What is art? It is the innate human desire toward a goal, the goal being to reify a vision of that which only exists in your own mind, and it is the process of training your own mind and body to reify that vision through deliberate practice of technique, and it is the process of self-criticism as you look back on each attempt at realizing your vision and making a conscious effort to refine your technique and your practice so that your next attempt comes closer to realizing your vision. What you actually produce during this process is a side-effect, an artifact, of the artistic process, though we often speak of these artifacts as though it were the “art” itself.

So the requisites are (1) human desire, (2) a goal, (3) a vision in your imagination, (4) practice of technique, (5) refinement of technique.

Notice that so-called AI “art” meets precisely none of those requirements.

#AI #AIArt #LLMs #Art

Crazy idea for #Emacs enthusiasts

On the #LispyGopherClimate podcast today, me, @nprofile1q... and @nprofile1q... had a fascinating conversation with @nprofile1q... .

During our conversation I remember her dropping this idea that the #GopherProtocol was all about menus. I remember this because she had said something like it in her Bartleby RFC document which I had read earlier, “But gopher is hierarchical. That’s the whole point. It’s a tree of menus, not a stream of content.” (I copy-pasted the section from which that quote comes below).

Just two weeks prior on the #LispyGopherClimate podcast we had a discussion with @nprofile1q... about “incremental completing read,” which was directly related to @nprofile1q... ‘s blog post on the Emacs Avy package.

So here is my crazy synthesis of the two: Emacs Avy as a Gopher client!!!

The incremental completing read pattern goes “Filter a list of results -> Select an item -> perform an action on the item.” The action could be to read the page, or to open a link that may trigger an “applet” action. I can see a whole new way to browse the Internet: no search engines, no LLM chat, just type what you think may exist and narrow down the list of all the content until you find something that you might want to read!

Is this post an attempt at humor, or am I just rambling? A little of each. I do want to try to build this thing, if anything to see how funny it would be to try to browse the Gopher network that way.

(Quoting @nprofile1q... )

I’ve been thinking a lot about how people in gopherspace – myself included – try too hard to make gopher be like the web. We abuse directories so we can have files with links. We call our writing “phlogs” which is just “blog” with a different letter, and then our phlogs end up looking like imitations of blogs anyway. Reverse chronological. Post after post. A timeline.

But gopher is hierarchical. That’s the whole point. It’s a tree of menus, not a stream of content. And the biggest abuse of gopher I see is people trying to flatten that hierarchy, trying to make it not-hierarchical, because that’s what the web trained us to expect.

So I started asking: what would sharing information look like if gopher had won? If the web never happened and something other than blogs took off? You wouldn’t have “posts.” You’d have a library. Subjects on shelves. You’d browse by walking through the stacks, not by scrolling a timeline.

That’s what bartleby is trying to be. Not a blog engine that speaks gopher, but a tool that takes the hierarchy seriously. Collections are the primary axis, not dates. Recent acquisitions exist, but they’re the display by the door, not the organizing principle.

(Reposting a blog post by @nprofile1q... copy-pasted in full from: this webpage)Can you Lisp without being strapped in to the Torment Nexus Machine?As of 2026-05-18 … sort of.

Every Lisp, Scheme, and Lisp-adjacent project listed is a non-toy implementation that is at least somewhat active. When I first wrote this article (2026-03-12), most Lisps did not have a policy or even public stance on LLM contributions. In such cases I posted to their bug trackers or discussion lists to ask. Most maintainers kindly responded.

Every link is either a document or issue stating the project’s LLM policy, or a link to an open issue. Roughly categorized according to how strongly for or against LLM contributions.

If I’m missing a project that should be listed, lemme know.Strictly Against
Fennel
STklos Scheme
Clojure
ECLStrongly Against
Loko SchemeWeakly Against
Janet exception given for tests and bug reproductions
GNU CLISP against on a specific reading of copyright law
Emacs Lisp temporarily against LLMs, waiting for official policy
Hy maintainer recommends against LLM contributions, no actual policyHesitantly Accepting
Chicken Scheme
Chibi Scheme
Cyclone Scheme
Gambit
Gauche
Gerbil Scheme LLM generated code potentially in source tree
Clasp
CCLAccepting
Bigloo
Coalton
Kawa Scheme
Sagittarius Scheme
Jank doesn’t accept external LLM contributions but permits usage by core developers
Racket LLM generated code in source tree
SBCL LLM generated code in source tree
Carp LLM generated code in source treeUnknown
Scheme 48 open issue
Chez Scheme at least one maintainer is against, another skeptical, open issue
Guile Scheme likely against but nothing officially stated, open issue
MIT Scheme open issue
ABCL open issue
LFE open issue

#tech #software #Lisp #LispLang #SchemeLang #SchemeLang #GuileScheme #AI #LLM #LLMs #VibeCoding #AntiAI

I was able to finish reading all of “The Genius of Lisp“ by @nprofile1q... and the whole book was as good as the free preview (chapter 8). I was able to speed-read through the detailed explanations of concepts I already knew, like tail recursion, garbage collection, the Y-combinator, Currying functions, and so on. But there were parts where I slowed down and read carefully, like the section on the Universal Turing Machine, and how a Turing Machine. Also the story of how the first Lisp implementation was created when one of McCarthy’s grad students implemented an M-Expression calculator, this was described in slightly more detail than what I recall McCarthy himself explaining in his 1960 paper — that or I had just forgotten those parts of the story.

The tone of this book reminds me a lot of popular physics books like Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time,” which was aimed more at general audiences than professionals. That said, there is a lot to enjoy about this book for professionals like myself as well. There are many good stories about the principals designers of Lisp throughout. The sections on the commercialization of Lisp for the first AI boom of the 1970s and it’s subsequent “AI winter,” were very interesting to read. And if you are a teacher, you might like how some of the concepts in the book are explained.

And I would definitely recommend this very strongly to 3rd-year high school students, or 1st and 2nd year college students, who are more genuinely curious about how computers work and want to know more than just how to make the next billion dollar app.

The next #LispyGopherClimate show with @nprofile1q... I look forward to talking about this book some more.

#tech #software #Lisp #ProgrammingLanguages #SchemeLang #Scheme #Clojure #RetroComputing #LispyGopherClimateShow

Douglas MacGreggor commentary on the US/Iran war

In the first 15 minutes of this video he states in the most plain possible terms the situation in the Middle East right now, I have not yet heard such well-informed clarity from any other commentator. It is refreshing even if it does not ease the knots in my stomach. So I am making a temporary exception to my moratorium on posting YouTube videos here on the Fediverse so that you can have a chance to watch this interview with Douglas MacGreggor on the US/Israel’s war of aggression against Iran.

In short, Iran is fighting a defensive war, so their strategy is to turn this into a war of attrition. The US has bases throughout the region and have a very, very large attack surface against which they have to defend — it is the same stupid error driven by hubris that every large empire makes eventually. So far, Iran’s strategy is working.

So the Iranian “regime” has not fallen yet, and now that Khameni and their president is dead, the people of Iran seem to have re-unified in support of their government in the hopes that they will have a chance to elect new government under the same constitution of the Islamic Republic, hopefully which will be less despotic than before, while maintaining their military to protect their people’s sovereignty, and more importantly, their civil infrastructure that protects their people from starvation.

The USA’s allies in the Gulf States, who had been made prosperous by cooperating with the US, have now realized that the US has no interest in defending their wealth. Really, it seems the United States is not interested in defending anyone at all except for Netanyahu and his corrupt cronies. And I have heard rumors that these Gulf States are already initiating talks to re-align with Russia instead of the US. And by China and Russia not getting involved, they know that they can become stronger if the US becomes weaker, but have most likely already started work to assist Iran militarily so as to defend their oil resources.

All I can say is, “know thy enemy.” Knowing anything at all, much less a complex enemy of some 90 million people, seems to be far beyond the collective mental capacity of the Trump administration, or the Netanyahu crime syndicate. The only question I have now is, how much more damage and senseless death and destruction can these morons continue to cause before this all ends?

Quoting MacGreggor:

“You can kill a leader, but you can’t bomb a civilization into submission, and [the US] has never understood what we were dealing with in Iran. Everybody talks about Iran as some sort of radical Islamic state. Nothing could be further from the truth. Iran is ultimately Persia, and that civilization is older. And Persian civilization, Persian thinking, Persian philosophy, Persian art, and history, all of those things have been asserting their dominance over the last 25-30 years. And the people of Iran have largely walked away from this ideologically rigid form of Islam….. so I think we have galvanized [the Islamic world] against us.”

End this damn pointless war now, and make the war criminals Trump and Netanyahu face justice under international law.

#politics #EndTheWar #NoWar #Iran #Israel #USA #UnitesStates #Trump #Netanyahu #EpsteinWar #OperationEpsteinFury

If you think these decapitation strikes on Iran’s leadership is a victory

Yes I know, distraction from the Epstein files, blah blah blah, that’s beside the point. Anyone who has been paying attention can see the pattern behind Trump’s belligerence, attacking Venezuela and then Iran in the span of weeks: these were the two largest oil producing countries that were also reliable trading partners with China. As many astute political commentators have noted, this has been part of a much larger and longer-term pattern of escalating hostilities toward China by the US, and that includes the self-defeating economic warfare Trump attempted with his tariffs on China in the first few months of his second term.

An attack on China’s oil supply is an attack on their weapons supply. The same can be said of Russia. This means China’s ability to out-produce the US and Europe’s stock of weapons is now threatened. This is an existential threat for China now.

So you can be sure that China is observing this attack on Iran’s government very closely, and taking notes. Although China has nuclear weapons as a deterrent against open hostilities from the US, I’m sure Chinese military leadership are planning for how the same kind of airstrikes the US is using against Iran right now could be used against the leadership of their own government, or even as a possible strategy for a preemptive strike against the US should hostilities escalate to that degree. And you can bet that this has occurred to US military leadership as well, and they are going to become increasingly paranoid and irrational in their stance against China as a result. If the US can do it to Iran, can China do it to the US? The Trump administration will be having nightmares about it for the rest of their miserable lives, I assure you.

China’s next move, I am pretty sure, will be to assume an increasingly hostile military posture against Korean and Japan, two countries from which the US would launch strikes against them. Japan and Korea, in turn, will not see China’s new military posture as a defense against the US but a threat against their sovereignty (if the US can do it to Iran, why couldn’t China do it to Japan and Korea) and further escalate their military posturing.

China and Russia may also choose to make moves to take back their oil supply, which would involve military intervention against the US. Russia may also enter the conflict to protect their oil supply and therefore their weapons supply as well.

So this is not going to be just a regional conflict contained within the Middle East, this is very rapidly spiraling into a third world war which will involve the whole Asian continent. Russia is already in conflict with the US via Ukraine, which involves Europe as well. I’m sure the Russians still remember what happened the last time they signed a deal with Hitler when the hostilities in Europe began. If Europe decides to side with the the United States in this new world-wide conflict, which seems to be their default position, Russia will form a military alliance with China, and may choose to carry-out a US/Israeli-style preemptive strike” against military targets in Europe and Asia.

You would be stupid to think if the Iran conflict winds down, regardless of which side wins their military objectives, that the world will go back to normal after this.

So congratulations to everyone who thought “regime change” in Iran was the right choice, all it costed you (so far) was a few hundred American and Israeli soldiers, was it worth it? A few thousand Iranian government executives and the innocent members of their families, was it worth it? A few hundred dead Iranian school children (so far), was it worth it? A commitment to a world-wide conflagration that could potentially kill a billion people including many Americans and Europeans in the very near future. Totally worth it?

I’ll say it again: all people of conscience must oppose this war, and demand war criminals in the US, Israel, and elsewhere, be brought to justice, or the war criminals will continue to escalate their violence against more and more people. Americans and Europeans, stop applauding regime change in Iran, and start demanding war criminals be brought to justice before this conflict gets any worse, before the war arrives on your own doorsteps.

#politics #NoWar #EndTheWar #Iran #Israel #USA #UnitedStates #America #Russia #Ukraine #China #Japan #Korea #WorldWar3