Gorilla Recap 2

Has it already been 3 weeks since we started this newsletter? How time flies smh...

This week I rolled up my sleeves and made some improvements to the blog. I didn't really like how the header of each post was relatively huge, and changed that in favor of a more compact and information rich outline:

Additionally, now we also got an automatically generated list of headings that should make navigation a little easier. If you noticed, in the past I used to include a little index at the beginning of each post, which would take me a couple of minutes to write out and link up, but there's no need for that anymore. I do need to go back through the old posts though to remove them though.

This list of headings is generated with Tocbot! A little JS tool that can be easily integrated on any page, try it out on your own blog!

Tocbot

Tocbot - Generate a table of contents based on the heading structure of an html document

But wait... there's more! I also got rid of linktree and built my own little about page. Not sure why I didn't do this way earlier 🤔

Thursday post will be about how to make a little list like this! It's actually just a couple of lines of css with some flexbox magic!

In other news it was Openprocessing's 15th birthday! What a wonderful website, I remember finding myself for the first time on the explore page and seeing all the fascinating creations that people had made. I lost myself there for a couple of hours just playing around with the sketches and taking notes on all the things that I wanted to learn how to make.

Gorilla Articles & Sketches

• This week we only got one new post up, but it's a good one! I've been wanting to learn how to turn my sketches into SVGs purely with Javascript, without using any external libs. After asking some gen-art friends about their strategies, Julien Gachadoat chimed in with a complete example of how he does it. There's some super interesting stuff in there, check it here:

SVG export for P5 and the JS Rendering Context

In this post we’ll thoroughly discuss what SVGs are, how they can be displayed on web pages, how we can algorithmically generate them, and how we can export them from our sketches.

Gorilla SunAhmad Moussa

• Expect another post tomorrow, where we put on our art-history hats and dive into the art of Vera Molnar! I wanted to stick to my new biweekly release schedule (Thursday and Sunday), but Vera just did so much cool stuff during her career that it just wouldn't feel right to not provide a complete picture. Hence, see you tomorrow!

Interesting Reads of the Week

RCS: An interview with Dmitri Cherniak

There's also been plenty of cool stuff otherwise! This week I read this Right Click Save interview with Dmitri Cherniak where he recounts the early days of generative art in the NFT space:

An Interview with Dmitri Cherniak

The artist discusses the moment generative art went mainstream with Jason Bailey

RCS

Reading interviews of other generative artists makes me feel incredibly inspired, and I immediately want to get back to working on my own pieces. I haven't been making as much art as I would've liked to in the past weeks since I've been focusing more on the blog and getting it up to speed. I'm very happy with it now though. There's only a couple more things on my list that need to be done and then I'll dedicate myself to making art again. 🤞

‘Godfather of AI’ quits Google with regrets and fears about his life’s work

Back in 2018 I was wrapping up my masters. At the time my studies mainly revolved around ML and AI for the purposes of sound processing. I also did a little bit of image processing, because the models used for these two tasks had a lot of similarity.

That is to say that I had a pretty good understanding of the state of ML at the time. The GAN paper that came out in 2014 for instance, was ground-breaking and enabled solutions to many tasks that we didn't think possible with regular algorithms.

I wouldn't have guessed that the space would adavnce this much however in just a couple of years. I'm not scared of the tools themself at this point, but I'm frightened with the pace at which things have developed. If someone as knowledgeable about the field as Geoffrey Hinton is concerned with the state of things, then these worries must be Justified:

Nobody wants to be another Oppenheimer.

Geoffrey Hinton who won the ‘Nobel Prize of computing’ for his trailblazing work on neural networks is now free to speak about the risks of AI.

The VergeThomas Ricker

Tip of the Week

This week I learned a bit more about CSS combinators, that allow you to set up style relationships between different classes and tags. For instance, if you have class called content that represents the main div of page and want a certain class in this div to have specific style you can do it in the following manner:

.content {
  // some style here
}

.content .text {
  font-size: 20px;
}

This is called the descendant combinator, since the .text style will be applied to any tags with a .text class, no matter in how many other divs they are nested. There's also the child combinator that does the same thing, but only applies the style to direct children:

.content > .text {
  font-size: 20px;
}

CSS just got a bit less mysterious to me.

Combinators - Learn web development | MDN

This is the last section in our lessons on selectors. Next, we’ll move on to another important part of CSS — the cascade, specificity, and inheritance.

MDN Web Docs.logo-m{fill:var(--text-link)}

Music for Reading and Coding

If there's one thing that Youtube does right, then it's its music recommendation algorithm. This week I rediscovered this instrumental Japanese album that I had completely forgotten about.

Okurimono is a japanese term that means as much as gift in english, so you might as well treat your ears and give this one a listen: