computational practice

Manifesto for mozilla hubs:

-animals are friends not food

-feminism

-lgbtqia+ rights

-anti-racism

-baked beans must be eradicated

-24 hour space, no forced sleep/wake schedules

-all gamers welcome as long as league of legends is not installed on their pc

Virtual spaces have become even more valuable through the pandemic allowing for an accessible, socially distanced way of meeting whether for work or social purposes, or for performances and exhibitions. Musicians have performed concerts in games such as fortnite and roblox keeping people entertained during lockdown.

I had a play around with Google Quickdraw, an online doodling game/neural network created by google that collects data sets of doodles. Using the worlds largest dataset of doodles to train the neural network to guess drawings in under 20 seconds. It currently consists of over 50 million drawings contributed by over 15 million people, also having the advantages of being open-source and being developed by Google has the standing in our society to collect the massive sample size.

As shown it had no problem recognising my very quick mouse-drawn rabbit along with nearly everything else I was asked to draw after 3 rounds of the game. The only one it couldn’t guess was ‘a short monster’ which I thought was quite interesting and propelled me into looking deeper into what defines a ‘monster’. The dictionary definition of a monster is “a large, ugly and frightening imaginary creature”, I feel as though people have there own personal various views of ugly and frightening, as well as varying imagination. The fact that monsters are imaginary and products of peoples imagination that we see in films etc. means there is endless ideas of what a monster may look like, making this specific category more difficult but not impossible for the neural network.

There was a lot of variation in the doodles it learned from for this specific category, most others for example pizza only had 2 general variations that people drew(either a slice or a whole pizza).

I read the text “Data” by Lev Manovich and highlighted what I thought was relevant to the definition of data and its relevance to functioning of societies. Data science is a relatively new field of work/study with the development of computers, using statistical methods etc to handle large amounts of data. This can include numbers, categories, texts, images, audio and similar media types, records of activities, samples, locations and connections between these things which can be analyzed using computational methods. It allows the use of large scale analysis to make decisions which can be useful to businesses, healthcare and governments especially or used for artistic purposes. The text provides many examples of data objects and I chose to look further into Facebook Phenomenon and the Facebook pyramid data of employees and digital capitalism, the graphs are very in depth and show connections within the company pulled rom publicly available information.Data-like representations have been used for thousands of years however the adoption of computers has restricted what may count as data today, meaning a dataset must be objects structured in a way suitable for computational medium. Most representations of data sets are also biased in that they include certain aspects and exclude others or practicality. A map was once nothing more than a 2D diagram on a piece of paper or a wall, only showing relevant information whereas now digital maps have much more utility and the ability to show further data types of your choice like navigation instructions and traffic details. What would we do without data?

how often do you think you interact with bots in your daily life?

In my daily life I interact with bots almost every day, I use a bot called NightBot on twitch to help moderate my stream, post relevant information at timed intervals in the chat and add fun commands viewers can use for more interactivity in the stream. I use multiple bots in discord servers that enhance my online social experience with friends in personal servers, for example a music bot so we can listen to music together whilst in voice chat and the meme bot for gambling games, automated photo edits and of course memes amongst other fun commands. The MEE6 bot is useful for server moderation, assigning roles etc. Outside of my computer I occasionally make use of virtual assistant bots like Siri as well as using companies chatbots on the web.

in what other ways do you think bots could play a different role in your practice or daily life?

I am currently building my own discord bot in javascript, mostly to make my friends laugh as it’s inspired by a game charcater and as a learning experience to create more in-depth and useful bots in the future.
I’d love a bot that could anylyse my energy levels throughout the day and suggest the most appropriate activities at that time, or for yoga moves etc.

This weeks task is to write a piece of code to help perform a daily task more efficiently, for this I decided to write a piece of code for making a cup of tea

function hotWater{kettle + water = fullkettleOn};teabag = in cup;if (sweetening);sugar +=;else(next step);if water = boiled(pour);stir;

I looked into esoteric programming languages for and came across Ook! And brainfuck, brainfuck being the most famous and appearing surprisingly complex despite consisting of only 8 characters > < + – . , [ and ] and was made this way to try and make a language to be able to write the smallest possible compiler. Invented in 1993.
Esoteric programming languages are experimental by design and many are simply jokes however many are still suitable to program in. Find that thing I watched about printing the programs own source code then refer this back to esoteric like HQ9+ where Q prints the programs source code.

A computer is a machine that can be programmed to perform many tasks an process data, they can be used for productivity, browsing the web, playing games and so many more things. Computers can do just about anything at this stage and are an active part of many peoples daily lives and integrated into how the world works. A computer can be a cinema, a shop, a notepad, an encyclopaedia, a photo album, a communication tool, and the list goes on.

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