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FOSS and Crafts

FOSS and Crafts

A podcast about free software, free culture, and making things together.

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  • 63 episodes
  • Updated Mar 3, 2024
  • Explicit

Episodes63

Newest first
  • Jul 23, 2020

    2: The impact of machines that "learn" and produce

    The results from machine learning have been getting better and better and the results seen so far from OpenAI's GPT-3 model look stunningly good. But unlike GPT-2 (which was publicly released under a free license), so far GPT-3 is accessible via API-only. What's the reasoning and possible impact of that decision? For that matter, what kind of impacts could machine learning advancements make on FOSS, programming in general, art production, and civic society? Links: The OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since bitcoin article The quoted comment on Hacker News Auto-generation of legalese and auto-web-design GPT-3 demos GPT-2 GPT-3's API and FAQ page Tensorflow and PyTorch (Artificial) neural networks and machine learning https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ Google's Deepmind and Agent57 (be sure to watch the Agent57 videos, they're's impressive) Mozilla's Common Voice project AlphaGo Bayesian spam filters; see also Paul Graham's highly influential a plan for spam writeup Markov chains (we miss you, X11R5...) The Postmodernist Essay Generator Postmodernism Neural networks' difficulties in explaining "why they did that" and an overview of attempts to make things better: An Overview of Interpretability of Machine Learning Chris had a conversation with Gerald Sussman about AI that was related to the above and influential on them. "If an AI driven car drives off the side of the road, I want to know why it did that. I could take the software developer to court, but I would much rather take the AI to court." The Propagator Model (by Alexey Radul and Gerald Jay Sussman, largely): Revised Report on the Propagator Model. See also: We Really Don't Know How to Compute! Three Panel Soul's Recursion comic (cut from this episode, but we also originally mentioned their Techics comic which is definitely relevant though) Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Impressionism, and the Realism movement (Obviously there's also a lot more to say about these art movements than just lumping them as a reaction to photography but... only so much time on an episode.) AI Dungeon 2 (nonfree, though you can play it in your browser) Episode of Ludology about procedural narrative generation Implicit Bias and the Teaching of Writing Machine learning's tendency to inherit biases Rise of the racist robots -- how AI is learning all our worst impulses Machine bias (and its use in deciding court cases) Google's Vision AI producing racist results When It Comes to Gorillas, Google Photos Remains Blind (Content warning: this is due to an extremely harmful form of synthesized racism from the biases in the datasets Google has used) Predictive policing algorithms are racist. They need to be dismantled. Discovering Reinforcement Learning Algorithms and the subdiscipline of Learning to Learn Hayao Miyazaki's criticism of an AI demonstration not considering its impact

  • Jul 16, 2020

    1: Collaborative Storytelling with Dice

    You've probably heard of "tabletop Role Playing Games" (or, tabletop RPGs) before, but what are they? In this episode, Chris and Morgan introduce a subset of RPGs called "Narrative RPGs" whose mechanics are focused primarily around storytelling (as opposed to tactical combat).2 Hear about how narrative RPGs can be used as "collaborative storytelling with dice", some of the narrative RPG systems that exist, as well as an in-depth look at one particular RPG system, Freeform Universal. Freeform Universal is so simple and easy to pick up that by the end of this episode, you should have enough information to use it for weaving stories with your friends! Links: Freeform Universal (or FU, pronounced "Foo") Official FU site Pay-what-you-want on DriveThru RPG Hacks for customizing Freeform Universal Fate (published by Evil Hat) Fate Core at Evil Hat Fate Accelerated at Evil Hat Old Fate website Fate SRD (fan) website Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder Look, you can find enough info about these on your own The internet is full of articles about them Open Game License (OGL) (... it's a weird license, but we'll talk about that some other time) Wikipedia article about the OGL Open Game License 1.0 (Wayback machine copy, RTF file) Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (CC BY 3.0) Dark Dungeons (CW: 1980s religious satanic-panic propaganda... but for a fun time, find the 2014 live-action film somewhere) Rory's Story Cubes (we called them "Rory's Story Dice" on the episode, oops) Donjon RPG tools (Don't have enough time to come up with your own materials? You can use these as long as you don't mind leaning into a lot of auto-generated tropes.) RPGs as therapy Please Don't Punch the GM: Adventures in Gaming Therapy (Role Playing Public Radio episode) Negotiating with the Dragon: Role-Playing Games as Group Therapy Mary Robinete Kowal's Shades of Milk and Honey (first book in the Glamourist Histories books mentioned by Morgan as inspiring one of her game themes) Libre Lounge (Podcast Chris used to co-host, still ongoing) Episode about history of Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder and the Open Gaming License Still reading this? Wow, okay, some bonus content... We mentioned that Morgan did a class assignment for her intro-to-German class about needing to make a German fairytale... here's the assignment, as turned into the class: Hilda die Hexe (be nice enough to remember this is an intro-to-German class). Additionally, Chris simultaneously wrote a slightly-more-elaborated-upon version called The Witch and the Carriage. The process of playing the game and then writing up both of these took about an hour and a half so set your expectations accordingly. Still want more? Okay, not claiming this is a "great" story, but here's a kind of fun writeup of a session called Santa's Little Uprising. (Not very serious, could use more polish.) Maybe we'll take up our own advice and more seriously publish some of the stories we've constructed together sometime!

  • Jul 15, 2020

    Episode 0: Welcome to FOSS and Crafts!

    Here it is, the very first episode of FOSS and Crafts! Co-hosts Chris and Morgan introduce themselves, their backgrounds, and give some sense of what to expect from the show. Links: Wikipedia summary of the Arts and Crafts movement