📰📕 Roll call for news and publication designers active on Mastodon.

Some of my favorite design is from those fields but either those corners of the community haven’t embraced Mastodon as much (compared to, say, web and typeface designers) or – hopefully – I just haven’t found as many of them yet.

Friend shout-outs and self-references are welcomed, even for people I already follow. Glad to know about people designing for anything from tiny zines to big publications, in print or digital format.

Someone recently suggested to me that AI systems bring the users' ability closer to the average. I was intrigued by this idea because it reflects my experience. I am, for example, terrible at any kind of visual art, but with something like Stable Diffusion I can produce things that are merely quite bad, whereas without it I can produce things that are absolutely terrible. Conversely, with GitHub Copilot I can write code with more bugs that's harder to read. Watching non-programmers use it and ChatGPT with Python, they can produce fairly mediocre code that mostly works.

I suppose it shouldn't surprise anyone that a machine that's trained to produce output from a statistical model built from a load of examples would tend towards the mean.

An unflattering interpretation of this would suggest that the people who are most excited by AI in any given field are the people with the least talent in that field.

I work with seniors to help them with their computing goals

I cannot tell you how confusing the password management software abstraction is for so many of them. An organized book like this would be a huge and comprehensible upgrade compared to their existing approach
https://infosec.exchange/@SwiftOnSecurity/112759598400928872

Two days ago, some GOAT developer published a web-based, local-storage After Effects alternative and it's REALLY GOOD.
https://www.reddit.com/r/vfx/comments/1dqf4kd/i_created_a_free_after_effects_alternative/

Here's the app: https://pikimov.com/

In the reddit thread, the developer casually mentions the app could fit on a 1.44mb floppy disk, lmao unbelievable.

The First Hacker

It's hard to ascribe "firsts" in history. Did Ada Lovelace write the first computer program? Does it count if it is a mechanical computer? Are Bombe and Tunny really computers in the modern sense? Was Pong the first home video game? Who was the first hacker?

What is a hacker? Someone who (maliciously or otherwise) convinces a computer to do something that it isn't supposed to do. Sometimes for fun and som

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/06/the-first-hacker/

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