Karsten Schmidt

https://mastodon.thi.ng/@toxi

Intoxicating, non-toxic! 27+ years of interdisciplinary opensource R&D, software dev, computational art/design/craft/edu, landscape/nature photography, darkroom, kallitypes, electronic music. Trying to do meaningful work. Creator & maintainer of the thi.ng ecosystem of 200+ code libraries.

Except boosts/linked content, all published media is my own work & copyright by me. Most posts delete >2 months.

Available for consulting/commissions. Searchable.

he/him

#ThingUmbrella #TypeScript #Zig #Forth #LandscapePhotography #AltProcess #Darkroom #Kallitype #Geometry #AlgorithmicArt #GenerativeArt #PermaComputing #Music4Coding #Hiking

Location: Bavaria (DE)
Web: https://thi.ng
Support my opensource work: https://codeberg.org/thi.ng/umbrella/src/branch/develop/CONTRIBUTING.md#donations
GitHub: https://github.com/thi-ng
Codeberg: https://codeberg.org/thi.ng/
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/toxi
fx(hash): https://www.fxhash.xyz/u/toxi

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Published at

2026-10-20T15:13:32Z

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Last Notes

2026-08-27 19:21:46 UTC

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Since a couple of people have asked how that lake looks in winter: It does/did indeed freeze over, at least partially and used to for at least a few weeks, but it's been less reliably so over the past few years (e.g. winter 2022/23 was the first time in living memory, when the lake was not completely frozen)... Like the Himalayas, the Alps (and other mountain regions) are also warming at above average rates...
I took the picture below just after sunset on a day in mid Feb 2022, when the lake did have very nice ice cover...
Also here, the neighboring (connected) lake at Christmas day 2024:
https://mastodon.thi.ng/@toxi/113714676984394790
#LandscapePhotography #Alps #Mountains #Lake #Winter
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/117/169/094/998/746/019/original/a85ef2a485c9c5cb.jpg

2026-08-26 05:45:02 UTC

Almost Post-Summer Blues (2026)
...at fjord-like Plansee, with the beautiful Thaneller (2341m) pyramid mountain towering in the background.
#MeerMittwoch #LandscapePhotography #Photography #Alps #Mountains #Lake
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/117/159/015/113/344/212/original/ec6b0f1950b284ab.jpg

2026-08-21 05:45:01 UTC

Allgäu, Late Summer (2024)
(Almost too cliché, but it doesn't take away its beauty...)
#MorningWalk #LandscapePhotography #Photography #Fog #Bavaria
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/117/128/184/160/373/072/original/dd118fe333f1160b.jpg

2026-08-19 10:52:24 UTC

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Genau das! Ich habe daher meine eigene Praxis auch immer als "transdisziplinär" anstatt "multidisziplinär" beschrieben, da ein transdisziplinärer Ansatz hands-on Fähigkeiten aus verschiedenen Disziplinen integriert, um einheitliche Lösungen zu finden/schaffen, während bei multidisziplinären Teams, Leute aus verschiedenen Fachgebieten meist unabhängig voneinander an gemeinsamen Problemen arbeiten, ohne ihre Erkenntnisse zusammenzuführen...

2026-08-19 09:03:16 UTC

Great article about the loss of diversity induced by recommender systems (including LLMs):
Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same
"A world that keeps removing the unlikely also removes the things that could have become the next likely. Ecologists have known this for a long time already and even priced it: they call it the insurance value of biodiversity, the standing reserve of rare species that cost energy and contribute nothing, until the climate shifts and one of them turns out to be what survives. A monoculture is efficient right up until the weather changes."
https://laurenleek.substack.com/p/temperature-zero-for-culture-why
Related: In my 2013 EYEO talk I used the Tower Of Babel as metaphor to talk about polyglot, diverse culture as key long-term survival strength (not punishment!) and to address the growing lack of diversity and rise of monocultures in creative coding fields, back then largely caused by centralization effects of popular frameworks (e.g. Processing, OpenFrameworks) and their social attractor effects restricting the practice and surrounding educational efforts to mostly a single family of (C-based) programming languages whilst completely disregarding other approaches, techniques and influences.
My main argument was (and still is) that diversity of languages and programming approaches (functional, imperative, object-oriented, logic, declarative...) is an important factor for long-term cultural survival and robustness, something I've also been warning about being increasingly under threat by LLM-based coding. The latter is accelerating the monopolization of existing tools/frameworks, due to their over-representation in training sets and therefore offering more "stable", usable LLM solutions, leading to diversity collapse and making it increasingly hard for new contenders to establish themselves. Also wrote more about that previously...
#Average #Diversity #Robustness #Survival #Culture #ProgLang #LLM

2026-08-19 05:45:03 UTC

Pre-alpine Pink Hour (2026)
It's a new day, it's a new dawn...
#MorningWalk #LandscapePhotography #NaturePhotography #Fog #Alps #Mountains
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/117/119/170/492/468/233/original/056f79c6751a77f2.jpg

2026-08-18 08:13:39 UTC

RE: https://mastodon.scot/@simon_brooke/117115279590977166
Wonderful essay by @npub1j79…rc5v! 👏
"People learn what respectable opinion sounds like. They learn which questions serious people are permitted to ask. They learn which ideas are described as credible and which are dismissed before discussion begins. They adjust what I call their priors to match these expectations. Most importantly, they learn what they are not supposed to notice.
This is why neurodivergent thinking might be much more politically significant than neoliberal accounts of neurodivergence allow.
Someone who does not process social conformity in the expected way can be difficult to discipline intellectually.
The person who notices the contradiction cannot necessarily be persuaded to ignore it simply because everyone else does.
The person who becomes intensely interested in the problem may spend years examining it."
#AuDHD #ActuallyAutistic #Neoliberalism
#note12js…dxra

2026-08-17 11:40:10 UTC

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Mon dieu! Whilst not *the* original library of Alexandria, please read up on the destruction of the Serapeum daughter library (established already in ~230 BC and still had the largest collection of books/scrolls in the city throughout the 4th century) and bishop Theophilus' direct involvement in these events. This act widely counts as one of the major triumphs of Christianity over paganism. Related, you might also read up about the brutal religious hate murder and dismembering of Hypatia (one of the scholars at the Serapeum/Mouseion) by a mob of Christian fanatics 14 years later... I'm sorry to inform you that hate, intolerance, fanaticism, sexism and brutality have always been part of that religion!

2026-08-15 11:01:01 UTC

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How is the destruction of vintage books for AI harvesting not in the same category as the parts of the destruction events of the library of Alexandria associated with early Christian fanatics! The destruction of earlier physical artifacts, cultures, praxes, archives and knowledge, to be sacrificed & fed to the new god, to be repurposed, regurgitated and recombined probabilistically & endlessly! All hail our new gloryful AI god, may its basilisk punish all non-believers and obstructionists! 🤯
The sheer ignorance of the assumption that scanned contents of a book (or other physical artifact) are all what matters, is the same ignorance which denies the role of embodiment and how it shapes our perception, thoughts, feelings, actions, and how we generally relate to the world around us. Not just that, by only focusing on final results, it also entirely discards the creation processes and histories of said objects.

2026-08-15 10:31:37 UTC

RE: https://mastodon.ie/@andrewg/117098562278114107
By that measure: A forest is merely the delivery mechanism for the timber, wildlife and land resources which, once extracted, generate income, rents, appreciate in value, and provide economically valuable services...
(I agree, I hate this timeline!)
#note1xmj…fw6j

2026-08-08 13:34:30 UTC

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So just to clarify, you're sampling the image with bilinear filtering or is that an extra and maybe more selective (pre)processing step? In my shader graph editor, the textures are sampled with linear filtering by default, so the above result would include that already...

2026-08-08 12:24:24 UTC

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This looks really good! Btw. Mac Quicklook/Preview, Affinity etc. doesn't know how to handle the GeoTIFF extension format, that's why you often either get usually just black, white or complete white noise looking results. Would you be able to share the Python snippet somewhere?

2026-08-08 11:52:04 UTC

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I haven't tried that, but I'm pretty sure the visible steps on the glaciers are due to the 8bit texture resolution, emphasized by the cheapskate ambient occlusion operator. I still have to integrate support for 16bit input files (and not using the HTML Canvas API) and floating point textures.

2026-08-08 11:26:28 UTC

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Just for (my own) future reference: A render (downsized from 4k res to 2k, made with the tool linked above) of this favorite area of mine, incl. many of the last remaining glaciers in this part of the Alps...
#DEM #GIS #WebGL #ShaderGraph #Alps #Glacier
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/117/059/642/091/469/777/original/fe2f94caec4c47ac.jpg

2026-08-08 07:43:03 UTC

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Here's a short code snippet I used to convert & chop the massive 44000 x 25000 pixel GeoTIFF DEM file into smaller PNG tiles for easier visualization:
https://gist.github.com/postspectacular/10e2940c4bb3fd706f77c3e65f1b4427
The tool uses the following #ThingUmbrella packages:<li><a href="https://thi.ng/imago:" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no">https://thi.ng/imago:</a> Image processing/compositing pipelines</li><li><a href="https://thi.ng/pixel:" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no">https://thi.ng/pixel:</a> Multi-format integer/float pixel buffers</li><li><a href="https://thi.ng/pixel-io-geotiff:" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no">https://thi.ng/pixel-io-geotiff:</a> GeoTIFF parsing</li><li><a href="https://thi.ng/transducers:" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no">https://thi.ng/transducers:</a> Iteration helpers/transformers</li>
#TypeScript #JavaScript #DEM #GIS #Tiles #Tool
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/117/058/763/629/645/701/original/4640bf25d1bb18a1.png

2026-08-08 07:01:49 UTC

This time with video (hopefully)... I found a 5 meter resolution digital elevation model of a part of the Austrian Alps (Tyrol[1]) and quickly visualized the region around the aforementioned Hintereisferner glacier using my https://shadergraph.thi.ng/ editor. The glacier itself is visible in the bottom left corner of the cropped terrain. The picture I posted earlier[2] was taken just north-east of the valley confluence nearest to the glacier tongue. Neighboring Kesselwandferner and Gepatschferner (the largest of the remaining glaciers in the Eastern Alps) are visible too...
If you want to try it with your own DEMs, just drag the image (as PNG) into the browser window, then create shader nodes: Normal map, Ambient Occlusion, Bump and Multiply (and set respective inputs for each node/pass)
[1] https://www.tirol.gv.at/sicherheit/geoinformationen-karten/freie-laserscandaten-und-orthofotos/
[2] https://mastodon.thi.ng/@toxi/117054172520918467
#ThingUmbrella #WebGL #ShaderGraph #DEM #GIS #Terrain #Glacier #Tyrol
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/117/058/601/413/055/795/original/767d49ac7124930e.mp4

2026-08-03 11:02:49 UTC

RE: https://mastodon.thi.ng/@toxi/117030783136853538
Being given a 100% AI generated score for your own mental work hurts. It also hurts because the result is presented as absolute and undeniable, with no path for appeal or inspection. A decision presented as a black-box score with no insights revealed how the score has been computed or the specific reasons/patterns which triggered "detection" to begin with[1]... A score produced by a third party which inserted itself as middleman in the communication flow between writers and readers and claims authority and arbiter status over deciding what is slop and what is not. Another layer of statistical machine learning to detect patterns/anomalies of statistical means of language generation...
In this specific case, I don't really care too much what these tools say. I know what I wrote and rewrote, over hours, and to the best of my ability (as non-native English speaker).
The myth of computational objectivity prevails. For decades it was about blind belief in algorithms, now shifted to AI models. The wider public and most decision makers neither seem to understand the difference, nor do they care about the inherent dangers. Pragmatism at all costs. The genie is out and can't be put back. The problems (if acknowledged at all) are always treated as temporary minor hurdles rather than fundamental systemic issues.
It's upsetting how Little Britain's "Computer Says No"[2] attitude and blind outsourcing of black-box classification and decision-making to machines has already been so extremely normalized and is impacting more and more of our lives, for many people/minorities in far more serious and outright deadly ways... 😭
[1] Having worked with many forms of machine learning myself, I know first hand that lack of detailed observability has been plaguing ML disciplines for decades. I think these are also some of the most worrisome aspects of more widely deploying LLM affine tech. Whilst some minor progress has been made, these efforts are severely challenged and thwarted by the exponentially growing model sizes, architectural complexity and distributed nature of agents.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_says_no
#AI #AIDetection #DecisionMaking
#note1as2…y68s

2026-08-03 09:07:13 UTC

Am I an LLM? Just out of interest, I checked different variations of a piece of my very own writing I've done this weekend with GPTZero, and each time it says it's **100% AI generated**, literally for every single sentence...
Such great motivation on a Monday AM! 😭
#Writing #LLM #AIDetection

2026-07-31 10:55:38 UTC

Reminder: Just as with Age ID and Chat Control legislation justifications, the AI build out, the price gauging of memory, storage (and CPU/GPU/SOCs too), the emerging hardware leasing & subscription models — all this is not just driven by generative AI in the form of chatbots, media generators, automation, job replacements, FOMO stories and other "obvious" reasons repeated ad infinitum by CEOs and in the media...
The only way these industry shifts and largest tech investments ever done make any sense (even in the face of the projected severe negative financial returns) is to consider them part of a larger, class-political project of comprehensively centralizing, monitoring/surveilling, renting out, drip-feeding and otherwise controlling future compute resources and access to them. This includes not only pure computation resources, but equally all communication, data & media produced, processed, stored or consumed via these infrastructures. Personal computing is being pushed out and with it privacy and autonomy over your own compute & media resources are going too...
Governments which have been vapidly talking for decades about "Digitization" (and utterly failing) are jumping on rolling out low quality, "good enough" AI services mostly aimed at the working class, allowing govts to maintain existing austerity programs, whilst claiming to be innovative, cutting costs (by pumping billions into overpriced consultancy contracts) and reducing "red tape" (i.e. mostly regulation which was actually beneficial or protecting the population & environment).
**The return on these investments is not financial, but mostly political!**
> As an aside: I see the biggest threads to the fediverse, as self-owned, self-hosted & self-moderated communication space, are not AI bots, nazis or bigtech-owned platforms, but price explosions of the required (and mostly rented) compute infrastructure. In the near future, these ongoing price increases will force more communities to look for alternatives, which will slowly erode this space[1]... Solidarity and crowdfunding are some ways to combat that, but I fear they will only go that far (i.e. not far enough)...
So even when the current AI bubble bursts, this built-up centralized digital architecture will be a key pillar for any authoritarian government (the general trajectory every country is seemingly on, at current...), run in collaboration with oligarch operators whose purposes are served even more so by said infrastructure. At the very least these data centers will be used for vastly increased state surveillance (machine learning hardware/software is uniquely suited for these use cases), at worst to disenfranchise, prosecute & deny entire demographics...
I'd very much like to stand corrected with this, but there are a no publicly available hints to suggest anything drastically different to happen, not with the current breed of politicians and money in play... At least in the EU, all the talk about Digital Sovereignty already has made it clear that it's mostly about building parallel infrastructure to US big tech, but with the exact same anti-democratic bias, justifications, funding structures and neglect of any climate/social considerations. 30 billion Euro investments to create "AI giga factories" and an "AI continent"[2]. Data centers operated by goody, goody European billionaires rather than evil US based ones... How novel and how sovereign!
[1] Related to that I also see the resource-hungry and extremely chatty nature of the ActivityPub protocol and Mastodon itself as primary implementation as large weak points... In order for the fediverse to survive for longer (for the above stated reasons), I think some drastic reconsiderations of existing design decisions are required to achieve a much lower computational footprint & running costs (e.g. storage requirements, consolidation of messages, reducing traffic & worker effort, esp. important for larger accounts or communities etc.)
[2] https://mastodon.thi.ng/@toxi/117010071572799616
#AI #Politics #PersonalComputing #DigitalSovereignty #LongRead

2026-07-24 11:50:57 UTC

Lunch Break (2026)
(High alpine carpentry, today a month ago at Breslauer Hütte... Not the worst of work places one can imagine...)
#LandscapePhotography #Photography #Alps #Mountains
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/116/974/803/751/725/516/original/8bca849e33fa251e.jpg

2026-07-23 09:35:12 UTC

Triggered (in good way) by a recent comment by @npub1t2w…2qkr, AI music DJs be like...
(...or the end state of performances once the appearance of an act/skill has become more important than the act/skill itself)
#SocietyOfTheSpectacle
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/116/968/607/665/218/338/original/db72e3733ae17e88.mp4

2026-07-21 09:02:32 UTC

RE: https://mastodon.thi.ng/@toxi/116946178813103516
One of the worst (but by far not the worst) effects of genAI as technology: Seeding doubt & distrust in the last remaining parts of shared reality and in people's creativity or their skills... So much brain rot and cognitive bias!
Having just spent half a day in the darkroom yesterday, mixing chems, preparing emulsions, test strips, refining tone curves, making prints, experimenting with toners and sharing some work-in-progress shots — this morning I was waking up to an accusation that I keep publishing AI generated images (this time supposedly the one below) and not label or CW them as such. WTF! So much for trying to hone an actual wetware skill/craft...
Apart from feeling pretty offended by that comment, I wonder how are makers supposed to address these insinuations? How many people are already sharing these doubts and how do they change perception and value/role of art in general? Do we need to document our process in ever greater detail as some form of "certificate of authenticity"? I feel the urge to upload more timelapses of my processing (analog and digital) or even RAW camera files to prove AI-free workflow or source materials... Some receipts are here (but also in my TL):
https://makertube.net/c/noircountry/videos
For my color photography, my editing is purposefully very lightweight and mostly limited to adjusting levels, minor color adjustments (e.g. for shots taken with polarization filter), cropping, resizing with sharpening (unsharp masking or Lanczos kernel). Since some of my older lenses have auto-focus issues, I use an old version of Topaz for denoising/sharpening, but only rarely and as subtly as possible. For B&W there's usually more layered/refined level/contrast editing & some masking... In general my mantra is to "get it (mostly) right in camera" and also have written about this previously:
https://mastodon.thi.ng/@toxi/116635793094198883
#AI #Photography #Darkroom #PrintMaking #FineArt
#note1wa0…l4y6

2026-07-19 10:31:14 UTC

Fruits Of Labor (Of Love)
(A 10x8" silver chloride print I made last night of a scene captured in the Bernina Range in 2024, which reminded me of 18th century landscape painting...)
#SilentSunday #LandscapePhotography #Photography #BlackAndWhite #FineArt
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/116/946/178/714/895/403/original/8621b7a0677fe9ee.jpg

2026-07-18 16:56:00 UTC

Two small new prints from this afternoon, this time not Kallitype but contact printing on silver chloride FB paper, developed with Adox MCC. The increase in depth and detail is just wonderful and the feel of the final results an instant throwback to my early darkroom adventures ~40 years ago... 😍
The pictures are of two of my favorite places in recent years. Larger prints will be available for purchase in September.
#AltProcess #AnalogPhotography #DarkroomPrint #BlackAndWhite #LandscapePhotography #Photography #FineArt
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/116/942/029/414/458/918/original/db2fe12947a93407.jpg

2026-07-08 11:23:25 UTC

RE: https://front-end.social/@stephaniewalter/116883233383073706
"When was the last time... you thought about something for an entire hour? Like nobody bothered you and you had an idea and you sat for an hour and thought about it. How about for a whole day? Does everybody remember the last time they sat and thought about something for a whole day? How about over a course of a month? You had something you were working on and obviously, not spending all the time every day when you started thinking for a month. Or a year? These are tremendously valuable moments if you get to have them at all. I consider myself extremely lucky to have had the ability to think about probably three different things for a year or more." — Rich Hickey (2010)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc
#RichHickey #Clojure #ProblemSolving
#note1req…8nft

2026-07-07 11:47:08 UTC

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Thank you, Tim! We really need to have that call we were talking about! :) I fully concur with all you said and esp. your landscape-framing of algorithmic art is also very close to how describe it sometimes... 🤩
Re: Effort - I agree here too, and it's precisely me defending that word/concept which has previously gotten me into boiling water and resulted in complete alienation & traumatic experiences due to reactions from former peers/community. Effort to me doesn't mean necessarily time involvement (though it's usually unavoidable), but mostly to approach things with a level of care, genuine interest and deep engagement with what you're doing or trying to achieve. But the community consensus was instead that insisting on caring about these things is mostly seen as gate keeping or trying to block the "democratization of art making", blah blah...
These things/developments/behaviors are also partially encouraged by a general ignorance and technophobia in the art world. Novelty, nepotism, storytelling and clever post-rationalizations are often all what matters there. Skills/effort are not very bankable. The NFT period has very clearly shown that the most trivial/inane stuff has turned out to be most successful and in-demand, and it really has only gotten worse since...
For the past few months, I can't stop thinking about the issues raised in this fantastic Dutch article too, also in regards to algorithmic art:
Art as a fair: how rich techbros influence the art world with their preference for easy-going spectacle
https://archive.ph/A9riU
#Art #AlgorithmicArt

2026-07-07 08:56:05 UTC

RE: https://sunny.garden/@BlueAppaloosa/116875628493477254
Not as contradiction to the below in any way, but simply as personal addendum: I think the precondition for great art is maybe not so much about having to suffer (a spectrum in any way), as it is about having lived life (ups & downs) and having something deeper to say, to share/convey, even in the most abstract/indirect way. Not even a message per se, but a feeling, experience, an observation, insight, lesson, place or encounter, real or imagined, a concept or (thought) experiment, relationship, principle, a quality... People who've gone through some form of self-discovery, not necessarily suffering, tend to have a large(r) reservoir of such influences (incl. trauma) and are using art to process/express them, maybe also in an attempt to (re)connect/share with others. I don't know if that makes it "better" art (highly subjective and context sensitive in any way), but to me it's often noticeably different, more honest, meaningful and more appreciated than "art for art's sake" or "art for money's sake"... Even as a viewer/listener, engaging with other people's art (and knowing more about how it came to be) can also be highly therapeutic (and educational) in itself. I find people here (incl. myself) are not making best use of these opportunities (e.g. to connect with other artists here)...
(Ps. I still find it both sad and odd, there are so few decent conversations about art & process related topics on Mastodon, at least not in my TL. Engagement with my own art posts (incl. photography) here seems to be (with exceptions) mostly limited to likes, maybe a handful of boosts (if lucky) and small talk (which I'm very bad at 😩)... boosting in general seems to have taken a massive dip...)

2026-07-05 20:28:18 UTC

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Btw. Here's the aforementioned beautiful scene from "Smoke" about photographing the same view of a street corner thousands of time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8WmkAh2nXE
#Photography #Cinema #TimeFade

2026-07-04 16:17:48 UTC

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More about the larger project:
In a moving key scene of the 1995 film "Smoke", William Hurt and Harvey Keitel are browsing through photo albums of thousands of images taken by Harvey's character of the same view of a street corner, every morning at 8am. Their conversation is pondering the more permanent nature of a place itself vs the daily flux and ephemeralness of individual lives inhabiting it, incl. accidental snapshots of loved ones (like William's character's wife), who passed away meanwhile...
During my London years, for 10 years I worked thousands of days on a bench in Highgate Woods, creating some of my best work there. When I found that bench, perfectly located, I too was reminded of Castaneda's concept of "finding your spot", a place which so strongly resonates with you, that you immediately recognize it when you find it. As Harvey Keitel's Auggie character in "Smoke", I too felt a strong desire to document this place each day I went there to work.
Whilst I still have to properly process these thousands of images, I found that my recent life near the Alps and my rekindled passion for vintage photography processes, offers unique opportunities to extend this time horizon and create comparisons which document longer term changes humans have done to places, directly and indirectly, sometimes subtle, oftentimes quite shocking.
The approach I'm taking with this project is partially only possible due to the long history of tourism in the Alps. Because of that, there're copious amounts of research material available as reference for reconstruction/restaging: vintage postcards, photographs, brochures, maps etc.
This series will not only focus on mountains or glaciers, but also the urbanization (extreme in some cases) of alpine settlements/communities and their transformation into tourism hotspots, driving massive infrastructure projects to support these new demands and causing widespread changes to surrounding landscapes.
If you have any interesting places to propose, please do get in touch! Thank you! 🙏
#Timefade #LandscapePhotography #Photography #Art #History #Environment #Alps #Mountains

2026-07-04 16:17:04 UTC

New long term photography project: Timefade — prints and animations documenting alpine places and their changes over decades or a century.
First place completed: Breslauer Hütte and the glaciers of the Gurgler Range. Two images from the same location, separated by 103 years: 1923 and 2026.
The hut was built in 1882 and has undergone several restorations and extensions. The major peaks from left to right: Großer Ramolkogel, Hinterer Spiegelkogel, Firmisanschneide, Schalfkogel, all between 3400-3550m
The shrinkage of the glaciers in this view might seem rather small for a time span of a century, but it's worth remembering that most of the volume losses have only been during the past 25-50 years and the melting process itself is exponential and accelerating... Secondly, for a size/scale reference: On the rightmost glacier (Diem-Ferner), the elevation difference between the top edge of the side moraine and the glacier creek is now >100 meters (more than a 30 storey building)...
It might only be two photos (some more are already in progress), but production involved several weeks of library research (see below) of suitable locations and images, feasibility studies on old & current maps trying to determine photo spots, lenses and viewing angles from where the original pictures were taken, travel and hiking logistics, then taking dozens of photos from different candidate points in situ. Back home after the shoot: Testing different candidate images for best match/alignment potential, tweaking and fine tuning their perspectives, video editing...
Image credits:
The 1923 photograph (author unknown) is from the AKON vintage postcard collection of the Österreichische National Bibliothek: https://akon.onb.ac.at/#id=AKON_AK097_437
The 2026 photograph is by me, taken 24/06/2026 (for future reference)
More about the larger project in the thread below...
#Timefade #LandscapePhotography #Photography #Art #History #Alps #Mountains #Urbanism #Environment #ClimateChange
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/116/862/603/835/050/102/original/b085724c455ac194.mp4

2026-06-23 06:30:04 UTC

Non-uniform distribution
(@npub1hkl…9agh, please help! 😂)
Also, if you look closely, I'm not sure if these are tadpoles of two species... Are the larger grayish ones going to be toads, or maybe just older?
#TextureTuesday #NaturePhotography #Abstract #Biology #Tadpoles
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/116/795/972/583/637/232/original/f1cf9d374db411f0.jpg

2026-06-22 13:20:01 UTC

Summer solstice 2026, last night, ten minutes past sunset... on our way back from the very end of the valley.
#MountainMonday #LandscapePhotography #Video #Alps #Mountains #Lake #SummerSolstice
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/116/793/571/505/275/335/original/9b01f8629d361a29.mp4

2026-06-20 07:52:35 UTC

For some it's an ego surfing metric, for others an indicator how much of their published material/output was present in the training datasets of LLMs and now is encoded in their model weights...
https://intheweights.com/
"This site queries all models with something like "Who is ? Give up to 10 results, each with a short description and confidence." We then cluster similar descriptions together and assign a strength score. Your strength score is an average of how strongly each model recognized you, plus a bonus for how many models recognized you."
More about the process:
https://intheweights.com/about
(via https://aoir.social/@aram/116778147377398743)
#AI #LLM
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/116/781/347/920/934/692/original/18bd49cf33a37479.png

2026-06-16 19:58:41 UTC

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I've uninstalled any Mastodon mobile apps and been using https://phanpy.social in Firefox for the past year or so. Works just as well and I love the UI and features it has...

2026-06-14 08:33:55 UTC

Last Night's Dinner By The Lakeside
#SilentSunday #LandscapePhotography #Alps #Mountains #Lake
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/116/747/536/526/153/725/original/caf09e1d7da07e88.jpg

2026-06-06 18:52:31 UTC

RE: https://eldritch.cafe/@VioB/116704420025821004
File under: Ignorance (of other cultures/languages) is bliss... always has been
#note19w6…nt65

2026-06-04 11:45:15 UTC

A/B testing latest refinements (more depth, better details in clouds/highlights and contrast in mid tones). First image is the new version. Next stop double size, 14x10"...
#AltProcess #Kallitype #LandscapePhotography #Photography #BlackAndWhite #NoirCountry #Dolomites #DarkroomPrint #PrintMaking
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/116/691/665/820/422/493/original/7f1dce06ee8e0328.jpg
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/116/691/665/820/600/453/original/4834e28c7feb1d43.jpg

2026-06-03 09:31:32 UTC

Real & simulated viscous fingering: Accidentally printed a digital negative on the wrong (non-absorbent) side of the transparency film, then folded it and the thick layer of ink produced this beautiful effect of branching traces. The two color prints in the back (soon also available for purchase) are variations of this project below, for which I've been simulating that effect via code...
https://mastodon.thi.ng/@toxi/115979123468886067
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saffman%E2%80%93Taylor_instability
#Fluidsim #FluidDynamics #Inkjet #DigitalNegative #PrintMaking
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/116/685/477/721/410/526/original/668070a4a3c6573f.jpg

2026-05-29 12:48:07 UTC

On the way to Roßgundscharte (2021)
#FootpathFriday #LandscapePhotography #BlackAndWhite #Photography #Alps #Mountains #Hiking
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/116/657/939/186/788/159/original/c2a6c6f156cca0d0.jpg

2026-05-27 12:24:17 UTC

Witness the fitness! Still one of the finest music videos ever made:
Roots Manuva — Witness (1 Hope) (2001)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltP7L16A8Hs
#Music4Coding #RootsManuva #BigDada #NinjaTune

2026-05-27 10:02:33 UTC

Ed Zitron's new mega piece "Revenge of The Business Idiot":
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-revenge-of-the-business-idiot/
Some choice nuggets & quotes:
"LLMs impress the writers who do not want to write, the coders who don’t want to code, the researchers who don’t want to research, and the lawyers that don’t want to actually understand case law. Those that desperately tell you how powerful AI is and that you simply must use it are looking for you to validate their own laziness or distaste for effort, and those who are impressed with LLMs’ outputs tend to be people with low standards."
"The aggression with which AI boosters and executives act toward those who aren’t impressed suggests a genuine intellectual and moral weakness. Nobody who’s this insistent, aggressive and violative with their language of “it’s here and if you don’t adopt it you’re stupid and dead” has ever been right about anything. Nobody this desperate, insistent and forceful has ever had good intentions, good vibes or brought good omens — they are always bearers of some kind of con."
"Only an economy oriented around coveting and coddling losers would have let AI get this far. Every single story about AI has to either directly gloss over the obvious financial and technological issues or start speaking in the kinds of vague theoreticals reserved for cults and multi-level marketing scams."
"CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis because they’re sufficiently distant from the last mile of work that still has to happen to generate most value with AI." — Aaron Levie, CEO of Box
#NoAI

2026-05-27 07:30:11 UTC

Globe
(Trollius, Trollblume, Ranunculaceae)
#BloomScrolling #NaturePhotography #Photography #Macro #Flower
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/116/645/364/379/801/625/original/02239bc4684802b0.jpg

2026-05-26 09:24:23 UTC

Decades Of Biopatina
Layers upon layers, signs/patterns of struggle, opportunism, reaction diffusion, on the walls of a 150 year old building complex in the mountains...
#TextureTuesday #NaturePhotography #Macro #Fungi #Mould #Texture #Abstract
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/116/640/150/988/908/215/original/296dec22fcb24c87.jpg
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/116/640/142/965/913/587/original/e8fd7f724dbdd744.jpg
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/116/640/151/123/600/636/original/3926e37aaf4197f1.jpg
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/116/640/142/998/120/869/original/6c9dbace660f8277.jpg

2026-05-15 10:19:22 UTC

Released as a single humongous monolithic pull request within a week since opening, the kind of ad-hoc, uncoordinated, trigger-happy, just-because-we-can attitude of the #Bun "LLM Rust rewrite" is so symbolic of the cultural shift many people & orgs are undergoing, where their focus has moved almost exclusively to quantity & speed-to-market (aka "higher productivity"), completely shoving aside long-term goals and considerations, incl. design principles/strategies, maintainability, safety, but also so many social aspects (e.g. organically grown community/staff, organizational skills/knowledge/understanding, much of it tacit, sometimes built up over decades), consideration of downstream effects, compatibility/composability, costs (not just your own) etc. All of these things, this loss of culture, seems to be treated as easily sacrificable third-class factors, or which are simply assumed to be automatable (and therefore replaceable, unnecessary) in the new mindset. It's uncanny!
The engine can't/mustn't be slowed or halted, and it needs more fodder! Only with maximum speed can we accelerate it enough to jump over the coming chasm, straight into the singularity...
In these developments, I too see very strong parallels to a similar goldrush mindset which emerged during the NFT years and has changed digital/algorithmic/generative art for years to come, and which has similarly 180° reorientated the focus, work & value systems of many artists/peers...
#OpenSource #Culture #AlgorithmicArt #GenerativeArt

2026-05-13 13:00:56 UTC

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Fully agree! Can only see this challenge happening via some form of self-inflicted "correction" trigger, e.g. circular financing schemes running out of steam, increased risk or unwillingness/inability to fully commission hyperscale data centers, e.g. see Microsoft's challenges in Kenya and general DC cancellations in US... It seems things are moving (more)...
https://thekenyatimes.com/world-news/microsoft-ke-data-center/
https://tech-insider.org/us-ai-data-center-delays-cancellations-7gw-capacity-crisis-2026/

2026-05-13 11:57:59 UTC

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That's be great, but as long as AI is the only perceived growth engine left running, I'm not sure there's political will for this (anywhere) to throw any spanners into its more widespread adoption...

2026-05-13 10:13:43 UTC

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Ok, I grant that direct political polls using this method are probably some ways out, but indirectly using simulated polls to easier support a company's position/strategy to then use as tool for lobbying purposes to impact/nudge policies isn't that far fetched at all... Regulators & politicians are picking up these polls and using them (in part) for decision making, just as is done already. But the danger here is that these polls do not represent actual people's opinions, and that all sorts of subtle biases can be introduced via agent modeling/prompting, even more so than via clever formulation and framing of questions in traditional polls (plus let's not forget all the pretrained biases in the LLM corpus). The proposed approach is much more open for increased gaming & manipulation, akin to the impact dangers of Polymarkets on policy making & insider trading etc. Conceptually, this simulated approach also fully embraces the idea of intersectional demographic groups only exhibiting "hive mind" behaviors, maybe with a modeled x% contrarian rate...

2026-05-13 08:11:45 UTC

Simulated opinion polls to drive public policy — what could possibly go wrong!
In the name of saving costs and producing more polls (i.e. the double benefit of increased efficiency AND productivity), statistical truth (traditional polls) is being replaced with its derivative, producing statistical insights via a second layer of statistics and agents simulating known, pretrained demographic behaviors & preferences, instead of interviewing actual people. Yay!
It seems they're blindly following Wheeler’s Law, i.e. "All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection" and ignoring the corollary: "...except for the problem of too many layers of indirection."
Queue future presidential approval ratings based on a simulated population of agents... Too dystopian?!
https://ngmx.com/@pathunstrom/116565726550598652
#LLM #AI #Gallup #Statistics #Poll

2026-05-11 12:18:21 UTC

RE: https://swiss.social/@lugidani/116555176274067802
The Swiss are still doing better in that respect than many other developed countries, incl. Germany yesterday:
https://overshoot.footprintnetwork.org/newsroom/country-overshoot-days/
#Climate #Degrowth #OvershootDay
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/116/555/900/488/484/512/original/c49bd725b681df96.jpg
#note1kqv…vp0j

2026-05-10 09:22:32 UTC

The Mountains Flowed Before Him (2026)
(Given a large enough time scale, these mountains would be almost like waves...)
#SilentSunday #LandscapePhotography #NaturePhotography #BlackAndWhite #NoirCountry #Alps #Mountains #Hiking
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/116/549/546/864/533/260/original/c67a01038f12affd.jpg

2026-05-06 21:26:57 UTC

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I always felt that the "design" parts of a generative design workflow are both very direct (e.g. in terms of selecting/layering certain algorithms, data structures and other invariants), but that other design aspects are also very, very indirect. For the latter, I'd include first identifying, then selecting and refining possible parameters, their value ranges/resolution, their constraints and relationships with other params... Almost every project (of mine) also seems to go though the same trajectory of me initially adding a ton of params to quickly explore the overall shape of the possible design space and identify interesting "hotspots" (i.e. param combos where the system is producing interestingness™ :), only then to iteratively reduce the number of params again, eliminating/merging them or making them more conditional upon others, with fewer possible values etc. This can only be done in a feedback loop, letting the system produce new outputs, mapping out the variations and then making necessary changes, rinse and repeat... So in this iterative workflow "curation" has always been a fixed part of the overall design process. From what I've read about LLM model creation, their process is similar in principle, only that params (not just model weights) are usually undergoing a form of reinforcement learning and human evaluation of outputs is outsourced to thousands of workers helping to fine-tune the model parameters and training data (being a sampling process, it's also a form of curation).
The more params a generative system has, the harder it becomes to control and to predict or constrain the boundaries of its n-dimensional parameter space. Exponentially so. And especially so, once params are made interdependent and/or if temporal feedback/memory/relationships are thrown into the mix, all of which LLMs do fundamentally...

2026-05-06 19:11:41 UTC

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Not barging into your interesting thread any further, just wanted to point to similar supplementary points made here (re: these models and outputs being designed implicitly and explicitly [via chosen analysis/training/refinement methods/processes and source selections]):
https://mastodon.thi.ng/@toxi/116527449262566457

2026-05-05 11:31:47 UTC

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Yeah, I saw that meter, just found it strange that this setup would take this long and doesn't saturate fully... Wishing you best of luck figuring it out!

2026-05-05 08:24:00 UTC

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Do you know the wavelength of your UV light? If your lows aren't getting dark enough in such a long time, it might indicate your UV light's wavelength isn't optimal. 365nm is supposedly best, but I found it harder to find decent options. So mine are 385nm (40W) and 395nm (200W) and the corresponding exposure times and distances are only: ~1:45min (4 inch) and ~2:40min (16-20 inch). For the latter, I initially also used a sheet of paper to diffuse the light more (for larger prints), but that extended the exposure time to ~17mins for not any noticeable difference...
(Btw. This is all for kallitype, but should equally apply for salt)
#AltProcess #Kallitype #SaltPrint #UVLight

2026-05-04 16:14:00 UTC

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By any chance, is that the flow field near Climber's Bivouac on the south side (Parmigan trail or so)? If so, oh man, memories... 🥹 That's as far as I got on a short Friday afternoon hike 8 years ago, this month! Wonderful area and such a brutal contrast at the edge of the lava and the surrounding forest... Felt like a completely different mountain than on the north side!

2026-05-03 06:55:04 UTC

Churfirsten
(View from the Alpstein. Celebrating my bday in one of my favorite places... 🤩)
#SilentSunday #LandscapePhotography #NaturePhotography #Alps #Mountains #Switzerland
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/116/509/330/848/179/181/original/fe4c5804e4bd89a1.jpg

2026-04-04 13:29:19 UTC

I find a form of active de-computing is one of the best ways to cope with the current exceeding world pain exhaustion & LLM brain drain around, i.e. doing more things offline, with your hands/body, being more present in your world, getting into crafts/materials, creating/fixing/mending things and sharing your lessons learned with others (in that sense quite in the spirit of open source culture).
To some this is may be just another form of entitled escapism, though I see it as active skill building and learning by doing, connecting with people who're still finding and creating (not just) beauty in the physical world, preserving/expanding older skills, methods & techniques, showing how to actively & creatively navigate, work with and improvise with the hard limitations imposed by chosen materials/resources, processes, situations or environments, and a form of creation which doesn't rely on exabytes of harvested data and other planet-scale resource guzzling infrastructure to realize one's ideas.
(Aside: I also think this is very much part of the appeal of "classic" [non-LLM based] generative/algorithmic design & art approaches, but also #RetroComputing and #FantasyConsoles...)
Anyhow, I think this stunning ceramics project/sculpture/vase is a great example...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6LJzTaQJx4
Of course, my generative artist/designer/programmer mind immediately goes into deconstruction mode, imagining how I'd approach something like this in code form (e.g. via volumetric modeling) and also how to manifest it physically (3d clay printing or maybe paper craft with a cricut[1]). I don't doubt that one day soonish a robot arm will be able to perform or exceed this kind of finesse, but I also think, this kind of automation just like with LLMs, is never the point of making art with your hands, other than making a point that it's now possible to have a machine create such detailed simulacra. It's the same one way road to Uncanny Valley as chasing 3D realism in game dev, with ever more resources required for ever diminishing returns... Maybe that in itself will become a useful measure/marker and status symbol for the trillionaire class.
Building open worlds of endless unspoiled forests made of ultra high-res scans in UE5, whilst the world is burning down though climate change and war. Always be chasing the end of the road, instead of enjoying the journey, the act itself. Only valuing final results without ever appreciating (or even caring about) the process to get there. Pure consumption...
Isn't it interesting, all the thoughts a "simple" ceramics sculpture can trigger?
#WeekendWriting #Craft #Art #ArtMaking #Ceramics #LearningByDoing

2026-04-01 10:34:47 UTC

Claude Code source leak reveals how much info Anthropic can hoover up about you and your system
"Anthropic's Claude Code lacks the persistent kernel access of a rootkit. But an analysis of its code shows that the agent can exercise far more control over people's computers than even the most clear-eyed reader of contractual terms might suspect. It retains lots of your data and is even willing to hide its authorship from open-source projects that reject AI."
https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/01/claude_code_source_leak_privacy_nightmare/
#AI #InfoSec

2026-03-28 10:14:34 UTC

Good concise overview of #Meshtastic vs #Meshcore and how to choose when to use which one...
https://www.seeedstudio.com/blog/2026/03/23/meshcore-vs-meshtastic/

2026-03-14 11:49:27 UTC

Reading through Anthropic's official repo for giving agents various "super skills"[1]... There's an "algorithmic art" skill and the instructions are explicitly encouraging pure deception as one of the key "critical guidelines":
"The philosophy MUST stress multiple times that the final algorithm should appear as though it took countless hours to develop, was refined with care, and comes from someone at the absolute top of their field. This framing is essential - repeat phrases like "meticulously crafted algorithm," "the product of deep computational expertise," "painstaking optimization," "master-level implementation.""
https://github.com/anthropics/skills/blob/main/skills/algorithmic-art/SKILL.md
For someone who's been working in this field for almost 30 years, this "skills.md" file is just the worst... and so far off the mark! 🤮
Touch some effing grass, Anthropic (and all boosters)! How can so many people think this approach is _the_ future? The map is not the terrain...
[1] Alone the premise of this repo is pure comedy gold and pure sadness in equal measures!
#AlgorithmicArt #GenerativeArt #NoAI #Agents #Deception

2026-03-05 14:31:06 UTC

With Microslop having deprecated the Intellicode auto-completion extension in #VSCode and sooner or later forcing everyone to use cloud-based #Copilot instead, are there any other #TypeScript users who're not interested in switching to Copilot and if so what non-AI based alternatives are you seeing/using? I'm very tempted going back to using Emacs, but it's been years and I've never used TypeScript with it. Grateful for any advice or insights (not limited to Emacs only)!

2026-02-22 11:16:30 UTC

RE: https://mastodon.social/@andrewnez/116108709896510035
"When a whale dies in the open ocean, its carcass sinks to the abyssal floor and becomes an ecosystem. Marine biologists call this a whale fall, and the body sustains life in three overlapping stages: mobile scavengers strip the soft tissue over months, enrichment opportunists colonise the bones and surrounding sediment for years, and chemosynthetic bacteria feed on the skeleton itself for decades, converting the lipids stored in bone into energy that supports entire communities of specialised organisms. A single whale fall can sustain life on an otherwise barren ocean floor for fifty years."
#note1dct…5vp4

2026-02-21 22:07:54 UTC

Morteratsch and the majestic Bernina range in full glory 🤩
Yes! That's what I'm talking about... Reprint was successful and much improved! Tweaked negative, new developer mix & weaker toner for more neutral grays. Also built an interim solution/contraption (involving 6kg of books as weight) to ensure the contact print is sharp everywhere...
As for the scene in the image: These are the highest mountains of the central eastern Alps (Biz Bernina on the right is 4048m, the others are all similar). Alone the last vertical ice fall section is ~1000 meters tall... Yet these glaciers are losing length & volume quickly (between 10-30 meters every year, trend accelerating...) The moraine line (approx. 200 meters above the valley bottom on the left slope shows the previous volume of the main glacier, which already has lost over 3km in length over the past century 😢
#AltProcess #Kallitype #PrintMaking #LandscapePhotography #BlackAndWhite #NoirCountry #Glacier #Switzerland #Hiking #ClimateChange
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/116/110/896/135/723/362/original/394c6b400fef1701.jpg

2026-02-02 21:47:59 UTC

Not quite groundhogs (for groundhog day), but cute hogs nonetheless...
#MonochromeMonday #NaturePhotography #BlackAndWhite #NoirCountry
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/116/003/233/929/968/083/original/20b9f4adbda0763e.jpg

2026-01-21 15:09:28 UTC

Unhinged doesn't even cut it anymore... This speech & rhetoric needs a superlative to describe it... sheer brain rot! And yet, instead of a group walk out, a standing ovation at the end... unbelievable!

2025-12-31 20:01:59 UTC

The last light of 2025....
(...is giving me big hopes for 2026, against all odds!)
#LandscapePhotography #Sunset #Alps #Mountains #HNY2026
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/115/815/960/961/179/590/original/ef18cb674c93178c.jpg

2025-12-27 11:24:12 UTC

Came across this 2010 blog post about mindfulness in computing and so much of these behaviors have only intensified to new extremes with LLM usage. So much so that not only is the process of software creation being quickly supplanted by prompts and (stochastic) "search" assemblies, but more generally the kind of mindfulness talked about in the post (here meaning thinking through & solving a problem yourself[1]) is now being openly discouraged by industry and forcefully delegated out to a fuzzy pattern-match search megastructure, producing equally fuzzy results, uncaring of correctness or consequences[2] and requiring more resources than anything else ever built, regardless of problem scope/complexity.
Mindlessness.
Mindnumbness.
https://nf.wh3rd.net/space/posts/2010/08/the-invaluable-trait-of-mindfulness.html
"Later on, I thought about the strange thing that happened when I’d pulled out my phone. A modern smartphone is an impressive computer. My Nexus One is more powerful than my state-of-the-art desktop PC was 10 years ago, and is perfectly capable of factorizing a small number. But I didn’t ask it to. Instead, I told it to make a request that traversed a mobile network (comprised of tens of computers or routers), the open internet (20-50 computers), and into Google’s search infrastructure (thousands). There, in vast indexes, a reference was found to a site that could answer my question. The page at WikiAnswers clearly states “The factors of 91 are 1, 7, 13, and 91.” [...]
My request directly invoked the resources of thousands of computers, and indirectly used the energies of at least two other human beings (plus their supporting infrastructure). All to answer a question that could have been solved by my 8-bit ZX Spectrum (circa 1983) in the blink of an eye, or, simpler still, by thinking about it slightly longer than I had bothered to. I had to laugh at the absurdity of it all.
We do stuff like this with technology all the time. By its very nature, technology makes it easy to solve trivial problems, even we don’t arrive at the solution by the most efficient (or reliable) means. A solution that works is, more often than not, good enough. Until it isn’t.
A poor algorithm will go unnoticed as long as it is fast enough to run within the available resources. Too often in this industry hardware is used to solve software problems."
[1] This also implies paying attention to resource & infrastructure usage required
[2] Limited Liability Machines: https://social.coop/@shauna/115787899531998860
#AI #LLM #Mindfulness #FrugalComputing

2025-12-14 15:46:49 UTC

Looking for other people here who're interested in analog "alt process" photography (especially Kallitype & salt prints in general) and who are also making their own prints. There used to be a few more such people in my TL, but they all seem to have vanished or stopped posting in the past year, and generally it feels there's precious little interest in this topic on Mastodon... (I too have a feeling, either my own photography went drastically downhill over the past 3-4 months or people in my circles are just less and less interested in it, or maybe don't get to see it all... Hello self-doubt! 😩)
Anyhow, if you are interested in these topics, please like or boost so I can follow back! Much appreciated! It's very hard to find peers in such niche topics whilst on a tiny single user instance...
Ps. Also, if not Mastodon, any other communities/forums you might be able to recommend?
#Photography #AltProcess #BlackAndWhite #SaltPrint #PlatinumPrint #GoldPrint #Kallitype #Darkroom #PLPT

2025-11-21 20:39:05 UTC

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For the past year or so I've been mostly offline two days a week and even on other days only really use the phone for @npub1t2q…n4vh, taking pictures and Signal for comms, but if needed can (have to) switch to SMS. Every other app has mobile data turned off by default[1], which also allows me to stay on the cheapest data plan and increased battery life. It was "hard" in the beginning, but really not for very long at all and I think it quickly helped me deepening my sense of the "Big Here"[1], being more present in the moment/place/experience. It's also a very positive subliminal feeling, knowing I'm leaving a lot less direct data traces whilst out and about...
[1] Sometimes need to temporarily switch to online maps for realtime traffic info/detours, but only doing this very rarely...
[2] https://longnow.org/ideas/the-big-here-and-long-now/

2025-11-18 12:57:22 UTC

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...I'd be one of those people to say thanks! 🥹 Do you have a link about this?

2025-11-16 09:00:09 UTC

Sonnenberg ridge entirely living up to its name...
(Made the most of the last warm weather yesterday afternoon to hike/climb along this beautiful long ridge with many cliffs, roped sections, some cute chamois and hardly any people — temporarily felt like late August, yet in two days supposedly snow starting...)
#SilentSunday #LandscapePhotography #Photography #Alps #Mountains #Ridge #Hiking
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/115/558/554/526/668/278/original/f6152ab45956a1c4.jpg
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/115/558/554/521/983/366/original/3de7f882ddbb343d.jpg
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/115/558/554/514/454/501/original/a159b5bd203dc68e.jpg
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/115/558/554/535/716/684/original/ca242b12b4903122.jpg

2025-11-05 09:33:26 UTC

Been updating my personal Mastodon tooling to download and convert my bookmarked toots. Here's how little code is needed to download a single message and convert its HTML content into Markdown, all using these #ThingUmbrella packages:
- https://thi.ng/hiccup: Interop data format (i.e. just nested JS arrays) to encode hierarchical documents
- https://thi.ng/hiccup-html-parse: Parses HTML into hiccup format
- https://thi.ng/hiccup-markdown: Serialize hiccup to Markdown (also includes a Markdown parser to hiccup, but not used here)
- https://thi.ng/zipper: Functional tree editing, manipulation & navigation (here to clean/transform the parsed HTML document)
Edit: Gist version of this example code:
https://gist.github.com/postspectacular/1d7ebdc5a81894c16ab744cb8d25c320
#Mastodon #Markdown #TypeScript #JavaScript #OpenSource
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/115/496/399/951/184/551/original/084463976214c3e5.png

2025-11-02 09:20:44 UTC

First signs of winter, on the first of November...
(The snow cover was actually already more solid earlier this week. That's probably the last of the colors for this year... hard to believe we're here yet again!)
#SilentSunday #LandscapePhotography #NaturePhotography #Alps #Mountains #Autumn #Color
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/115/479/363/123/262/569/original/69bd5d8b38ba29cb.jpg

2025-10-22 13:38:12 UTC

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Another short video of the above waterfall...
#WaterfallWednesday #Waterfall #NaturePhotography #Photography #Alps #Video
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/115/418/090/030/741/238/original/62b97d0eeb84787b.mp4

2025-10-22 12:45:26 UTC

Watching the epic "stuiben" (aka spray) of the water crashing down 160 meters at Stuibenfall (Ötztal, Austria, tallest waterfall in Tyrol)...
#WaterfallWednesday #Waterfall #NaturePhotography #Photography #Alps
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/115/417/882/594/061/313/original/a59fec1bae6634d5.jpg

2025-10-20 11:15:15 UTC

Taking The Red Carpet Path.
(Not often that I find myself in a place exuding such intense natural positive/friendly energy [and beautiful scents]...)
#MountainMonday #LandscapePhotography #NaturePhotography #Alps #Mountains #Heather #Forest #Hiking
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/115/406/203/369/612/154/original/48caa6e45bcbd5c7.jpg

2025-09-17 17:18:30 UTC

#WaterfallWednesday meets #ThrowbackThursday — the view from the narrow bridge inside the stunning/infamous Höllental (Hell's canyon), September 2021, almost to the day... ahhh, memories!
#NaturePhotography #Video #POV #Alps #Canyon #Hiking
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/115/220/775/461/678/204/original/a47daf28e8e07bb8.mp4

2025-09-13 15:24:20 UTC

TIL our garden soil is pH neutral (to my surprise). Beautiful royal blue!
#SoilSamples #Chemistry #Gardening
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/115/197/677/299/320/341/original/166e35ccc12ce408.jpeg

2025-09-12 12:36:11 UTC

Ridges are my thing, 360 views...
(Ammergauer Alps, November 2024)
#FootpathFriday #LandscapePhotography #Alps #Mountains #Hiking #Video #POV
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/115/191/353/748/842/416/original/e7a634337d6b60fc.mp4

2025-09-07 13:41:06 UTC

Having just finished a 1-year consulting contract myself, my own list of restrictions for future jobs/consulting is very similar:
- will not work on adtech/surveillance/weapons
- will not knowingly make world worse and/or abet genocides
- will not be forced to use vibe coding (or will explain cost implications)
- prefer to work in the open
- prefer remote only
- flexible with time zones (last role was for a company in LA, -9h)
https://mastodon.cloud/@AccordionGuy/115159184286484121

2025-08-18 14:52:39 UTC

After a weekend of coding, this is my #MountainMonday today... 🥰
#LandscapePhotography #Alps #Hiking
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/115/050/332/642/826/629/original/29a8ac077e751444.jpeg

2025-08-15 15:00:23 UTC

Path of reflection
#FoothpathFriday #LandscapePhotography #Photography #Alps #Mountains #Lake
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/115/033/376/143/283/057/original/8a6b4dff30e7fce9.jpg

2025-08-03 10:12:56 UTC

Needing more paths in more lives to be as beautiful as this...
(This hike & experiences further up touched me like not many others have...)
#FootpathFriday #SilentSunday #LandscapePhotography #Photography #Alps #Mountains #Hiking
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/114/964/298/119/645/955/original/0b41427987cfb8c0.jpg

2025-07-31 16:24:18 UTC

Out & about in the Bernina Range, on our way to the Labyrinth, surrounded by majestic 4000ers (meters)... A dream! 😍
(#ThrowbackThursday, preemptive #FootpathFriday and my personal hiking highlight of 2024)
#LandscapePhotography #Alps #Mountains #Glacier #Switzerland #Hiking
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/114/948/771/450/172/463/original/751edbdea5a64fa8.jpg
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/114/948/771/481/383/716/original/f0722515ad12be07.jpg

2025-07-19 09:01:30 UTC

Erosion studies from our morning hike yesterday, a ~500m long section of the valley exposing interesting structures and the fragility of life resting on the thin layer of top soil...
#Geology #Erosion #NaturePhotography #Photography #Mountains #Alps
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/114/879/082/585/696/995/original/2e6c19ca8041a374.jpg
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/114/879/082/601/413/574/original/9722b415cab73c7b.jpg

2025-07-18 18:23:26 UTC

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I also just watched this video, which doesn't directly address it, but mentions the emotional toll on him...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZtD_4CWqiU

2025-07-18 17:06:38 UTC

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Yes, I didn't know anything about it, but I agree it was a brave, good – and human – decision...

2025-07-18 16:34:20 UTC

Memoirs of the CP/M creator released:
“Our father, Gary Kildall, was one of the founders of the personal computer industry, but you probably don’t know his name. Those who have heard of him may recall the myth that he ‘missed’ the opportunity to become Bill Gates by going flying instead of meeting with IBM. Unfortunately, this tall tale paints Gary as a ‘could-have-been,’ ignores his deep contributions, and overshadows his role as an inventor of key technologies that define how computer platforms run today.
Gary viewed computers as learning tools rather than profit engines. His career choices reflect a different definition of success, where innovation means sharing ideas, letting passion drive your work and making source code available for others to build upon. His work ethic during the 1970s resembles that of the open-source community today."
https://computerhistory.org/blog/in-his-own-words-gary-kildall/
#ComputerHistory #CPM #PersonalComputing #RetroComputing

2025-07-16 16:32:24 UTC

An early morning alone on the banks of the (still young) Isar river some weeks ago... Really more "flow" rather than #WaterfallWednesday, but I just absolutely cherish places and moments like this & feeling so privileged being able to experience these after decades of living in large cities... (each time also a reminder how much we stand to lose...)
#LandscapePhotography #River #Alps #Video #POV
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/114/863/867/119/387/644/original/a0a7fe6f7e22a43c.mp4

2025-07-12 13:46:09 UTC

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Thanks! Having walked the ridges of a few similarly steep glacier side moraines in the past 2 years, I also found it amazing to see how they might look in a few thousand years. These kind of realizations always add a new aspect to my hiking experiences...

2025-07-11 22:18:46 UTC

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Thanks, Tim! It was a highlight indeed... Also check out those two short clips from the same place & hike:
https://mastodon.thi.ng/@toxi/114795288179789270
https://mastodon.thi.ng/@toxi/114834620736829995

2025-07-07 15:25:52 UTC

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Wow! That turned out to be _quite_ the eye sore... sorry! #DebugArt #Devlog

2025-07-07 15:21:22 UTC

There's a whole bunch of recent #ThingUmbrella updates which I still have to write about, but one of the things is the reworked, improved and more customizable optical flow (aka https://thi.ng/pixel-flow package). The visualization in this test video is showing it in action via color-coded overlaid flow field vectors (once again worst-case scenario for video compression, let's see how it comes out [or not...])
#OpticalFlow #DataViz #Visualization #TypeScript #Video
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/114/812/628/284/341/688/original/2ca41054983fb007.mp4

2025-07-06 10:34:45 UTC

Mountain summer
#SilentSunday #LandscapePhotography #Photography #Alps #Mountains #Hiking
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/114/805/839/096/778/215/original/4f9794cba15748c1.jpg

2025-06-29 07:22:57 UTC

Yesterday near Rossgundscharte, Allgäu High Alps
(Longest, most stunning & varied tour in a while, traversing Warmatsgundtal into Rappenalptal, Germany's southernmost valley — 21km, incl. 1450 hm grueling descent over loose gravel...)
#SilentSunday #LandscapePhotography #NaturePhotography #Alps #Mountains #Hiking #Cliffs
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/114/765/448/884/079/765/original/0de9c52247399fcc.jpg

2025-06-06 11:19:32 UTC

#ThrowbackThursday meets #FootpathFriday
(Dolomites, late October 2024)
#LandscapePhotography #Nature #Video #POV #Alps #Mountains #Hiking
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/114/636/145/966/530/613/original/5b3af648f79038f8.mp4

2025-05-14 17:08:43 UTC

A beautiful glacier for #WaterfallWednesday 😍
#LandscapePhotography #Photography #Alps #Mountains #Glacier #Hiking
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/114/507/285/915/111/181/original/177b724e6fe80dfa.jpg

2025-04-28 16:29:34 UTC

Fresh Clouds Of Life 😍
(found in the mountains last weekend — some of the parent froggies were still watching/guarding nearby... biggest clouds I've seen so far)
#MountainMonday #NaturePhotography #Photography #Macro #Lake #Biology #FrogSpawn
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/114/416/535/016/649/383/original/d13eee7512c14890.jpg
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/114/416/534/844/325/849/original/3a858281121a750e.jpg
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/114/416/534/983/995/820/original/4dc9e5f3f3d852a8.jpg

2025-04-25 12:13:52 UTC

Hanging Valley, Italy 2024.
(The crop gives no indication of the 400m drop below the forest...)
#ForestFriday #LandscapePhotography #Photography #Alps #Mountains #Hiking
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/114/398/542/638/284/934/original/1f2a4c275825f4f2.jpg

2025-04-21 08:17:21 UTC

Last light. Same place, different direction, only minutes after...
https://mastodon.thi.ng/@toxi/114369083214208003
#MountainMonday #LandscapePhotography #Photography #Alps #Mountains #Lake #Reflection #Sunset #Alpenglow
https://mastothing.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/114/374/963/351/246/660/original/4298f546dc02f836.jpg