michael lascarides

@mlascarides.bsky.social

197 Followers 372 Following

Art tinkerer, library dweller, immigrant. Thinking a lot about how to prove libraries are worth keeping around. Ōtepoti.

A happy kid looking out on to a beautiful Otago Harbour view from a partially constructed treehouse.
Photo of an extremely gawky Soviet-era Polish cropdusting aircraft superimposed with the title "PZL-Mielec M-15: One Of The Aircraft Of All Time".
Picture of a kākāpō emerging from its burrow, looking fabulous.
Screenshot of tweet reading "I have cleaned the house. The house is now read-only. Please do not edit the house."
Copilot is for entertainment purposes only. It can make mistakes, and it may not work as intended. Don’t rely on Copilot for important advice. Use Copilot at your own risk.
Cover of the album Millions Now Living Will Never Die by Tortoise.
Illustrated chart showing how various forms of accessibility accommodation benefit the permanently disabled but also the temporarily and situationally disabled. Downloaded from https://www.coursearc.com/accessibility-content-fundamentals/ ©2023 by CourseArc licensed under CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Onion headline: "Standard Deviation Not Enough For Perverted Statistician."
A lone tree with a warning sign containing only a silhouette of the same lone tree. Sorry, I don't recall the original artist and Google Image Search has no sense of humour and is therefore no help.
Nokia 7600 (2003)
One of my abstract generative artworks. Bright colours, dense layers of precise shapes and lines.
Chart showing the switch from information scarcity to information abundance (around 2000), and that both situations make libraries necessary.
Satellite photo of the intersection of Miller Rd and Airport Rd in Dunedin.
Ad for Portobello Spring Market Day - 14 September - Coronation Hall - 10am-2pm
Abstract, detailed artwork. Pinkish circles and squares on black and blue background.
Two bar charts, titled Comparing OpenHands success rate across platforms (left) and task categories (right), from research paper entitled TheAgentCompany: Benchmarking LLM Agents on Consequential Real World Tasks.
And the vast majority of its competing agents did substantially worse. OpenAI's GPT-4o, for example, had a failure rate of 91.4 percent, while Meta's Llama-3.1-405b had a failure rate of 92.6 percent. Amazon's Nova-Pro-v1 failed a ludicrous 98.3 percent of its office tasks.
View of Hereweka Harbour Cone, Broad Bay, NZ.
Protester at 2004 RNC in New York holding sign "US OUT OF NY"
As for “Write what you know,” I was regularly told this as a beginner. I think it’s a very good rule and have always obeyed it. I write about imaginary countries, alien societies on other planets, dragons, wizards, the Napa Valley in 22002. I know these things. I know them better than anybody else possibly could, so it’s my duty to testify about them. I got my knowledge of them, as I got whatever knowledge I have of the hearts and minds of human beings, through imagination working on observation. Like any other novelist. All this rule needs is a good definition of “know.”
“The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.” He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.” “I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.” In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip. “You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug. From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door. “I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out. Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.” ― Philip K. Dick, Ubik