirely unnecessary NDA culture has been commercial poison for me for the past 15+ years and also a huge problem for the open source projects themselves. NDAs are a legalese subversion of open source's social contract: Not being able to create case studies or otherwise publicly document how useful and time-saving the many tools on offer have been for many of my clients has been so damaging in the long run and it's making me question why I even continue with it...Clients get an incredible discount from using open technology, but then do not even allow you to mention their name as reference or talk about how the projects were used to solve specific problems for which they approached you in the first place. It's PR death for these projects (and CV death for people like myself) by a thousand cuts...#NDA #OpenSourceRT: https://mastodon.social/users/hyc/statuses/116816916444068291