#mandy brown

[lucybellwood]

"Making systems resilient is fundamentally at odds with optimization, because optimizing a system means taking out any slack. A truly optimized, and thus efficient, system is only possible with near-perfect knowledge about the system, together with the ability to observe and implement a response. For a system to be reliable, on the other hand, there have to be some unused resources to draw on when the unexpected happens, which, well, happens predictably." (Deb Chachra, How Infrastructure Works, p. 209) Another way to look at this is that you cannot optimize for resilience. Resilience requires a kind of elasticity, an ability to stretch and reach but then to return, to spring back into a former shape—or perhaps to shapeshift into something new if the circumstances require it. Resilience is stretchy where optimization is brittle; resilience invites change where optimization demands continuity.

—Mandy Brown, from her post "Against Optimization" on A Working Library

[celluloidrainbow]

HOW TO GROW A TIGER LILY (2019) dir. Anthony Aguiar Lily, a photographer riddled with crippling anxiety, tries to over come the manipulative people in her life while being stalked by a mysterious woman. Over the course of a day, unexpected twists and turns deliver surprises Lily never anticipated. (link in title)

[binsofchaos]

[dubbatrubba]

Being certain about uncertainty

This short essay by Mandy Brown has 777 words. (I counted… OK, Microsoft Word did.) I’m lucky it was brought to my attention by one of the many newsletters I try to read each week/month. (I wish I could remember which one… ) The essay is about dealing with uncertainty. And how uncertainty is the only thing that makes life possible. Our awareness of life, of its great variety and beauty and…

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[themirrorofink]

Accountability sinks

In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies argues that organizations form “accountability sinks,” structures that absorb or obscure the con

"...structures that absorb or obscure the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held directly accountable for it."

[dreamingmappist]

Happy birthday, A Working Library.

But if there’s anything I know about practicing it’s that it isn’t about rules or consistency or scarcity or god forbid optimizing: it’s about coming back. A practice is built on the movement of return.

There are books here that have taken up residence in my mind. Or perhaps more accurately, I have lived long residencies within them, have curled up under their eaves and stretched out on the porch, have explored the basements and attics and crawl spaces.

[jarrettfuller]

Bots | A Working Library

Mandy Brown on the implications of bots taking on more and more responsibilities in our digital lives:

Will Oremus approaches the coming age of AI with somewhat more circumspection. He notes, among other concerns, that language interfaces are necessarily more opaque. As an example, Oremus asked his Echo a seemingly innocuous question, “what’s a kinkajou?”, to which Alexa promptly responds: “A kinkajou is a rainforest mammal of the family Procyonidae.” But Alexa didn’t say where that information came from, nor did it provide any opportunity to interrogate the source’s credibility. After some digging, Oremus was able to uncover that Alexa was quoting the Wikipedia page. In a browser, the same question would have surfaced Wikipedia, of course, but it would have done so transparently, and it would also have located many other pages; plus the Wikipedia page itself would have included the page’s history, which might have revealed where there were disputes about the information given. Alexa’s placid, Majel Barret-esque response presumes a certainty of truth that may be fine for generic questions about kinkajous but are unlikely to hold up to many other topics.

And this excellent paragraph on gendering these bots as female:

In fact, it’s not hard for me to imagine a straight line (or at least a moderately meandering one) between a generation of bot makers who anoint their creations with gendered names and personalities and the impossible reverie that is the singularity: could the very notion of the singularity be the embodiment of the oppressors fear that the oppressed will one day rise up and slay them? Perhaps the attention some men apparently spend on wondering whether AI will eventually surpass them should be instead spent on noticing the fact that women already have.

[robertogreco]

These rococo days of the web have been sadly lost to capricious corporate owners, and newer platforms almost seem to have recoiled from them. (I could write a whole other letter about the neutered minimalism common on a lot of platforms today, but I digress.) But I think that history is telling: in that, given a canvas on which to play, many people opted to express themselves with color and image, often spending much more effort there then on the words, and often in surprising ways.

Mandy Brown, “Hypertext for All” (I’ve previously quoted that wonderful essay.)