allison

Poet, programmer, game designer. Associate Arts Professor at NYU ITP. she/her 🏳️‍⚧️

Home page: https://www.decontextualize.com/

Last Notes

2026-04-17 17:14:39 CEST

listen, our students are entering a workforce where their peers will be heavy cocaine users. so we would be putting our students at a disadvantage if we *don't* teach them how to use cocaine (responsibly and ethically of course)

2026-02-23 23:43:42 CET

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i don't know that i'd trust these models for summarization or navigation. even when the outputs are technically correct, they can leave out certain information or frame the information in a misleading way, papering over whatever makes the code unique and materially suited for the task at hand

2025-10-09 20:14:35 CEST

so i have an array with several thousand elements, ~50% of which are empty. the empty elements aren't uniformly distributed over the length of the array. (it's a hash table.) i want to select a non-empty array element at random. is there a clever way to do this that (a) is constant time (or close); (b) doesn't require a second data structure; and (c) isn't just sampling at random in a loop until you get a hit? (this is for an embedded application so RAM is at a premium)

2025-09-12 20:50:58 CEST

"exnomination" is a really useful word and I'm surprised it isn't used more often in the context of theory and politics. exnomination is the process by which a group works to depoliticize their worldview and values, so that those views and values come to be considered "natural," "apolitical," and "common sense" (the term is from Barthes' _Mythologies_ but I first encountered it in Robin Lakoff's _The Language War_)

2025-07-07 20:29:26 CEST

this is a very cool project: an open source, inexpensive design for a wet-spinning machine, designed to help you make biodegradable yarns for e-textile prototyping https://hybridbodylab.github.io/open-wet-spinning/ (example yarn recipe: https://hybridbodylab.github.io/open-wet-spinning/docs/recipes/thermo/)

2025-03-26 17:12:21 CET

who decided to call it the myth of theseus and the minotaur and not "bull-terminated string"