Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 01/10/2026always wanted a lil tool for understanding color spaces better kylemcdonald.github.io/color-cube/ 0122
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 28/09/2026it's just a more boring version of @driesdepoorter.be driesdepoorter.be/surveillance...driesdepoorter.beSurveillance Speaker, 2018-2026“Surveillance Speaker ” is an installation about surveillance and artificial intelligence. The artwork showcases in a critical way the latest breakthroughs in computer vision software. “Surveillance S... 150
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 26/09/2026code is definitely different from most human culture. the most similar thing we have is probably the legal system, but even that isn't so similar because it is fundamentally rooted in language not in math. 000
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 26/09/2026we're in a rough part of the process, post-bootstrap and pre-social-integration. but i think these trends (like the internet becoming useless) are cyclic not monotonic. 100
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 26/09/2026oh, wrong doom loop. yes plastering public forums in slop is a kind of environmental disaster. more communication will happen in private for a time. but bots will be deployed in private spaces too, and continue to grow. and i suspect public forums will grow back, with non-slop ai in the mix. 120
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 26/09/2026i would guess it will be web native and compile to typescript, and the frontier version will be used for something like chatgpt work to run internally, never seen by users. developed primarily to satisfy duel objectives of increasing benchmark accuracy and reducing token usage/increasing speed. 130
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 26/09/2026i think we will get better at knowing what we want and communicating it clearly. but we will also go through a long phase of feeling misunderstood when we want anything even slightly unusual. 020
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 26/09/2026yesterday i saw astra casually writing python that dropped all unnecessary white space. i would guess we’re a year from openai releasing a new programming language that was designed by and for LLMs. 230
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 26/09/2026the job market doom loop? my work has always felt precarious, like i have to justify myself in a market that doesn’t need me, so personally i’m not feeling anything different with ai taking over coding. and yes ai will absolutely come up with its own patterns. 220
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 26/09/2026as an artist, my job is not to maintain purity. my job is to survive in a toxic ecosystem without being destroyed by it. and to help others survive. and, maybe, find ways to heal together. this often means accepting a latent complicity. 3170
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 26/09/2026i've done years of work on datacenter emissions, and i believe the environmental harms of LLMs are overstated. are there some terrible people at the helm who are profiting immensely? on this i agree 100% 180
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 26/09/2026i've seen novel problems solved in a way that makes me feel "regurgitation" is an oversimplification. "inefficiency" is improving, and measured against human labor in many cases i would say LLMs are very time and resource efficient. 150
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 26/09/2026IP is a broken system forcing the creativity gift economy into our monetary economy. i'm not interested in buttressing IP. i'm interested in seeing people empowered to make the work they want. i'd rather focus on work displacement than IP theft. 2110
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 26/09/2026i also have this sense that the generating code is becoming an inseparable feature of daily life. it's so obvious it's not even worth mentioning. "artist working with code" is like saying "artist working with physical matter". 3201
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 26/09/2026fat's not dead! we have a signal chat and we're all keeping in the loop with each others solo albums ;) 130
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 26/09/2026i'm not "working with code" anymore. i'm thinking in systems, and writing in natural language. i've only been programming for 25 years. any code i write is going to be vastly inferior to a frontier model. 1234
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 26/09/2026i tried opus 5.5. for 15 years my bio has said "artist working with code". today i changed it to "artist". 6452
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 19/08/2026i once walked a docent through an installation, he asked how it worked and i rattled off the internals to nods of understanding. but then i said "it also has a raspberry pi inside" and his eyes got so so big. i realized that he thought i meant an actual pie. 1385
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 24/07/2026thank u tabloids for caring about climate change www.dailymail.com/news/article...dailymail.comHow World Cup gas-guzzling private jets pumped out super-pollutersRoughly 92,000 private jets flew in and out of host cities this World Cup to match the annual emissions of more than 34,000 cars. 020
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 22/07/2026let this be a lesson to every artist doing antifascist work: your art will ultimately be used by fascists to argue in favor of fascism. thank you @regret.bsky.social for writing about this ♡ 050
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 22/07/2026only problem is: no one is using the site, and face recognition doesn't even work like this. 141
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 22/07/2026the federal govt is literally spamming icespy.org in filing after filing because their agents are soooo scared to be identified by an art project 130
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 22/07/2026new article about icespy.org! DOJ has been using my 2018 art project as justification for arguing with states that ICE agents need to be allowed to wear masks 😩 172
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 20/07/2026no single tool or art project will "fix" climate change. our job as imaginative people with technical skills is to form a distributed but aligned ecosystem of creative interventions that identify harms, care and repair, and replace toxic patterns 182
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 20/07/2026i also built a visualizer to show some of these patterns, heavily inspired by "flight patterns" by @aaronkoblin.bsky.social 151
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 20/07/2026we built a tool to traffic private jet emissions during the world cup and other events. it's pretty bad 🤮 1235
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 09/07/2026absolutely fascinated by what fable counts as a biohazard 580
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 08/07/2026i literally laughed when i read the elegant solution. it's so obvious in retrospect. and i knew it was there, i just couldn't quite see it. 070
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 08/07/2026i've had a pet technical problem for ten years. i know the solution space inside and out. a few months ago gpt-5.5 made a massive leap that broke new ground, but the solution was not elegant. last night, fable found the elegant solution 😳 2100
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 26/06/2026the algorithm is really simple: 1. draw binary numbers as a sequence of black and white pixels 2. count up, placing them horizontally on whichever stack (row) is shortest 3. reset the count at some maximum the results are surprisingly complex 030
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 26/06/2026there are 1024 unique designs, and every item has the seed printed on the back near the collar 110
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 26/06/2026this piece came from work i was doing during grad school to reverse engineer the mp3 specification, but some of these same binary patterns show up behind the scenes in my work on "light leaks" 100
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 26/06/2026it's my first time making merch! binary stacks (2008) knit shirts and sweaters now available in collaboration w glitchwear.store 🤗 180
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 11/06/2026just had a flashback to approximately 2004 when digital photography bloggers discovered unsharp mask. those images felt so intensely detailed. i didn't have that feeling until i saw a retina display 5 years later, then HDR displays 10 years after that. 050
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 27/05/2026if you’ve ever wondered what my salary is, @businessinsider.com just published it along with some info about my apocalypse early warning system www.businessinsider.com/programmer-a...businessinsider.comI vibe-coded a billionaire jet tracker to warn people about a possible apocalypse. Then the data started getting weird.Kyle McDonald's jet tracker exposes wealth inequality by monitoring private jets, and questions who has access to critical information. 0161
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 30/04/2026i've never used times new roman for anything but i felt like prof or style was the way to go. the future of the web will either look handmade, or it will be ai slop contemporary-home-computing.org/prof-dr-style/ 1531
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 30/04/2026there was a small spike with the "whole civilization will die" tweet. i wanted to respond to recent trends in the polymarketification of everything, abundant vibecoded dashboard slop that makes us feel like we know more than ever while also having less power than ever. 4534
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 30/04/2026 it uses the last year of data to identify deviations from baseline 1360
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 30/04/2026i made an app for tracking whether the oligarchs are actually fleeing city centers ews.kylemcdonald.net 12555174
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 21/04/2026we probably even made eye contact as some of the few gaijin on site 😂 see you next time! 230
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 21/04/2026we recorded it and annotated it ourselves with real fencers, we also recorded motion capture data and simulated it with photorealistic renders 140
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 21/04/2026local neural nets are necessary for analysis given the immense amount of data that has to be ingested, all the visualizations are done using traditional computer graphics 010
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 21/04/2026extremely helpful feedback, it’s mostly men working on this system and i’m not sure how this hasn’t come up before. i’ll pass it on 🙏 110
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 21/04/2026the timeline of the system’s use in different events is available on the rhizomatiks website, except for use at the olympics. it changed drastically each time research.rhizomatiks.com/s/works/fenc... additionally, the version that will be shown this weekend was improved specifically for this weekendresearch.rhizomatiks.comFencing tracking and visualization systemThis website explains the process of our development from 2012 to the present. 210
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 21/04/2026research.rhizomatiks.com/s/works/fenc...research.rhizomatiks.comFencing tracking and visualization system 031
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 21/04/2026the version i worked on does not show right of way, but they may have updated it since—this was at the top of the to do list, even though it is very contentious to detect right of way automatically. anything that closes the circuit is shown. 000
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 20/04/2026the lineup is really world-class, this is a once in a lifetime event www.axs.com/events/13087...axs.comWorld Fencing League Debut - Los Angeles - Shrine Expo Hall - Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 05:00 PM - AXS USGet tickets for World Fencing League Debut at Shrine Expo Hall in Los Angeles on Sat, 25 April 2026 - 05:00 PM at AXS.com 2431
Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social · 20/04/2026the team at rhizomatiks handled the hardware, visualization, & data collection. i handled blade tracking, which meant training multiple custom convolutional neural networks and deploying them across 24 GPUs to track the entire curve of the 1px wide weapons at 60fps in realtime 4882
