TRST_Blog

Me: Hey, let’s go rent a car.

Enlightened One: I’m not sure we can…

Me: No need to worry. I can handle it. In fact it’ll be awesome! We can drive up the coast and visit those places we talked about. Oh man, the weather is supposed to be awesome for the next few days. I’m already in love with the idea and I haven’t even got the car yet.

Enlightened One: But…

Me: It’ll be fine I promise. Let’s go in…

Enlightened One: No. Seriously. Neither of us packed our driver’s licenses…

Me: Ah...

Enlightened One: …

Me: Gelato, then?

Enlightened One: …

For anyone who wants to write in and tell me there’s still time to learn to program or to speak Spanish fluently, that’s not really the point. I do appreciate if you want to share what worked for you, truly. Right now though, I just want to put words to feelings. 😋

I never learned to program. I tried, had small fits of fantasy, but ultimately gave up short of my desires. Never learning never impeded my development. I never lost a job opportunity because I couldn’t code. My wife loves me despite my (many, Many, MANY) flaws.

I say I can’t code, but I can follow along at home; I understand logical structures and am happy to hack apart a prebuilt function or class to do my bidding. What I never did was spend time with it, to familiarise my fingers over the grains of any particular programming language. Syntax, built in functions, scope, all of it was painfully difficult to recall and search up. I never gained a level of fluency because I thought practising was hard, which I was 100% correct about, by the way; however, it's the hard part makes you better.

This pang of regret recently began to bare its teeth on vacation in Sardinia. Weird how being away from a computer makes you think so deeply about one. You can separate a dork from their digital world, but you can never separate a dork from their digital heart... or something like that.

My Romance languages are poor, at best. I understand the rhythms and can even, when feeling brave, approximate an accent. But I am running into the same problem, I never invested the time to learn. The genders, nouns, verbs and their conjugations aren't in my mind. So, I mumble, mix words together and butcher tenses. It's only gotten worse over time, even after revisiting the cities and countries I love. (Shout out to the terribly confused woman at the bakery this morning who bore the full force of my panicked Italian/Spanish/French onslaught.)

I've reached many uncanny valleys for spoken and programmatic languages alike. Each time I reach some basic level of confidence, but fail to invest the effort, to climb the true mountain ahead. Inevitably, I end up in situations where shouting, “Dans de es biblioteca!” isn’t at all helpful—a phrase I may, or may not dryly recommend to my partner whenever she's in search for a better phrase in her writing.

Will I learn a language, computer or human based? Ya, probably. Eventually. Get off my back already! I'm sure it'll make me feel better and likely even help make me appear more handsome and attract throngs of loyal friends. Alright, probably not that last bit. It is easy to dream after you've run into numerous slivers of micro-anxiety producing situations, where knowing only a tiny bit more would have made you feel immensely better. Or so the story goes from the shadowy depths of the valley.

A couple of things about this picture:

1. Wow.
2. Such beautiful.
3. This is the iPhone X camera (unedited; compressed via TinyPNG’s API)
4. Being from a landlocked part of Canada, I had no conceptual machinery to comprehend the sea fading seamlessly into the sky. I could only stare. It was unreal.

I was going to sit on this for another day, then Twitter announced they’d be mucking about with their APIs again, so here we go.

I was dorking around on Product Hunt the other day and I came across Jonathan Toon’s Tweet-Tray. It's an electron app (say what you will) that sits in your menu bar and you can shoot out those world changing ideas and capitalise on your social media influencer lifestyle without getting getting stuck in your feed. I personally think—perhaps it’s inarguable these days—that your social feed should live at arms length. If you’re worried about missing out on the conversation, turn on your notifications or browse your timeline every so often.

When I saw this, I had a nostalgic wave rush over me, but I couldn't quite put my finger on where the connection was. After two hours of breathlessly searching the Internet—I really ought to upgrade my Google-ese—I figured it out.

Anyone remember Birdhouse? A third-party twitter client aimed solely at creating and posting draft tweets without seeing the rest of your stream. At the time, I recall this app having a moment among the productivity-guru Internet class but like all good things, it died far too young. I believe Birdhouse was a victim of Twitter’s changing API and developer policies; however, Adam Lisagor and Cameron Hunt, like the gentlemen they are, they made sure that their website is still accessible.

If you're still into the idea of using Twitter as a one-way publishing street, you can still replicate this behaviour using Drafts and the Post to Twitter action. Just note that you'll be limited to one account. Any social media thought leaders need not apply.

I was ironically searching for a clickbait headline generator to fill in the description for yesterday’s blog post when I came across the site Click-o-Tron and this little gem:

New President Is 'Hours Away' From Royal Pregnancy

I had never heard of the site before, but as soon as I looked through the archives I was hooked. Each post contains a plausible, albeit fantastic miso-mash of words and images. It was like reading a series of juxtaposition poetry. Just give this one a gander: A Tour of the Future Hot Dogs in the United States.

As it turns out™️ the whole site is based on a Reccurent Neural Network programmed and trained by Lars Eidnes. While reading his genesis of Click-o-Tron, I found this bit which spoke to my original poetic connection with the site:

It surprised me how good these headlines turned out. Most of them are grammatically correct, and a lot of them even make sense.

Consider the sentence “Mary J. Williams On Coming Out As A Woman”. I suspected this might be a case where the network had simply memorized a headline from the dataset. It turns out this was not the case. The only thing similar to “Coming Out As A Woman” is the headline “Former Marine Chronicles Journey Coming Out As A Trans Woman On YouTube”. The name “Mary J. Williams” does not appear in the dataset. The network has apparently learned that this is a plausible name, and also that such a name is the type of thing that can come out as a woman.

I can’t say I understood all of the detail about the Recurrent Neural Network that powers the website, but I was enthralled by the amount of fun Eidnes appeared to have while putting this together. The penultimate paragraph says it all:

In total, [Click-o-Tron] gives us an infinite source of useless journalism, available at no cost. If I remember correctly from economics class, this should drive the market value of useless journalism down to zero, forcing other producers of useless journalism to produce something else.

👏 Well done sir, well done.