spython

Funny, that idea came to me too recently, but i have not started.. did you have any success?

It's the other way around - I integrated some things I wrote in the comments here into the blog post. I'm still writing the post though - it's not easy to hypothesize about people's intention without sounding like an ass.

Indeed, I think this is how it starts. However the filtering system does not indicate to the user if their drawing was filtered - otherwise it would turn into a "trick the system" game - a whole different genre. So the visitor always gets the satisfaction of seeing their penis galloping on the horizon. Still, many if not most penis artists then continue to add more and more lewd drawings. So it's not just a test but some other behaviour. Coming from Hacker News, they might feel like a hacker, a rebel breaking the system. And that's fine - after all there are not many ways in a society where you can feel this way and not hurt anyone.

I understand all that, but how would you explain that 8,6% of drawings from people coming from HN were dicks, while visitors from Tumblr would draw dicks only in 1,6% of the cases? My guess is that people from Tumblr already explored a lot of the transgressions, so it does not interest them much - just like "potty talk phase" stops being interesting after your reach a certain age.

I'm writing a second part of this post right now - about the differences in how separate online communities are drawing horses. There are clear differences in richness of detail, drawing mastery, but also in the amount of dicks drawn. My suspicion that people with more drawing experience draw less dicks simply because they already have drawn all the dicks previously. While people with an untrained drawing muscle perhaps fall back to these easy and familiar shapes. Drawing a horse is hard.

So many dicks! Roughly 4 percent of all drawings are dicks. With over 600 000 drawings that means.. Twenty five thousand dicks. I thought about including them, but as with all the other transgressive drawings, the only person who enjoys looking at them is the one who drew them.

Yes, on the original gradient.horse it was an early experiment in hidden moderation - and it did help hide quite a few of the less kind drawings. Now, as the moderation model trained on the larger corpus works quite well, it's just for fun.

Oooh, there are just so many horses - more than 600 000 - that it's a tiny chance to actually see your drawings! And there are around 50 000 drawings marked as non-horses - all kind of weirdness - that could be an exhibition on its own..

Thank you for drawing, a typical drawing is seen more than a hundred times, so your pegasus and space invader were seen and appreciated : )

This hits home - I wrote you an email!

Would that be enforceable? Can people be excluded from the right to a legal dispute? It seems that otherwise any contract would include a clause that it can not be contested - which it sometimes does with mandatory mediation.

I think Mozilla is still mostly made up of tech-optimist people, so they were open and interested in ai from day one. I highly doubt there was any malicious intent.

Last I heard the ads were introduced to be less dependent on Google money - they actually cover the costs/salaries of the internal MDN team and thus secure the existence of MDN within the organisation.

Also apparently they are non-tracking ads, and so provide only a small fraction of income that tracking ads would bring, but that would go against the ideals of Mozilla.

So I'm seeing the ads as a net positive. (And am surprised that the people visiting MDN don't use an ad blocker anyhow).

You can go from the starting position to the last u-turn, skipping nearly the whole course. But I doubt that's intentional.

Quite a few actually. Other popular animals: dinosaurs, cats, and snails!

Yeah, I too had probably an idealized image of HN - but I guess what makes the HN great is the moderation :)

And it's not like there are no beautiful horses being drawn - I observed quite a few ingenious horses and non-horses coming in in the last hours. But I'm surprised at the level of.. carelessness.

One way of dealing with it would be training a penis-drawing-recognition ai and only show other penis drawings to people who draw dicks. Though it would go against the whole idea of, well, having a moment together.

Substack traffic is hard to quantify, at least for me as I am only looking at HTTP referrers, and I had the feeling the referrer field was mostly filtered out. It is comparable to facebook and mastodon traffic, both in volume and in the sense that it is a slow burn - the link gets share in a small community, and then gets shared a few days later in a different one. In contrast to tumblr, HN and bluesky, where a spike in traffic comes sudden, a cultural moment is shared by many thousands of people, and then the attention mostly disappears the next day.

Oh no! Did you use all the colors available?

As a bit of an observation - the horses went viral on tumblr, bluesky and to a lesser extent facebook and instagram and smaller pages at different days, so I could observe how the drawing style and content changes:

- Most beautiful horses and least penises were drawn by tumblr users. Maybe because they've drawn a lot of penises before and got it out of their system : )

- Most penises: HN (but I guess it's my fault for saying there is a filter) followed by b3ta.com and twitter

- Most swastikas: twitter and, somehow, HN.

- Most generous buymeacoffee supporters: tumblr

- Most unexpected source of traffic: substack

- Hardest slashdot effect: bluesky

The filter does not show directly whether it's filtered out or not - it's silent, otherwise the game would be "trick the AI filter" and that's a totally different genre.

Hey, it's my project, nice to see it here! I wanted to do something that I liked in the early times of the web - something small, optimistic and whimsical.

The AI-assisted drawing moderation is inspired by drawafish.com and works quite well at keeping the horse parade family friendly!

https://rybakov.com/ Though it's more about art and UX.

Like a polaroid shot with an actually good lens. Also the whole performative part of making a photograph is of course much richer with an old, manual camera.

Absolutely. Running around with a large format camera (Graflex) with an Instax back (lomograflok) and making photos and immediately giving results back to people changed a lot. Strangers were basically lining up to ask about the camera and have their photo taken. That was a really fun experience, and I noticed how much I missed that excitement - before camera phones took over such moments were much more common. Now I build/3d print my own large and medium format cameras, and that also makes it much more interesting, but the fun of instant photography with an ancient looking camera is just incredible.

Also, Pixel Piranhas: https://rybakov.com/blog/pixel_piranhas/

Which one would you recommend for a novice?

Absolutely, I feel like there is a lack of expressivity on the web – sure, I can upvote, comment, block/report or go away, but that's basically it. I can't frown, toss thing off the table, spit, grunt, roll eyes, look away, listen intently, nervously touch my face or fidget with my keys. At least not in any socially significant way. And as we spend so much time online, our expressiveness also kind of gets filtered down to the tools that are available. Not bodily expression but a few very limited gestures. So maybe we can imagine and create new gestures?

My other project was about a similar question - what if our emotional life gets reduced to the emojis provided to us by facebook? This was from 2018 so AI images were very new then :) https://rybakov.com/blog/zuckerberg_emojis/

And another, more productive approach was to look at gestures available in the physical library of Sitterwerk St.Gallen and translate it to the digital world. This was before tab groups landed in the main browsers (and tbh. the implementation is still not great): https://rybakov.com/blog/open_tabs_are_cognitive_spaces/

Yes, I remember a cute cat living on my desktop, chasing my cursor. Somebody on mastodon also linked to https://kickassapp.com/ - an asteroid game where you destroy DOM elements on websites, a project from 2011.

Somehow the web got very serious lately..

ForkLift is really good.

A few times in my career I've been looking for exactly this role, a place that would value sense and design/ux sensibility as well as an understanding of what is technically possible. Larger companies don't hire for this role, because it does not have a name. You could write “Temple Grandin for the web”, but that is closer to magic, something non-scalable, a position that is created for a specific person. I ended up working in small teams, often in experimental research positions, but that too is very special and esoteric.

If the role had a name, not even a theoretical foundation but simply a name, then and only then it could actually exist.

You can calibrate your gut feeling, though. You do it, every day, as you go through life. You get a gut feeling that a specific person might be difficult, and you can override it consciously.

But I often find that the “gut” feeling is more often right, and the unexplainability of it comes from the fact that it takes hundreds of little things into account and models future interaction outcomes and presents the feeling you will have in the end as ”gut feeling”. Your own black box of neural networks in your gut.

Honestly, my gut is much less welcoming to the idea of me visiting McDonalds than my mouth.

My gut says “I will feel bad”, my mouth screams “tastebuds demand an experience!”