Week 86 & 87
Amy's use of Chaikin's curve algorithm, current state of being, digital sketchbook, Toshihiro Katayama's work, chain-of-thought prompting, meaning-making-machines and webcam shaders.
[Articles] Generating the alphabet – Amy Goodchild (and Chaikin’s algorithm)
Read a very interesting article on Amy Goodchild’s blog last week.
If you know about my research interests, you’d know that I’ve been very excited by the idea of a generative font for well over two years now. I had developed an approach myself by regarding letterforms as rules, which was too arduous to follow up on over the years.
Well, Amy has come up with a rather interesting approach. She deconstructed letters into various points, based on guidelines that type-designers set.
This results in some wonky letterforms, particularly because there are no curves here. She then smartly introduced Chaikin’s algorithm, which recursively creates new points that ultimately result in curves between two points. In Amy’s words:
Chaikin’s algorithm is run recursively and, in each round, we create a new path with the following steps:
Copy the first point (the ends stay in place)
For the rest of the points before the last point:
Add a point 25% of the way to the previous point
Add a point 25% of the way to the next point
Copy the last point.
I thought this was so smart! You can read her article for the kinds of letterforms that she was able to generate. I’ll try out Chaikin’s algorithm slowly, I think it could be quite powerful.
[Explanations] Current state of being
For the past month, a certain change has overcome me. I’ve been more reserved, closed-off and tired to put in more work than the bare minimum. People close to me haven’t been able to accept the change, and, perhaps, I wasn’t able to accept it either.
However, in the last two weeks, I’ve come across three assortments of words that very well describe my current state of being. Here are the three, that do a better job than I could:
“It’s like the line from Naoe Kinoshita in Confessions of a Husband, ‘My boat travels lightly, drifting aimlessly at the mercy of the current’. That’s how I want to live my life … “
- from Days at The Morisaki Bookshop, by Satoshi Yagisawa.
S: Then we figure out a way. It’s about the willingness to find a way. You have to choose where you want to put in your energy.
Me: But that’s the difference, right? I’ve spent a large part of my life putting in a lot of energy into things that didn’t work out. I just want to be for a while.
- paraphrased from a conversation with S.
There are times when humans also need to hibernate. Maybe this is your hibernation period (metaphorically).
- text from P.
It’s not one out of the three, but a strange combination of all. And that’s it, that’s how I want to be for some time. I want to be still, go where the current takes me until I’m finally ready to set sail again (or not).
[Experiments] Making a digital sketchbook
In the last couple of weeks, I wondered what a digital sketchbook would look like. Sure, I share outcomes on Instagram and that, in a way, has become a sketchbook of sorts.
But the problem is:
Access – people without Instagram cannot access the whole post.
Branding & Blocking – it’s fully controlled by Instagram, I can’t even embed the feed on my website.
Doesn’t communicate the process – no space to also store code, which is integral for the work I do.
As I began more daily experimentation this year, I found my text-editor filled with samples of code that I would reuse as the starting point for another exploration, to deep-dive vertically in my research about a particular concept.
To meet my goals for sharing and to have an archive of the code I wrote & its output, I decided to emulate the idea of a ‘sketchbook’ – one single page over the internet that shows my progression.
I messed around with formats and platforms for a little while before I arrived at my current setup.
The file is a markdown file that sits locally on my computer and is edited via Obsidian (a markdown editor). Then, I used Quartz to convert it to a website. I tried to use Jekyll first, but it felt more appropriate for a bigger website. Finally, it is all hosted via GitHub pages. You can find the sketchbook here.
I don’t think it’s quite ready for being publicly available yet. I still need to figure out optimal formats – should it be a single scroll log? Or a multi-page blog? Or should the format be more image driven?
Don’t know yet. Will mess around and find out.
[Inspiration] Toshihiro Katayama’s posters
Came across a sweet archive of Toshihiro Katayama’s posters.
Looking at his work, I was re-inspired to use code to create graphic forms. That’s where I had started but suddenly stopped doing it because it didn’t feel meaningful enough.
Wanted to start again, and I did via my rotational studies.
[Reading] Chain-of-thought prompting
Came across a clever idea on ‘prompting’ (large-language-models) while reading an article on Quanta.
But in 2022, a team of Google researchers showed that asking language models to generate step-by-step solutions enabled the models to solve problems that had previously seemed beyond their reach. Their technique, called chain-of-thought prompting, soon became widespread, even as researchers struggled to understand what makes it work.
“They remove some of the magic,” said Dimitris Papailiopoulos, a machine learning researcher at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “That’s a good thing.”
- from How Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Helps Neural Networks Compute, by Quanta Magazine.
This is an interesting way to get LLMs to solve more complex problems. I tried this at work the other day, when I was trying to get ChatGPT to cluster a large assortment of ideas thematically.
It didn’t work out so well. But good concept to keep in mind later!
[Thought] Meaning-making machines
Aren’t we all meaning-making-machines?
I liked the term. I don’t know where it came from, but it was something to do while I was reading about meaning and someone said something about machines. Don’t know, but I like the combination of words. It describes me in a unique fashion.
Could there be more assortments of words that could aid in the communication of my identity? Arjun Yadav – meaning-making-machine, etc …
Funny idea. I don’t know why this is necessary.
[Experiments] Webcam-shader experiments
Been messing around with the idea of using data from the webcam as input for a shader on Punctual. Has led to some interesting outputs.
Still have to figure out ways to use it more efficiently.