Platform reality. "The web platform makes no demands because it offers nothing beyond the opportunity to do good work. Certainly it offers no attention — that, you have to find on your own. Here is your printing press."
A Mini Guide to RSS Feeds. A fun RSS explainer in comic form. I really love this and we should do more to encourage folks to try out feed readers.
Ironically I used a grammar bot to help rewrite my chatbot explainer for a 6th grade reading level, which for better or for worse is the level at which 60% of US citizens read at or under. A difficult truth.
Imagine you're an alien from outer space. You don’t speak any human languages, but you’ve spent hundreds of years listening to radio signals from Earth with your supercomputer. When you finally arrive and meet your first humans, your computer tries to guess the right words to say. It thinks saying “we are here to serve mankind” is a friendly greeting, but it doesn’t know that this could also mean cooking and eating people. Things get pretty crazy after that.
That’s kind of what a chatbot is like. A chatbot is a computer program that puts words together to make sentences that sound real. It does this by guessing which words usually go together. It can do that because it has studied tons of writing from people — books, websites, and more.
But sometimes it guesses wrong. And when it does, even if the sentence sounds okay, it might be totally wrong.
If you ask a chatbot about Ben Franklin, it will probably tell you the right stuff, like that he was a famous inventor and helped start the United States. But because it’s just guessing what to say next, it might suddenly tell you something totally false, like that he was on a TV show or started a chain of discount stores.
The truth is, chatbots don’t really “know” anything. They don’t think like people do. They just read what you type and send back a sentence that seems like the right one to say. Not always the truth — just a reply.
After a few grueling months of inconsistent effort, my newest comic "Los Ojos Del Desiertos" is now available to Neat Hobby! newsletter subscribers. It's a short five-page supernatural tale of greed in the American southwest, in the classic anthology style of Creepy and Tales from the Crypt.
Subscribers also get access to a blog post with a gallery of pencil layouts, the story of how I came up with "Los Ojos" and the original script I wrote.
I've been trying to come up with a simple explainer about how chatbots work, and I'm finding it really difficult to convey the non-deterministic aspects of the technology.
Let's say you're an alien from outer space. You don't understand human language, but you have several hundred years of intercepted radio signals from Earth in your supercomputer. When you finally visit Earth and meet your first humans, your supercomputer makes an educated guess as to what words to use to greet them. Unfortunately, neither you nor your computer know that "to serve mankind" can be understood as either assisting humans or cooking and eating them. Diastrous hilarity ensues.
That's sort of what a chatbot is. It's a computer program that can string words together into a convincing sentence by predicting which words to use. It can do this because it's studied the whole of human language and knows which words usually precede and follow other words.
Usually. Because sometimes it predicts the wrong word, and that single mistake might lead it down a path where the sentence it gives you is grammatically correct but factually wrong.
If you ask a chatbot for a summary of the life of Ben Franklin, it'll probably get most of it correct because the chatbot has studied all of Wikipedia. But because it's predicting what words to say to you, there's always the chance that it'll guess wrong and suddenly your report on Ben Franklin includes a section on how he appeared on season three of The Office.
It's unlikely a chatbot will reply "I don't know" because it doesn't actually know anything. It's not thinking about what it's saying. It can't think! It's designed to process your words and give back a reply. Not a true or accurate reply, just a reply.
That much alone is difficult enough to convey! And that's not even the worst part!
I didn't expect anyone to acutally play The Plot of the Phantom, but I also didn't think it would turn up on waxy, Boing Boing, and Hacker News either. It feels apt that it was old school Web 1.0-style blogging that contributed the most to people trying out the game.
This very unserious game I abandoned writing when I was 14 is now the most-viewed thing I've produced. People are asking for clues and mapping out the dungeon on their own accord. A reader kindly made an entry for it at the Interactive Fiction Database and included a review, which concluded "this is a game you play to feel empathy with the author, not because of its excellence standing alone." Perfect.
Based on feedback, I built a new hinting system into the game. Type "hint" to get up to three (and only three!) clues to get unstuck. There's also a few new Easter eggs and a slew of tiny improvements.
I'm glad people are enjoying it! Although I regret that I didn't track how many players erased the whiteboard in the Office Room!
So of course I set out to make my own text adventure game! The Plot of the Phantom was a Zork-alike dungeon crawl with plenty of hide-and-seek puzzle quests for objects required to advance the game (e.g. to open a door, you needed to find the key, which was in the bucket at the bottom of the well, but you needed to find a rope first, etc.). I spent most of the summer working on it, only to be flummoxed when the game completely consumed the 64K (expanded!) of RAM available. A year or so later I got involved in my high school's theatre program and started learning how to play electric guitar, and programming didn't feel that important anymore. So the floppy disks went into a box along with the computer and peripherals and it sat my parent's house until one day it was sold and that was that.
Let's now time-travel to the future a bit. It's 2018, and I've somehow gotten myself a career in software engineering, despite getting D's in maths and a BA in English that took five years to complete. I'm on a leave of absence, and I'm poking around Playfic marveling at the thousands of text adventure games written by hobbyists. This is how I learn about the existence of Inform 7, a modern programming language for creating text adventures ("interactive fiction" in today's parlance) that run on ported versions of the original Infocom software.
So I have an idea.
The The Plot of the Phantom code was gone, but I still had the original notebook of maps and objects. How fun would it be to recreate the game using the same virtual machine that Infocom used to create Zork? Well, not fun enough at the time I guess, because I quickly forgot about it after my leave ended.
But then: COVID. Stuck working from home, protests everywhere, wildfires turing the sky orange, a terrible election year. I needed something to escape, and that's when I pulled out that notebook started tinkering with Inform 7. I hadn't written down everything so it took some time to remember how some of the rooms and puzzles worked. I did some editing, removing some rooms, getting rid of scoring and treasure hunting, and — important! — changing the ending to be a lot less violent (I blame 80s action movies).
As I went about recreating my minature world, the backstory started to become...meta. The original version didn't actually have a story arc, you just had to get from one end of the dungeon to the other. Today the game has some references to the kid I was in 1984, and in some ways is a bit autobiographical. There are some new objects to examine and puzzles to explore, but the new game is largely what it was back then.
Large Language Muddle. I feel this. But I think there's an obvious collary: the people pushing AI this way don't care about craft, expertise, or "the journey." They care that there's a product to sell, and quality is very often an afterthought.
Just a QR Code. Generate a QR code for anything, right in the browser, no internet connection needed!
Tauri 2.0. An alternative to Electron for building cross-platform applications.
changedetection.io. Old-school web page monitoring for things like retail restocking, price changes, page defacement, etc. There's also a managed version, for money.
Hands are hard to draw! So I drew a bunch of them. One hand for every day in May, posted to BlueSky with the hashtag #MayoDeManos. I'm not certain I improved so much as confirmed that my style has plateaued. If I ever do this again I'll focus on simplified, less rendered hands and more poses of hands holding objects.
My inbox received a one-two punch in the form of notices that beloved Mozilla-owned read-it-later app Pocket and educational coding playground Glitch would be shutting down. More accurately, Glitch is discontinuing app hosting, and what remains to be seen is what Glitch will become without it.
Free/cheap web services come and go, but losing these two is harsh. I've used Pocket to collect stuff for years for my "Pocket Lint" series of link posts. Glitch will be missed as a free/cheap way to host a website, app, or "link in bio" page while learning how to do so.
It was, also, a cool place to host an ExpressJS + SQLite app that didn't need to be available 24/7. For the past twelve months I've been working off and on on a handful of low-traffic, indieweb-oriented CRUD apps that were designed to be chucked onto a platform like Glitch and embedded into any website, even those without a backend. Among them: a classic blog commenting widget, a webmentions service, and — mmm, savory irony! — a read-it-later link collection app to replace Pocket. Ha!
In the meantime, I've migrated my link-collecting from Pocket to Linkding, hosted for cheap at PikaPods. As for my Glitch projects, they're on hold until I can find another app host to deploy on.
If you have a recommendation, leave a comment on this post, which is using my aforementioned blog commenting app — developed and hosted at Glitch!
The Neat Gallery! image gallery generator now has the ability to support and preserve ALT text for thumbnail images with a simple metadata file that it generates for you in advance. Fill out this file and Neat Gallery! will insert your ALT text into the gallery HTML the next time you run the script.
