Category: the fora

all that stuff people say online

Engineering Words

Posted on Posted in babl, Criticism, da net, econocaste, fact, the fora

what words mean is what we agree — actually, how we use them as unknowing users. Like economics vs home economics: what we do without an PhD from Cornell. We make, buy or sell stuff. Economists wonder why they can’t predict our actions perfectly. Is it us, or the blackboard?

When a field gains another crafting, it also seeks to modify the name. Photography becomes digital, alt, AI, AgX or some other prefix. It happens in all fields. They, those other fields, don’t often discard the modifier, unlike amateur-hobby-enthusiast photographers. The Forumati Photographers grapple so much with the elements of the craft that they offend easily. They are repulsed by the PreFixers who would come into this forum with a claim of authenticity. If the craft is different, the art is gone.

They argue somewhat naively; meaning incompletely. A typical path is a call to authority: if you won’t accept my word, how about a story I seem to remember. Or, if that fails, how about a bit more info with my spin on it. This is the mark of the polemic in photoland. Just enough to convince. Just enough so you let me believe.

“I hope that there are sour apples in every bushel.” – Mark Shaney

They couldn’t write like Derrida, yet they could write a program that fooled, or at least satisfied them and their fellow engineers.

Like the founders of Opto-Chemical photography. Good enough to fool the drawing room.

In 1984, Rob Pike and Brad Ellis unleashed a character named Mark V. Shaney onto the unsuspecting Usenet forum “net.singles,” a place for nerdy lonely hearts to find love or at least commiserate in their failed search for love. Mark was named after a Markov Chain, a random mathematical process that provided the coding directives for his preferred form of communication: Regurgitating text into grammatically correct but completely nonsensical approximations of human language.

Mark was a bot.
there was Mark V. Shaney, a program that was so good at feigning humanity that it managed to confuse and rile Usenet group users for years.
 Using code written by Don P. Mitchell, the duo created Mark V. Shaney and unleashed “him” on the unsuspecting masses of the net.singles board, a place where scientifically-minded lonely hearts congregated.

According to a 1989 issue of Scientific American:

The program must first read and reflect on someone else’s work. It then produces a rambling and somewhat confused commentary on the work….Although sense is conspicuously absent from MARK V. SHANEY’s writings, the sounds are certainly there. The overall impression is not unlike what remains in the brain of an inattentive student after a late-night study session.

Because the program could read and comprehend punctuation, Mark V. Shaney easily composed full, grammatically-correct sentences. This further confused the lonely lovers on net.singles, who saw postings like the one below that boasted proper grammatical structure but made little actual sense:

---
damaged flesh and blood neural-nets spewing crazy flames all the time,” wrote Penn Jillette in a 1991 column for PC-Computing. (Indeed, a post by Mark V. Shaney in net.med about using raw honey to treat allergies elicited an outraged response from a user named Daniel R. Levy: “This reply is inscrutable!”)

What does all this mean; what was the promptation for me?

This: begin with a claim to support another claim. Provide very general direction, references sparse enough to sound like support from higher authority: “grammatically correct English that was utter gibberish. The team then published the results on USENET (a precursor to the internet) and said it was a new work from Jaques Derridas, the Deconstructionist Philosopher. People were so excited about this new “work” that, apparently, Ph.D. dissertations were considering analyzing it. Apparently, the gibberish closely mirrored Derrida’s actual writing. Ideas matter. Words matter. Grammar matters.”

His position is that since engineers can’t write (understand) Derrida, but can write a program that makes nonsense while adhering strictly to English Grammar, then Derrida is nonsense. This is from a person who holds Ayn Rand up as a model of understanding — a higher order artist.

He does answer, although without much reference. Not as much as I’ve provided.

Follow this mode (for this claim). can we get further. Dig into the claimed authority?

Extraction begins: get as much of the statement

  • Rob Pike. Bell Labs. USENIX Boston late 1990s.
  • Jaques Derrida. Grammar.
  • famous experiment Bell Las

I found enough to grant him almost accuracy. The omission was because his need for polemic. Prove the point of GIBBERISH.

so, what is the Derrida (1930 – 2004) position, simply?

Derrida called his challenge to the assumptions of Western culture “deconstruction” Derrida’s most quoted and famous assertion, which appears in an essay on Rousseau in his book Of Grammatology (1967),is the statement that “there is no out-of-context” (il n’y a pas de hors-texte).

Derrida once explained that this assertion “which for some has become a sort of slogan, in general so badly understood, of deconstruction … means nothing else: there is nothing outside context. In this form, which says exactly the same thing, the formula would doubtless have been less shocking.”

What he is saying seems quite obvious to those who have built languages: Context sensitive. It is demonstrated in almost every post on enthusiast boards, wherein they come together in effort to answer small questions and large with the same simplified answers. They operate in ignorance of the foundation text — they do not operate context free. They bring it with them.

computational imaging conversation

You Could, but Won’t

Posted on Posted in da net, the fora1 Comment

Why he remains: you let him, even like him. Ignore him, or boot him off your forum. He marks you each and everyone as foolish. 

you could, but wont
because you are him, even though you don't like him -- those parts of you that failed early

- the corrans, salsas, tin cants, oh gees, each hoping to make a recovery.
forumatti
forms of failure
-- the fear of failing
-- fear of being wrong, of error
-- the fear of being forgotten
-- the fear of having wasted
-- fear of missing out

and, being lonely. their real world surround doesn't nourish them
and as aloof, as snobby as they are, they cannot stand alone, or in isolation...

these form the basis of their limited imagery. an empty plinth, the small coffee mug industry

People go on the grand tour of a drive around frantically for two weeks photographing everything and then have it printed up as a coffee mugs and wheel covers for their RV

Photo forums are like listening to seventh graders talk about their sex weekends.

of the worst — they became aware as 10 year olds watching/listening to Jackass pranks — they grow up to become YT content producers as tho they were 50 year olds pretending they were 25 impressing 15year old self.


wiley; summary — more words isn’t more meaning. Meander makes goole hits. adds to the debris field … He makes tedious decor as he detours you into.. wait, he doesn’t detour most of his readers; they are making the same pictues for much the same reason.

At some point even the cheerleaders become annoying

Give a Lik

the Carmel Cowboy commentary about Simic and FBI — bad memory and he makes you wrong.

A wide, shallow mis-reader of throw away press as well as posts too long. He wants to talk, which is why he can’t listen

he picks up info from local fish-wraps like the Pine Cone and East Bay Shopper. Those are the places I find his tales originated.

Carmel Cowboys riding herd over what you do, like mall cops with bad hearing.

What can be verified?

How much of this happened; what is imagined for the purpose of power over the unknowing.

Isn’t that what the ladies in short-skirts he loves to poke at are doing.

Direct for power.

What can be verified? — Goog gives us: the Simic gallery, as well as the painter of the French street scenes. Easy to mistake, since Photrio Wiley sees so many seascapes in Carmel.

“Paul Minicucci, chief consultant to the California legislature’s Joint Committee on the Arts, said that art buying is generally considered a victimless crime. ”How far can government go,” he asked, ”in issues that involve the aesthetic capability of the public?’’” 7/7/1988 NYT

“Privately, other gallery owners have said the resentment by smaller galleries is largely a matter of sour grapes. The big galleries are successful, they say, and the smaller galleries less so. “Growth and progress is not an indication of dishonesty,” one said.

Should the paint-off in France not pass the FBI’s muster, the Carmel dispute could blow into a genuine scandal. Rescheduled several times, the test is supposed to take place within two weeks. Meanwhile, Simic continues to offer Valere paintings for sale, and Valere’s agent predicted that the test will produce vindication.” 1988, La Times

In 1988, a scandal… that was dropped.

“Only one Carmel gallery has been investigated in recent years for fraud–Simic Galleries, the subject of a 1988 federal investigation following FBI suspicion that paintings allegedly done by one Paul Valere were in fact produced by several artists. The case was dropped after the gallery produced the elderly Mr. Valere in France, and he was able to paint a reasonable “Valere” under the watchful eye of a visiting FBI agent. The gallery was cleared of wrong-doing, although Valere”s dealer eventually pleaded guilty to fraud, says Monterey attorney Philip Daunt, who represented Simic in the case. “There were some discrepancies in the biography [the dealer] gave Simic,” Daunt says. But the sting remained. “ 1999, montereycoutnyweekly

What else are we cautioned to avoid… New York City Consumer protection is the alluded Wiley fear. It deals with reproductions, editions and clearly writing a provenance. I leave it as an exercise for you to check on the successful prosecutions.

his memory is based upon wide mis-readings…. which serve as evidence that his misconceptions are reality. He trys to impose on you the criteria he has used. The map he failed by. This path to your kiddie pool, where he preens as a supreme swimmer. It doesn’t matter, since he is selling stories based upon his years bent over the desk in the back-office of a soft wood, door store.

Under the ACAL, “Multiples” means “prints, photographs, positive or negative, sculpture and similar art objects produced in more than one copy and sold, offered for sale or consigned in, into or from this state for an amount in excess of one hundred dollars ($100) exclusive of any frame….” Id. at § 11.01(21).