beka valentine

trans dyke hacking on @QueeriousLabs@twitter.com . she/her (xey/xem or ey/em if you're bored with binaries); no child zone, 18+ only 

current twitter handle: @defnotbeka@twitter.com 

former twitter handles: @beka_valentine @illegally_beka

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npub1dedkf2flnstav55fz9y9uwvu30srv8zs9c78xm5prruwqrv4p5xqd6j93d

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beka_valentine@kolektiva-social.mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsxukmy4ylec97k22y3zjz78xwghcpkr3gzu0rnd6q3378qpk2s6rqpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0ds7892ka

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nos.lol

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Last Notes

2026-03-25 21:17:01 UTC

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@nprofile…ted5 when did that class run?

2026-03-25 21:12:26 UTC

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that's not to say that it makes a compelling case internally, but at least there's a clear sense that you can use the tool to create interesting things you might want to look at
way better than anything in the VRML book

2026-03-25 21:10:13 UTC

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now, i do get that this book is a technical introduction to VRML, but its hard to pick it up and feel like this is something worth spending time on
whereas the VRML sourcebook for VRML 2.0 at least throws a weird alien world on the cover to entice you

2026-03-25 21:08:26 UTC

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Jaron Lanier had the good sense to pitch VPL's work on VR by making appeals to human creativity and expression, which is at least an open ended invitation to fill in the blanks with compelling ideas

2026-03-25 21:07:16 UTC

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its not just VRML, but VRML is the easiest thing to point to
these same people are still around, and were pushing the metaverse a few years back, with painfully similar schlocky pitches
no one cares about ~commerce~
you won't attract people with that as your pitch

2026-03-25 21:06:08 UTC

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and its an interesting contrast to the incredible imagination behind hypermedia that existed from the mid 80s through the mid 90s, and the web from the mid 90s on, and video games for forever

2026-03-25 21:04:59 UTC

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now look, sure, i get it. it's early days of VRML, from 1994 to 1997, but even through to the late 90s or early 2000s, you'd be hard pressed to find VRML content that was in any way compelling. the imagination for what it could be was just.. boring and bland and schlocky

2026-03-25 21:00:10 UTC

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now, given that these are static things, not dynamic, interactive environments, its hard to find any of this compelling on its own
VRML 1.0 didn't even have animations and such, so you couldn't even make little characters that did stuff. that came in VRML 2.0 / VRML97

2026-03-25 20:58:58 UTC

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the aforementioned track light is described somewhere in source but never even shown

2026-03-25 20:57:43 UTC

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a blank building exterior with a bench and lamp
a studio apartment with furniture and kitchen
a banana
a stair case with 3d text as buttons
a computer lab
an abstract architectural space
an abstract representation of SQL
a molecule
a slot machine
South Beach in SF

2026-03-25 20:52:33 UTC

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here's a list of example objects/spaces in the book, in order:
an AR15
a hexagon
some squiggle writing
the VRML logo
the planet earth
the New College vrmLab
a cube
an orrery (consistently mispelled as orrey)
a strange building interior that's described as a "stock ticker"

2026-03-25 20:47:40 UTC

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what i mean by that is like.. the things imagined are so boring and schlocky. the mythos around the motivation for VRML is all like.. William Gibson's Matrix, or Neal Stephenson's Metaverse, but the canonical examples are stupid
like, one example given is a track light
whoopie

2026-03-25 20:46:13 UTC

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reading through the VRML book that Mark Pesce wrote, i feel like there's a real sense of .. not having much to say with VRML
i think this was an eternal problem, partially due to VRML's static nature, but even then i think it's not logically impossible to say stuff

2026-03-25 20:36:06 UTC

VRML 1.0 is a truly weird language. not sure if this is carried through to later versions and its descendants but, wow what a strange language

2026-03-25 04:36:35 UTC

Sonique's It Feels So Good is such a great song
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5ZaxGR21sc

2026-03-25 03:10:13 UTC

Sadeness, by Enigma, is such a quintessentially 90s song, holy moly
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4maoo4A3x4

2026-03-21 06:28:25 UTC

the modern metaverse/web3/whatever bullshits, is so funny because the best examples of it look no better than stuff from the 90s, except unlike the stuff from the 90s, there's now no reason for it to be so ass

2026-03-10 16:31:20 UTC

its really hard for me to express how enraging the lat few years of software have been
i've been saying for a while that there's been significant, voluntary regression of software quality for a while now, but this kind of obvious regression makes it undeniable
this was a choice
https://x.com/peer_rich/status/2031287133982392412

2026-03-02 17:11:55 UTC

i'm a little surprised there's been no real effect on the markets tbh

2026-03-01 08:45:45 UTC

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the oldest known built wooden structure is almost half a MILLION years old, and the fact that we have any trace of it at all is incredible because wood generally doesn't last or leave much of a trace
who knows what else was out there, lost to time

2026-03-01 08:18:38 UTC

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human history is incomprehensibly long, and we know practically nothing about what happened, who these people were, what their lives were like
oceans of time stretch behind us, unfathomably deep, full of people and stories we'll never know

2026-03-01 08:15:22 UTC

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when the city at Çatalhöyük was being founded, Jericho in the West Bank had been inhabited for 2000 years

2026-03-01 08:13:15 UTC

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when the first pyramids were being built in Ancient Egypt, the city at Çatalhöyük was 5000 years old and had been abandoned for over 3000 years

2026-03-01 07:40:01 UTC

when Athens was at its peak in 500 BC, the Egyptian pyramids were already an ancient mystery people would go visit on vacation
the Trojan War happened a thousand years earlier and the pyramids were still ancient by comparison

2026-02-21 08:12:28 UTC

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in my grand TV show, Athens, i would have aGreek chorus, where the episodes begin and end not with traditional "last time on" or whatever
but rather with actors playing the chorus members in the scene, be when they're done with the chorus, they simply go right into character

2026-02-20 18:45:45 UTC

someone should give me 500k per episode to make a show called Athens, spanning 800 years of ancient greek history

2026-02-10 02:27:44 UTC

something really interesting about linguistic phenomena is that they often seem to operate on principles of equivalence that are completely contrary to how typical machine learning functions

2026-02-08 20:45:05 UTC

people say "Oh, San Jose is bigger than SF! it's a big city!"
no. San Jose is a big suburb. it has like five tall buildings. Berkeley and Oakland both have downtowns with more tall buildings than San Jose
the only thing that makes San Jose """big""" is its vast sprawl

2026-02-01 18:33:43 UTC

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@nprofile…74ng there's an old but really good blog post from Geoff Pullum, discussing this fact in response to a commentor on @nprofile…l8xm's blog, back in 2005
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001843.html

2026-01-31 05:09:58 UTC

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the honest tinfoil hat nutballs are gonna have to start inventing stories about the illuminati secretly trying to make the world better and kinder, just to get their kicks

2026-01-31 05:08:46 UTC

being a conspiracy theorist right now has gotta be rough. you spend your life talking about the secret pedophile torture cabal running the world and now one believes you and now it's just all in the open

2026-01-31 03:37:29 UTC

i think it's outrageous that we live in a world where the secret cabal of powerful men is fucking children instead of plotting to becoming immortal by merging with a super-intelligent AI named Icarus

2026-01-23 17:42:08 UTC

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@nprofile…uryc @nprofile…c9kz don't leave us hanging, post some pics exemplifying what was so good about them! :)

2026-01-12 04:09:34 UTC

Season 5 of Star Trek: Discovery is the most insulting piece of trash, second only to Star Trek: Section 31

2026-01-11 20:44:34 UTC

the best thing you can do to your tomato based pasta sauce is dump gobs of spiciness into it. cayenne pepper, harissa, you name it. just make it spicy and itll be infinitely better

2025-12-21 06:08:12 UTC

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i think a lot of this comes out of not really planning ahead. so people have clever ideas, maybe write them down, maybe not, cant fit them in with later stories, etc.
compare with Babylon 5, which would bring up 9 million interesting things and pay them all out eventually

2025-12-21 06:00:46 UTC

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another example of this is in Earth: Final Conflict, where the arrival of Be'Lai on earth reveals the existence of an entire Taelon dissident movement with complex difficulties due to the Commonality's psychic link

2025-12-21 05:54:52 UTC

so many scifi shows of the past raised really REALLY interesting plot elements and then just let them fall on the floor
two examples that come to mind:
in DS9, there Maquis were a clear seed of a storyline about the imperfections of the Federation, but that never went anywhere

2025-12-19 17:38:27 UTC

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but then he lists out his sources for these fantasies and its like 90% scifi
he doesn't even list out the more serious futurology work from the time period, like Futureshock, or the non-fiction discussions that folx like Clarke and Asimov constantly had in the public sphere

2025-12-19 17:36:49 UTC

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and like, before you can jump to the conclusion that capitalists had other priorities -- which is a very real thing -- you have to first ask, where did you even get the idea that this was the future?
he insists he got it from all the people that were trusted to predict it

2025-12-19 17:35:53 UTC

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and Graeber's answer is "well it might have been possible, we just don't know for SURE, but I think most of it was, and the main reason is that the capitalists didn't want to do it!"

2025-12-19 17:34:55 UTC

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he consistently wrote things like "It's the year 2000. We were promised flying cars. I don't see ANY flying cars! Why? Why! Why."
and while its funny when Captain Sisko says that while selling IBM's linux servers, it's not funny when serious social commentary has that form

2025-12-19 17:08:14 UTC

one of the things that was very annoying about David Graeber is that he seems to genuinely have been convinced by the utopian techno capitalist visions of the future from his youth

2025-12-14 08:26:48 UTC

in the tech industry, you can make a fuck ton of money if you're smart and able to do the most boring work invented

2025-11-26 00:58:56 UTC

good video about the ridiculousness of post-1960s reading education trends that's been damaging literacy for multiple generations of people, and how it's being finally discarded
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGsNcFfezLM

2025-11-23 22:17:59 UTC

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I'm really curious why this fell out of fashion. is the fabric that much more expensive than foam? or is it just that fabric is more durable and therefore contributes to the value being retained longer, so people don't buy new equipment as much? i dont get it

2025-11-23 22:15:53 UTC

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i noticed this after opening up a Kodak Brownie 2 movie camera that I bought recently and seeing the inside of the film cover's lip
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/115/601/311/663/918/648/original/7383db89c94b05e3.jpg
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/115/601/311/634/940/270/original/694f1ad549bee549.jpeg

2025-11-23 22:09:28 UTC

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and unlike the foam, fabric doesn't disintegrate, so you can buy old equipment off ebay, stuff thats like 75 or 100 years old or more, and open it up, and instead of being met with black particulate and goo jamming everything up, you find perfectly clean, functioning stuff

2025-11-23 22:08:09 UTC

something I realized recently is that before the use of foam as a cushioning material in electronics -- where you have a foam block or strip that goes around a closure -- we used to use fabric, like felt

2025-11-20 01:26:07 UTC

A Streetcar Named Desire sure is a movie

2025-11-11 18:24:16 UTC

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anyway, the Digit By Digit method of calculating square roots is fine and interesting and is worth learning, so here's the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6evC4klO_lI
just remember that this guy's framing narrative is borne of ignorance and reactionary politics

2025-11-11 18:22:33 UTC

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most people who complain about New Math being nonsense have never actually looked at what the recommendations actually are, and those who do look at it with biased reactionary eyes, like this guy, are too ignorant to understand what they're reading
it's Dunning Kruger

2025-11-11 18:21:29 UTC

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it's that parents didn't know the techniques taught in New Math curricula, and therefore didn't recognize that it was also algorithmically valid, and they thought it was junk. it also meant that they couldn't help their kids with their homework without also learning new math too

2025-10-28 20:43:04 UTC

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like, Babylon 5 is my reference point for Good Plot in space games, and the entire arch of B5 is about a dramatic change in the way the galaxy works. but it's not just a long term arc that has this quality, there are lots of fractally smaller arcs like this too

2025-10-28 20:41:08 UTC

so im thinking again about what makes so many space games boring and what makes the space scifi i enjoy as compelling as it is, and i think part of it comes down to the sense that some major shift is happening in the world

2025-10-21 03:25:05 UTC

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you can be smart as hell, but if you write like a first grader, don't bother going into an interview for a programmer job. they'll think you're illiterate, and the whole interview is going to suck. if they mention it, you might scrape by, but if they don't, forget it

2025-10-21 03:23:14 UTC

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collaborative writing situations are the ones that will open doors to more empowered futures, because they're the ones that get you well paying jobs
if you can't write clearly, an interview where you need to do whiteboard exercises, for instance, will go rather poorly

2025-10-21 03:21:32 UTC

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handwriting may be less necessary now that computers are wide spread, but it's not unnecessary
and arguably, the ways in which its still necessary -- collaboration at a blackboard or whiteboard, for instance -- are ones where _good_ handwriting is vital

2025-10-21 03:19:56 UTC

if you had asked me a few years ago whether I considered handwriting to be an important thing to teach kids, I would've been on the side of "meh, it's fine, we have computers" but I've completely changed my views on this and now I think that we're doing kids a disservice

2025-10-20 17:23:29 UTC

microSD cards were a mistake tbh

2025-10-16 06:18:29 UTC

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we're not teaching kids to understand computers, to control them, to create their own computer experiences and bend the machine to their will
we're teaching them to ask corporations to give them what they need or want
that's no education, that's a trap

2025-10-16 06:17:02 UTC

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now what kind of education is that? you're not empowered, you're not the one in charge of the computer, you're a consumer, you're eyeballs for corporations to sell software to
that's what we're teaching kids that computers are for: buying, consuming, etc

2025-10-16 06:15:32 UTC

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but what kind of computer literacy is that? they're starting out on iPads or iPhones, browsing the web, playing games, and whatnot. maybe they'll have Chromebooks to do the same
most of them aren't learning how computers work, and the computers are terrible for that anyway

2025-10-16 06:13:58 UTC

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this was a lower class school that wasn't some fancy school for techies
but I from what I know of schools today, they're not teaching kids to program. they're expecting the kids are computer literate, or that they'll learn it at home at least

2025-10-16 06:12:10 UTC

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now granted, Peninsula School is in Menlo Park, so you'd expect them to be very technically biased, but when I was in 4th grade in the mid 90s, I learned some Logo programming at an intermediate school on Long Island on Macintoshes

2025-10-16 06:09:58 UTC

you wanna know how impoverished the world of computer education has been since about 2000?
in 1980, there were elementary schools teaching 10 year old kids how to program BASIC on Apple II's, Commodore PET's and other computers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oFh1gFJVe4

2025-10-13 01:31:17 UTC

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the world would be much better if you could get a full career's worth of skill for a few thousand dollars of evening and weekend classes

2025-10-13 01:30:19 UTC

the fact that career skills generally cost huge quantities of money that most people can afford only once in their life, and which must be decided on at the age of 18, is I think a major problem in our society

2025-09-30 03:57:14 UTC

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we live in a country of cave dwelling losers who stopped learning new things about the world literally a quarter century ago, it seems

2025-09-30 03:56:20 UTC

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imagine if 1 in 12 Americans used a telephone or watched TV on a weekly basis
can you imagine newspapers running articles explaining what telephones or televisions were?
no, it's absurd, only a troglodyte could be so phenomenally out of touch
and yet.

2025-09-30 03:54:38 UTC

there are 70.8 milion GenZers in the US, and 40% of them -- 28 million GenZers -- use Discord weekly. that's a bare minimum of one in every 12 people using Discord regularly
and yet the news media still finds its necessary to explain what Discord is

2025-09-30 03:32:42 UTC

leftists and progressives who critique capitalists really need to care more about credibility. if you go around saying things that are demonstrably nonsense -- if someone can say "look at how dopey and wrong this person is" -- people won't trust or listen to you

2025-09-09 22:13:33 UTC

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imagine if we have the knowledge required to do this *right now*, the only reason we don't have it is that no one has gone out and built it yet

2025-09-09 22:12:45 UTC

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imagine if this derivation was performed in conjunction with your computer, where it can explore options and present alternatives rapidly, and you can provide it with hints and suggestions, synthesizing whats each part -- programmer and computer -- do best into something better

2025-08-25 21:52:54 UTC

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@nprofile…kvgh i dont know if i've seen the word lately

2025-08-24 07:04:26 UTC

the depiction of the Asimovian Trantor is hilarious in many respects. firstly, almost no one shows it correctly. it's canonically a completely domed planet, with basically no part uncovered except for the oceans
instead, it's always depicted like Coruscant is

2025-08-24 05:38:08 UTC

Art Deco is an architecture that deserves to be scaled up 10-100x but we don't live in a civilization capable of justifying such a monumental scale

2025-08-24 03:36:19 UTC

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like, man, I get it, your respective orgs dont want to devote time and money to XSLT. that sucks!
but why are YOU doing that???
it sounds like WHATWG is just a bunch of people using the working group as their personal hobby space

2025-08-24 03:34:58 UTC

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"Hey guys, what should we devote our time to?"
"Oh, I know! new versions of XSLT!"
"Do we have the resources at our respective orgs to work on this properly?"
"Nope!"
"Sounds good! Let's work on XSLT, then!"

2025-08-24 03:33:38 UTC

i think its really funny that WHATWG is moving to de-standard XSLT because WHATWG members have failed to implement XSLT well enough or securely enough
good job guys, you're all dipshits

2025-08-23 17:30:15 UTC

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@nprofile…td4f @nprofile…68w5 @nprofile…5lc3 @nprofile…7hjs what makes it centralized is the fact that the vast majority of users aren't self-hosting their own bluesky server and instead just using the bsky.social servers

2025-08-22 23:15:10 UTC

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@nprofile…5lc3 @nprofile…7hjs its so funny seeing people talk about bluesky like its decentralized
and this is people _on bluesky_ who _like_ bluesky
baffling

2025-08-20 19:47:18 UTC

watching and reading media about computers from the 1950s through 1970s, and earlier golden age scifi, i really get a good sense of what the zeitgeist around big computing was. it's kind of hard to put into words but i want to try

2025-08-19 01:40:54 UTC

every time i go out in the sun, i get REALLY sleepy afterward. it's very annoying

2025-08-13 01:19:40 UTC

frankly im surprised there hasn't been a new bunch of groups like the Weathermen and Symbionese Liberation Army

2025-08-04 22:10:44 UTC

vim and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race

2025-07-25 15:58:51 UTC

@nprofile…2922 @nprofile…93eh @nprofile…vsfg related to the recent Futzing Over Computers episodes, there are some interesting works connected to the issue of military computers and technology generally
David F. Noble's America By Design, which touches on the role of public private partnerships and research labs and the ways this drove technology to dominate American society
Brian Dear's The Friendly Orange Glow, about PLATO, which started as a military education project but was soon subverted for hobby uses
and the People's Computer Company newspaper/magazine, which was an early 1970s counter cultural project pushing for access to computer outside of the military industrial academic nexus. PCC is especially relevant because they did some community oriented FoC work like building public computing spaces, envisioning those in the future, etc etc

2025-07-25 03:24:12 UTC

im sorry, the Enterprise now uses cryostasis to keep people alive instead of medical transporter buffers??? WHO'S WRITING THIS SHOW? YOU SUCK

2025-07-25 01:02:57 UTC

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@nprofile…jakc i suppose! i guess im not worried about mere tens of seconds

2025-07-25 00:48:49 UTC

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@nprofile…jakc the top multiple results on ddg all answer the question pretty clearly???

2025-07-25 00:04:42 UTC

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@nprofile…jakc do you have an example?

2025-07-24 16:07:49 UTC

its fascinating to me how some wage laborers will sometimes be considered not proletariat by leftists because of the self-perception of those wage laborers or because of things like financial incentives, while other wage laborers with similar financial incentives are

2025-07-21 02:10:09 UTC

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the punched cards on a jacquard loom are PROGRAMS that encode instructions that output PIXEL ART to the structure of a piece of fabric being created by said pixel art
what kind of pixel art? this:
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/114/888/774/591/260/506/original/53ac27f5aa3e3d5c.jpg
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/114/888/774/962/267/751/original/a38ed5234bc074f0.jpg
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/114/888/775/185/479/554/original/53b3f3c9e820ee7e.jpg

2025-07-18 18:29:09 UTC

VSCode is some of the worst software I've ever used, it's shocking how widespread it's become

2025-06-29 06:21:05 UTC

alright folx, stop setting off fireworks in SoMa thanks

2025-06-20 18:59:34 UTC

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i think we have these massively powerful computers around us all the time and we're squandering them, for a variety of terrible reasons, and i think that's sad

2025-06-20 18:58:49 UTC

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this isn't to say that computers CANT be radically better or different now than they were in 2025
quite the contrary, I think that there's SO MUCH we can do with them, in principle
but I don't think we're seeing a lot of stuff actually being done that's new

2025-06-20 18:42:49 UTC

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and i know some people will want to say "oh but all the changes are invisible! we have massively faster computers now, massive amounts of memory and hard drive space, and so games and movies and so on and so forth are way more impressive!"

2025-06-20 18:42:00 UTC

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was there an equivalent change in user experience and capabilities from 2000 to 2025, as there was from 1975 to 2000?
i don't think so
i think our computers here in 2025 are almost identical to the ones we had in 2000, in terms of what its like to use them and what we can do

2025-06-20 18:40:45 UTC

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has there been as much of a change between that iMac and the current iMac, as there was between a Commodore 64 and a standard PC of 2000?