lesser daemon (Page 9)

31

Dec

2022: A Series of Small Steps

Update: I accidentally jumped ahead a year in the initial post. 2021 was The Bad Year and 2022 was The Good One. Sorry, time is difficult.

2021 was not a hard year to beat. Someday I'll probably write about it in full, but suffice it to say my mental health was about the worst it's ever been. So bad that I had to quit one job and take a metric ton of psychiatric medication just to stay functional for the other one.

This led to a pretty serious re-evaluation of how I was living. It turns out that investing your

4 min read

09

Dec

Enter The Demon Zone

Intentional and Unintentional Machine Learning Failures

For the past few months, I've been working with machine learning and intentionally overfitting/breaking models. This is very much a work in progress, but is an attempt to explain why I think these phenomena are so interesting. I welcome your feedback as I continue to work through these ideas.

Overfitting is a well-documented phenomenon in machine learning, and one widely considered to be undesirable. It's what occurs when your model works too well, when it can perform perfectly on a training set but can't respond to new data. This can often result from

5 min read

11

Nov

100 Days, Day 60: Month 2 Reflections

I have settled into something of a rhythm at this point. A whole lot of it is still just daily sketches, but at least I'm sharing them somewhere.

I think, as far as the goal of moving my archives over to this "new digital home", I am accepting defeat. I'd still like to, but it's just not my highest priority right now.

On the plus side, I am staying consistent, and I've been feeling more creatively inspired. It's been a really hectic month that lends itself to sketching rather than working on longterm projects, but a lot of ideas for

2 min read

17

Oct

erasure poetry with Amiri Baraka and Ron DeSantis

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The work in question.

Code lives here.

Reading about detournement this week has me thinking of this meme by Trevor Allen.

o, the Pelican. so smoothly doth he crest. a wind god!

If, for Debord, detournement is about creating new webs of meaning, and robbing existing signs of their own meaning, then erasure seems like a powerful method of reframing recognizable corpuses (corpi?). I'm especially interested in his point that a detournement is less effective the more it approaches a rational reply. Rather than trying to "embrace debate" or critique our political enemies directly, the goal

3 min read

13

Oct

Combining Keycloak, LDAP, and Nextcloud (With Discord SSO!)

For most of the past couple months my energies at Eyebeam have been focused on helping move Undersco.re to a more scalable user management and authentication model. Previously, we'd just been using Keycloak with a Discord identity provider. This provided a relatively seamless single sign-on experience, but had a number of drawbacks, most importantly:

Running through the Discord IDP, without being able to synchronize with guilds, meant all users had to be a member of Underscore's Discord to use SSO.
This process didn't allow for real one-to-one account syncing across different apps, particularly NextCloud, which serves as the core

9 min read