beka valentine

https://kolektiva.social/@beka_valentine

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

current twitter handle: @[email protected] 

former twitter handles: [@beka_valentine](https://kolektiva.social/@beka_valentine ) @illegally_beka

location: SF, CA

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npub132p3v5et2ujg4jpdklvxdge2qlvlzjgqatar7lpmfarx9syl0x5skgwsev

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Last Notes

2026-07-09 18:19:19 CEST

one of these days i'll learn to proof read my posts, i promise
aww who am i kidding

2026-07-08 09:46:51 CEST

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but how do we make an analogy for software engineering, say? or for uh.. film making? or .. whatever?
im sure film making has a lot more obvious apprenticeship components than software. but is it apprentice-ified?

2026-07-08 09:45:15 CEST

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as they advance, they might do basic stock prep, facing raw stock into dimensioned stock, then move up to doing routine aspects of work holding, cutting dovetails for dovetail clamping, or whatever, doing increasingly large portions of the job that a machinist might do

2026-07-08 09:43:23 CEST

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an apprentice machinist, for instance, might do things like cut stock, take measurements, do job setup tasks, assemble necessary tools, learn and do maintenance, etc.
all of this is important work to do and has an associated skill to learn

2026-07-08 09:41:47 CEST

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the problem is that the apprenticeships need to be properly designed to be both educational (so we have to know some amount of how to teach people skills, etc.)
but also we need to be able to slice up work in such a way that novices can do stuff that contributes a nonzero amount

2026-07-08 09:40:49 CEST

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but it also means that there are career paths that clearly go somewhere, beyond the entry level position of apprentice

2026-07-08 09:39:38 CEST

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it's a good approach to having employment pathways for people, because it means that as long as there are apprenticeships, there are jobs for anyone who wants one, and no hassles to getting one

2026-07-08 09:38:36 CEST

apprenticeship models of employment are really nice, and we need more things that can be shaped into that model
it's kind of optimal in some ways? like, minimal skill threshold required, minimal requirements to get an apprenticeship, get trained on the job and paid to do it

2026-07-07 18:08:25 CEST

you used to be able to sort youtube videos by age, but not anymore
i guess people were using it to avoid watching AI trash and they didn't like that

2026-07-03 09:22:24 CEST

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indeed. escaping this tendency requires thinking consciously about how software can easily become a trap, and how replicating trap software is just making another trap

2026-07-03 06:28:02 CEST

moonfall was such a stupid movie omg
still better than section 31

2026-07-01 19:46:29 CEST

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and those aren't interested in making things that you can learn from and advance in. SquareSpace doesn't want end user empowerment through end user programming, SquareSpace wants end user lock in. they want you to never leave, so they don't help you become empowered

2026-07-01 19:44:41 CEST

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making a website is not just about making some HTML and CSS and JavaScript
you have to find hosting, a domain name, etc.
Apple had easy solutions with iCloud, but everyone else making these tools just said nah that's ok
and so web-based complete solutions took over

2026-07-01 19:43:29 CEST

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partially its because they were often just kind of terrible to begin with, and didn't help people become more capable web programmers
and partially its because the people behind these apps didn't want to address the problem of how to make the whole problem easier

2026-07-01 19:41:58 CEST

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or take the various WYSIWYG webpage making programs out there. there's a long history of them producing terrible code, except for a handful of them. iWeb was pretty decent IMO
but as blog engines and then various SquareSpace-like web apps became popular, these apps REALLY faded

2026-07-01 19:39:55 CEST

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but some time around 2005 or so, Apple the company stopped caring about these AppleScript and Automator, and let them languish, to the point where now, basically nothing is scriptable. HyperCard was also dead by this point.
so routes into end user programmer were dwindling

2026-07-01 19:38:35 CEST

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and AppleScript was similar to HyperScript, so you could transition from scripting Hypercard stacks to scripting your whole computer, automating huge workflows, with relative easy
eventually AppleScript lead Sal Soghoian developed Automator, a GUI tool to make it even easier

2026-07-01 19:37:00 CEST

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you may know that AppleScript existed, but was less well known now, and what was more well known in the past and far more important then, is that many MANY programs had AppleScript support to make the whole program scriptable. there were official guides for how to do this

2026-07-01 19:35:31 CEST

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many people learned to program initially from Hypercard
and if they wanted to extend the functionality of their non-Hypercard software, MacOS had facilities for that too:
AppleScript

2026-07-01 19:34:29 CEST

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or take the later 80s and the 90s and very early 2000s
Hypercard introduced people to some basic interactive programming techniques, Hyperscript let them level up in an easy way that didn't require lots of fancy knowledge

2026-07-01 19:32:43 CEST

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and so distribution frequently took the form of Byte magazine articles, etc. that said "here's the source code, type it in"
and so the end user often had no choice but to learn some programming, in a language that wasn't too complicated to learn

2026-07-01 19:31:31 CEST

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what was end user programming like in the 1970s and 1980s?
for the average person, BASIC. by necessity, sometimes, because the software industry wasn't yet distributing as widely, and physical copies were harder to produce, etc.

2026-07-01 19:30:10 CEST

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very little consideration has been given toward ensuring that end users can relatively easily take up the task of programming their own computers. historically, more attention was given to this, in fact

2026-07-01 19:30:00 CEST

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for example, let's consider so-called End User Programming, which is a broad term used to refer to programming done by people who are not programmers but rather just average people trying to achieve a goal

2026-07-01 19:29:41 CEST

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in particular, there are a lot of software-related skills which were either never properly developed into novice-friendly forms, or which were left to languish and complexity and die over the last 20 years as the idea of the novice ceased to be widely recognized as real

2026-07-01 19:29:33 CEST

personally i'm ok with AI techniques being less well known but there's a deeper thing going on here which is far more important IMO, because it's also partially why LLMs have taken over
== this thread is in response to this tweet: ==
https://x.com/krismicinski/status/2072303376629444764

2026-06-28 06:12:44 CEST

if the co-CEO of Mullvad is donating money to far right whack jobs, can you really trust that the company isn't storing your activity? what trust can you have when your VPN activity data is a great weapon for the right wing? none.
https://det.social/@lostgen/116820546568940358
#note1rs4…p8c4

2026-06-25 08:23:49 CEST

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Connections 3 also has a tendency to do this kind of sideways jumps. like, its fine i guess, but everything is connected sideways. there's nothing to learn from that really, whereas causal links let you build a picture of what makes the world work

2026-06-25 07:53:13 CEST

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but Connections 2 has dramatically worse links between things
half the time its sideways in time, "these two guys happened to know each other"
sometimes its "speaking of fabric--.." random association connections
its very confusing and hard to follow

2026-06-25 07:51:09 CEST

the TV show Connections, by James Burke, is really good but Series 2 is kinda bad
Connections 1 traces causal relationships between developments in science, technology, art, mathematics, showing how one development enable another and another and so on

2026-06-14 21:58:10 CEST

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CHM does this for all of its computers, even the ones that you can buy on eBay right now. god forbid anyone touch an Altair 8800
but even when these science museums make interactive exhibits, like the Exploratorium does, the interactivity puts the _science_ behind glass

2026-05-30 20:06:17 CEST

@npub1nqr…hg9p [@jimmyhmiller](https://hachyderm.io/@jimmyhmiller ) i feel like FoC would really enjoy the early chapters of The Friendly Orange Glow, even if it's not deeply related to FoC specifically

2026-05-26 19:02:58 CEST

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2026-05-26 18:54:10 CEST

sure, you complain about the AI cliche of "Not X, but Y"
but do you complain about "No X, just Y"?

2026-05-24 05:22:48 CEST

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you know, i had a dream like 4 days ago that you came out as trans and that motivated me to start listening the computer-is-a-feeling episode, so now im wondering if im fucking prophetic or what

2026-05-08 23:19:47 CEST

there are exactly 2 things in my experience as a programmer that make it feel really true to say that programming is mathematical
the first is program calculation/squiggol
but the other is shader programming

2026-05-04 18:36:23 CEST

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personally, I love the dry brushed/sponged look, and have spent the last few days making shaders to replicate it, but YMMV on what you like and want out of a scifi environment

2026-05-04 18:35:27 CEST

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dry brushed and sponged marbling is a very common thing in B5 for wall in general, and certainly breaks things up visually, but on its own it doesn't necessarily have a scifi feel to it
if anything, it's more 80s/90s DIY home decor, which is MY scifi jam but maybe not yours

2026-05-04 18:34:08 CEST

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in the case of B5's MedLab, they're checker boarded with bare painted wall behind them, which increases visual complexity by breaking up the higher-order monotony of the tiled Contour Spectrums
they're also marbled with what is like to be dry brushing or sponging

2026-05-04 18:32:21 CEST

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the lesson to take away from this, tho, is that breaking up a flat wall or other surface can be done relatively easily with some interesting tiled details. they don't have to be especially complex, just complex enough to not be a big blank solid color

2026-05-04 18:27:34 CEST

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and the number of teeth in the sawtooth increases, as well, and the spacing is variable
these panels show up in very few places in Babylon 5, and I'm not sure if they're used in other shows, nor what they are if not custom made

2026-05-04 18:25:09 CEST

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unlike the Sonex Contours, these are not beveled panels at all, they're flat and terraced, with a horizontal zigzag/saw tooth formed by different terraces. the higher up in the stack a terrace is, the further up the vertical dimension of the panel it goes

2026-05-04 18:23:34 CEST

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i don't actually know what those are, they might be a different kind of Sonex panel from the 80s/90s or they might be something different entirely, maybe custom made
here's a clearer view of their details, behind Garibaldi
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/116/517/228/238/058/243/original/3230cbc1a710709b.png

2026-05-04 18:21:57 CEST

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these are probably NOT actually sound isolation panels but rather just material with the same checkerboard of alternative lines
either way, the motif is fairly common in scifi as well

2026-05-04 18:19:34 CEST

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many different kinds of such echo dampening were used in Star Trek, and were used all over the place
but it's not just Star Trek that uses the motif! here we see a similar motif adorning Commander Sinclair's kitchen, on the top left and bottom left cabinetry
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/116/517/212/112/417/102/original/0eab22a7d9837030.png

2026-05-04 18:16:06 CEST

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these panels are the more common echo dampening design you see, consisting of a checkerboard pattern of grooves, in this case 3 grooves, alternating between horizontally aligned grooves and vertically aligned grooves

2026-05-04 18:14:26 CEST

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but wait! there's more!
more sound isolation, that is
did you think Sonex Contour's was the only sound isolation panels used? no! there's also more traditional echo dampening panels!
here's Sonex's Junior panels used as the walls of a transporter pad in Star Trek VI
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/116/517/192/452/453/690/original/4c11830064213ac7.jpg

2026-05-04 18:12:24 CEST

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I'm sure other scifi shows have used Sonex Contour panels, too, but these are the two that I'm most familiar with

2026-05-04 18:10:07 CEST

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Triline, which has three central vertical grooves
and finally Triline Corner, which has three lines extending perpendicular to two adjacent edges and then curving 90 degrees near the middle to join up

2026-05-04 18:09:04 CEST

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aside from the ones mentioned above, there's also:
Classic, which is just a beveled panel
Rasiz, which seems to be a beveled panel with a smaller bevel
Horizon, with central diagonal grooves
Matrix 4 and 6, with vertical and horizontal grooves in a 4x4 and 6x6 grid

2026-05-04 18:07:29 CEST

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there are in fact many kinds of Sonex Contour panels,beyond just the 3 described above, but those are the ones you see almost exclusively in TNG and B5, at least
from the below site, you can see that there's maybe 10 kinds total?
https://www.asiproaudio.com/sonex_countour_foam.htm

2026-05-04 18:05:09 CEST

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"Oh but Beka that's just one place where they're used, and it's just one kind!"
oh ho ho! look at this! its a Sonex Contour Vision in another place in medlab, on the back wall of the isolation chamber!
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/116/517/153/858/706/700/original/2eaa1d7306331bfd.png

2026-05-04 17:59:27 CEST

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these may not in fact be Sonex's but rather vacuformed plastic copies, as you can see from this thread where someone bought an actual panel from a Babylon 5 set, and it was a vacuformed styrene panel
copying was probably cheaper than buying Sonex's
https://www.therpf.com/forums/threads/medlab-wall-panel-babylon-5.360767/

2026-05-04 17:57:14 CEST

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here you can see teal Sonex Contour Spectrum's behind Dr Franklin in MedLab 1, on the wall of the exam area of the medlab
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/116/517/120/950/190/648/original/e407e4a69150bf6c.png

2026-05-04 17:54:31 CEST

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now you might think "oh these are just a star trek or TNG thing, not a scifi thing" but you'd be wrong! babylon 5 used these as the distinctive wall decor of MedLab

2026-05-04 17:52:40 CEST

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Sonex Contour wall panels come in a variety of designs. that one with the half-diagonal grooves is the Spectrum. there's also the Panorama, with two groups of diagonal grooves, and the Vision, with two overlapped/crossed groups of two
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/116/517/102/225/549/789/original/4effc56b31114ff7.jpg
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/116/517/102/453/185/119/original/a662e1963451d562.jpg

2026-05-04 17:48:42 CEST

here's another thing that turns your room into an instantly cool science fiction set: the fuckin Sonex Contour wall panel
https://kolektiva.social/@beka_valentine/114600567753999701
https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/116/517/089/789/125/563/original/861b3610674234da.jpg

2026-04-29 19:03:00 CEST

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ah see i grew up on the 90s scifi show version

2026-04-29 19:00:50 CEST

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i havent but it looks like a revival of that style and i therefore love it
but where's the guy who talks to animals?!

2026-04-29 18:07:26 CEST

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it feels almost imaginable that someone in 1992 could express pride in winning American Gladiator, as if that were a genuine accomplishment on par with winning an Olympic gold medal
i can't see anyone feeling similarly about WipeOut or its ilk

2026-04-29 18:06:37 CEST

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and so i think that's why this kind of cringey camp futurismo versions of these kinds of shows went away and were replaced by goofball comedy versions

2026-04-29 18:02:29 CEST

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the aspirational scifi faux-sport games of the 90s couldn't last because they inherently run counter to a core embarrassment that Americans, at least, feel about positivity toward the future, especially when that involves personal and collective choices to improve things

2026-04-29 18:00:13 CEST

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but that kind of sincerity and seriousness about aspirational utopian futures is often seen as cringe, naive, and childish
so the choice is to either abandon the activity entirely or strip it of sincerity and turn it into funny haha goofiness

2026-04-29 17:58:38 CEST

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the shows are very serious and sincere about how they treat it all, even tho its dripping with campy 80s low budget scifi, because there is a core mood of aspiration which is inherently utopian and future fictional

2026-04-29 17:56:21 CEST

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like, the campy futurismo of those shows is so front and center, because there is a very real kind of science fictional aspirationalism to exalting people who aspire to excel in their pursuits even when they're completely dork ass things

2026-04-29 17:53:01 CEST

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American Gladiators takes that to the more scifi extreme, with weird laser tag firefight simulation, fantastic future combat games definitely remeniscent of anbo-jutsu, a proper climbing wall
completely unashamed to be doing what are basically stupid future scifi sports

2026-04-29 17:51:02 CEST

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kayaking through rapids? yes! but on boogieboards in a pool!
mountain climbing? yes! but on a weird foam mountain with slime!
bushwacking through a forest? yes! but with bungee neon cords!

2026-04-29 17:49:28 CEST

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but what makes these specific game shows so spiritually connected, for me anyway, is that they're a strange, surreal, scifi version of more traditional things
take Guts. a bunch of the sub-games in Guts are artificialized replicas of real out doors-y things

2026-04-29 17:47:32 CEST

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no one is pushed into these things culturally in Star Trek, but they're definitely portrayed in a positive light where they form part of a well rounded conception of self perfection through physical and mental effort

2026-04-29 17:45:29 CEST

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and you see this reflected in TNG at times and also mid-80s TOS movies. you've got the crusher-troi-aerobics scene, Kirk on the mountain, Riker's anbo-jutsu therapy session, Gainan and Worf's phaser training

2026-04-29 17:43:07 CEST

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both of these shows fit right into the 70s and 80s fitness craze, of course, which itself is culturally connected to TNG, in that TNG portrays a future where self improvement, or even self perfection, is praised and supported in everything, especially well rounded improvement

2026-04-29 17:40:16 CEST

hot take: Nickelodeon's Guts, and Universal Studio's American Gladiators, were amongst the closest we've gotten to the culture depicted in Star Trek: The Next Generation

2026-04-17 23:29:10 CEST

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no, but looking over that, it looks dreadful

2026-04-17 22:40:49 CEST

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we could totally have a shader language that does this, too, by compiling to GLSL or whatever
since the dimension has to be fixed at compile time, each version of noise and interp could be unrolled into separate concrete implementations for the various needed dimensionalities

2026-04-17 22:39:25 CEST

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and then noise would just be
noise : (d : Dim) -> Vec Float d -> Float
noise d p = interp d (cube p) p

2026-04-17 19:36:58 CEST

every time I do shader programming, I think to myself, gosh this needs functional programming

2026-04-16 23:07:42 CEST

new video time!
Cutting thin sheet metal on a nibbler!
https://youtu.be/l8Pyg-Bwqao

2026-04-15 09:17:11 CEST

some of you have never listened to the Turok sound track and it shows

2026-04-15 03:14:14 CEST

finished john romero's excellent excellent autobiography and immediately went out and bought a bunch of classic FPSes. i've never been into FPSes all that much but the book was inspiring

2026-04-13 22:20:04 CEST

FLOSS devs!
have enough self respect to say "this is my hobby, not my work, if you don't like that, too bad!"

2026-04-13 18:36:49 CEST

@npub1x78…xn0m reading through Texturing & Modelling: A procedural Approach, and found a ref to your 2000 paper with Borshukov :)

2026-04-12 00:20:16 CEST

i'm REALLY enjoying John Romero's autobiography Doom Guy, this is exactly how i want histories of computing to be. a fun story of people doing cool, exciting things and having fun doing it

2026-04-09 00:50:39 CEST

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"TACO" is an abbreviation, for "Trump Always Chickens Out", used as a taunt to goad Trump into doing the thing he chooses not to do after saying he's going to do it

2026-04-08 20:46:54 CEST

the TACO assholes won. the ceasefire is gone. Democrats got what they wanted: continued war with Iran

2026-04-08 11:09:21 CEST

democratic politicians never face consequences for their actions and inactions and that's fundamentally why they're so feckless
if they're not made to obey, why would they ever obey? if not getting re-elected is their biggest fear, why bother worrying?

2026-04-08 04:57:18 CEST

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the H2G2 radio play and TV show have a similar quality, as does the Lynch Dune

2026-04-08 04:52:05 CEST

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something about being made of cardboard and rubber, instead of shiny CGI, makes it almost folksy
it has heart in a way that most modern Who doesn't
a lot of old scifi is like this tbh
oh and the MUSIC of old who is incredible!

2026-04-08 04:50:43 CEST

there's something really charming about the Old Doctor Who, in that it's depictions are super campy, and mix scifi, fantasy, and reality, and ends up feeling .. i dunno, quaint and educational and approachable, in a way that New Who never could

2026-04-07 19:44:33 CEST

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nuclear deterrence is the boy who cried wolf

2026-04-07 18:12:14 CEST

boomers lived through the Cold War and what they learned was "saber rattling never goes wrong, the nukes will never launch, it's fine to do whatever"

2026-04-06 23:51:19 CEST

Artemis astronaut just said 6-7 smdh

2026-04-06 23:46:27 CEST

you should watch the 1950 movie Destination: Moon, it's very good

2026-04-06 20:43:51 CEST

i want more shows about the struggles and triumphs of space exploration, with minimal fucking relationship bullshit
elevated scifi is the worst trash written by fools who don't understand how to actually write, they just know how to make flowery prose about losers

2026-04-06 07:35:16 CEST

listening to John Romero's Doom Guy. really good so far. i just wanna give him a hug

2026-04-05 22:26:23 CEST

every rocket ship should be legally required to play Steppenwolf's Magic Carpet Ride during launch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIpXYU-9CBM

2026-04-05 21:25:17 CEST

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which is interesting. something as simple as "go to Place X" can lead us to the conclusion that a good deep simulation of NPC AI really ought to, in some sense, contain explicit representations of knowledge of actions and such

2026-04-05 21:23:29 CEST

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its a pretty inescapable fact once you realize that navigation through the world could involve almost entirely using tools. using keys, using doors, using elevators, using bicycles
its only the most limited of settings where travel is exclusively on foot

2026-04-05 21:14:07 CEST

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the substance of that knowledge, the form it takes, might instead be simply a general representation of how-to knowledge, which is equally applicable to, say, knowing how to make a healing potion

2026-04-05 21:12:52 CEST

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a purely spatial route _as an object of knowledge_ (rather than as an idealized form we invent for algorithms) may in fact just be a special case of explicit how-to knowledge, that happens by accident to simply consist only of "go from place A to place B" type parts

2026-04-05 21:11:01 CEST

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whatever this representation is, it probably shouldn't be merely an abstracted path through space, but rather some representation of things to do
we frequently talk in metaphorical terms of routes and ways, for instance