Broadcast Intrusions
GOODLINKS 2023-11-23: MAD Mag Doc / AI Birdsongs / NASA Worm Logo / The Brightest Flash / AI-Larry David / Neurodivergent Talking Heads / Orca Moshpits / Social Justice Kittens and more.
I always loves the synth-gadgets by Teenage Engineering which exist somewhere at the intersection of artful design, DIY-aesthetics and music tech. Their newest toy is the EP–133 KO II sampler composer. It looks gorgeous, comes with a ton of features to fickle with beats and i want one.
The Verge has more on the thing and here a cool tutorial video by a guy with cool hair: Get started with the new EP-133, K.O.II by Teenage Engineering
The Wrong Biennale is an "independent, multicultural, desentralised and collaborative international art biennial" on the web. The "sixth edition entitled o6. Número Seis. Punto presents work by 2000+ artists selected by 160+ curators exhibited in 100+ pavilions and embassies from November 1st, 2023 to March 1st, 2024" and contains a trillion experimental digital artworks. They also have a video site containing experimental shortfilms and animations.
NASA is honoring Richard Danne, the designer of their famed logo which turnes 50 next year. I had no idea that this NASA-typo from 1974 was called by the name "Worm Logo" and its predecessor by the name "Meatball".
"From the veins of an old-school notebook, Pejac has unearthed a pencil and a 24-carat gold masterpiece".
Rhizome has put the talks of their Neural Net Aesthetics panel online featuring Refik Anadol, Maya Man and Eileen Isagon Skyers. A lot of AI art theory and speaking of Refik Anadol about whom i've blogged back when he started to make his first neural net visualizations and whose work, i'm afraid, has not evolved one bit since then. Funny to see the guy now beefing with reknowned art critic Jerry Saltz on TwiX, who's calling his art a "mind-numbing multi-million dollar mediocre spectacle" and "gimmick art" and "a banal screensaver". Team Saltz here.
I updated my post on the OpenAI drama up to the point where Altman got his job back and some rumors about an AGI-breakthrough. But the better summery posts of the hubbub are How Sam Altman plays into Microsoft's ambitions by Paris Marx going more into Microsofts Azure-angle of the story, and The interested normie's guide to OpenAI drama by Max Read, writing about the mess in a much more entertaining way than i ever could. Also, this:
And while everybody's looking at OpenAI and nobody's watching: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team.
Accelerationists often argue that AI may help with climate change and if you're like me, you'd scratch your head at how a power hungry tech like AI would be able to help. Here's one way: Researchers train AI to produce solar cells from perovskite in record time: "Researchers in Australia have harnessed AI to produce solar cells from the mineral perovskite in just a matter of weeks, bypassing years of human labor and human error to optimize the cells." I'm still decel but I'm listening. If you can explain how this advancement, if it becomes commercially feasible, doesn't get eaten up by rebound effects, i'm all ears.
„The mathematics of Neural networks are beautiful if expressed visually.“
Synthetic data for birdwatchers is a thing: AI tool helps ecologists monitor rare birds through their songs: A company has developed an AI model to generate birdsongs of rare species to make digital ornithology tools more reliable.
AI can steal passwords in virtual reality from avatar hand motions: "Researchers trained AIs to analyse each individual person’s virtual avatar hand movements and reconstruct most keystrokes typed by the avatar’s user over the course of 10 or 15-minute typing sessions. They tested the vulnerability in Meta Horizon Workrooms, a virtual office platform provided by Meta." Paper: Can Virtual Reality Protect Users from Keystroke Inference Attacks?
Johann Rehberger created a Commodore 64 GPT which "allows to enter and run simple BASIC programs even."
Unauthorized “David Attenborough” AI clone narrates developer’s life, goes viral: A personal David Attenborough surely will be a huge seller in the future AIA-store (AI-Assistant-store), but i personally would absolutely prefer Larry David.
Anna Wiener in the New Yorker on AI-music pioneer Holly Herndon’s Infinite Art: "The model is the art work". That's what I'm saying.
Grimes' manager gets into AI-music and launched Triniti — The platform for Artistic Intelligence. They want to provide a "voice-cloning and licensing solution that empowers you to own, protect, and monetize your unique voice likeness, while combating AI-driven fraud in the music industry." Reminds me of beforementioned Holly Herndons Spawning.
Can you run Llama on a microcontroller? "Turns out the answer is some version of yes! (...) Language model inference runs on the 800 MHz Arm Cortex-M7 CPU core. Camera image classification uses the Edge TPU and a compiled YOLOv5 model."
"This repository, ai-exploits, is a collection of exploits and scanning templates for responsibly disclosed vulnerabilities affecting machine learning tools."
Youtube introduced it's music tools based on DeepMinds Lyria music model and the first text-2-song examples are technically impressive, but because they only license lame ass mainstream shit, it's musically speaking total crap.
With Dream Track you can generate short tracks "with the AI-generated voice and musical style of artists", while their music tools are the style transfer tech for melodies we've seen a year ago where you can whistle a tune and generate a saxophone-version of it.
All of this is technically interesting but artistically lame. The Dadabots and every AlgoRave-DJ made more interesting tunes five years ago than this stuff which will only get good if people start to hack it and use it in ways it's not supposed to be used. Until then it's just a sophisticated Music Maker Software for off the shelf songs for people who don't like music but who want some lala anyways.
Judge dismisses parts of Sarah Silvermans AI Lawsuit Against Meta: Like with the Stable Diffusion-lawsuits, some parts were dismissed. The dismissals largely revolve around the argument that every AI óutput is a derivative work of its training data. The "allegation that the copying of books for purposes of training its AI model rises to the level of copyright infringement" will move to court.
Meanwhile, Disney Asked Microsoft To Prevent AI Users From Infringing Its Trademarks: "Tributes and parodies of Pixar-style characters generated by Microsoft’s Bing AI imaging tool have drawn the attention of The Walt Disney Company’s legal counsel". Wait until Warner finds out that i can generate infinite Batmen.
SAG-AFTRA’s new contract hinges on studios acting responsibly with AI: "The use of ‘digital doubles’ alone will reduce the number of available jobs, because bigger name actors will have the opportunity to double or triple-book themselves on multiple projects at once." Get ready for a world with no fresh faces on the big screen, and all movies starr Vin Diesel and Scarlett Johansson.
The Opposite of Information: Eryk Salvaggio on how AI images in tandem with Social Media incentives create informational noise to deliver ads.
What the Doomsayers Get Wrong About Deepfakes: "Manipulated media is far from harmless, but its harms have not been epistemic. Rather, they’ve been demagogic, giving voice to what the historian Sam Lebovic calls 'the politics of outrageous expression'. At their best, fakes — gifs, memes, and the like — condense complex thoughts into clarifying, rousing images. But, at their worst, they amplify our views rather than complicate them, facilitate the harassment of women, and help turn politics into a blood sport won by insulting one’s opponent in an entertaining way."
From that article, Joshua Habgood-Cootes paper on Deepfakes and the epistemic apocalypse, and his explainer video:
People are speaking with ChatGPT for hours and are forming "relationships" with the machine. Spike Jonzes Her should be mandatory viewing in preschool.
How's your AI crush doing? Well, I Can't Speak to Viral AI Girlfriend CarynAI Because CEO Is in Jail for Arson. Sucks. Bummer. Frownfaceemoji.
Charles Stross apologizes for inspiring the effective altruism movement and goes deep into the history of rightwing delusions in scifi: We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus. Money quote: "science fiction is fiction".
If you're longtermist, and i am, and you're not taking climate change seriously or figure that the ultimate best way to ensure the thriving of future generations is by ensuring thriving for all currently living people, then you're a baffoon and should be laughed out of the room. Unfortunately, some of those baffoons run powerful billion dollar companies.
Happy Broadcast Intrusion Day! Matt Blaze on Mastodon: “I regard this incident as the best and purest hacking prank in modern history. The combination of sophisticated, meticulous technical planning and execution, utterly juvenile content, essential harmlessness, lack of financial motive, and never getting caught or identified (or later taking credit) remains, in my opinion, unmatched to this day. Pure art.“
So, X sues Media Matters to silence moderation criticism. Some people claim that Musk has a point because Media Matters created an account following nazis and brands and then scrolling until they got an ad and selling this as an everyday user experience. But this is not what the original article says.
The original article claims that X's statement that "brands are now protected from the risk of being next to potentially toxic content" is not true. And it's obviously not, even when proving that false statement required creating a non-everyday user experience. The keyword here is "protected".
However, the new meme is X Users screenshoting ads next to offensive hashtags.
Meanwhile in other social networks trying to silence criticism: Donald Trumps "Truth Social just filed a defamation suit against 20 media outlets for reporting that the company has lost tens of millions of dollars." They are suing for $1.5 billion in damages, which is awe inspiring delusional even by Trumps delusion-standards.
BBC has some first hand accounts from the families suing Meta for creating addictive products for children: ‘I was addicted to social media - now I'm suing Big Tech’: "'I literally was trapped by addiction at age 12. And I did not get my life back for all of my teenage years'. Taylor Little's addiction was social media, an addiction that led to suicide attempts and years of depression (...) The companies, Taylor believes, knowingly put into children's hands highly addictive and damaging products. Which is why Taylor and hundreds of other American families are suing four of the biggest tech companies in the world."
In a recent roundup i had a bit about online vigilantism and how it relates to social justice movements and trolling. Now a new paper on everyday vigilantism found that communal narcissism and sadism as predictors of everyday vigilantism, which just adds to that picture: "In all three studies, communal narcissism and sadism were statistical predictors of everyday vigilantism: The higher participants’ scores on these variables, the more likely they were to monitor the people around them for moral infractions, and to punish those perceived to have committed them".
And it's by far not just social justice advocates doing online vigilantism, it's increasingly becoming a mainstream activity with TikTokers doxxing Gossipers: ‘It’s not a public service, it’s toxic’: welcome to the world of gossip surveillance.
We've "lost control" of West Antarctic melting: A new study says the West Antarctic ice shield is lost and 5m sea level rise is coming, no matter what we do: "It is confronting to think that 5m of sea level rise is already locked in. But we should not see this result as a reason to despair, rather as an urgent call to action."
The Emissions Gap Report 2023: Broken Record – Temperatures hit new highs, yet world fails to cut emissions (again) from the UN Environment Programme "finds that the world is heading for a temperature rise far above the Paris Agreement goals unless countries deliver more than they have promised". And that's more than unlikely: Nations made bold climate pledges. They aren’t close to meeting them.
High temperatures may have caused over 70,000 excess deaths in Europe in 2022.
Finally, some actual good news: China’s emissions set to fall in 2024 after record growth in clean energy: "China’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are set to fall in 2024 and could be facing structural decline, due to record growth in the installation of new low-carbon energy sources."
And even more good news: Portugal just ran on 100% renewables for six days in a row: "For nearly a week, the country of 10 million met customer needs with wind, hydro and solar — a test run for operating the grid without fossil fuels."
Screen use impacts thinking skills and Children's brains shaped by their time on tech devices, review shows: "In a new meta-analysis of dozens of earlier studies, we've found a clear link between disordered screen use and lower cognitive functioning." The meta-study "is an analysis of 33 studies which use neuroimaging technology to measure the impact of digital technology on the brains of children under the age of 12. In total, more than 30,000 participants are included."
This is why i insist on getting screens out of schools, pronto. And parents giving screens to kids are acting irresponsible.
Oliver Waters at 3 Quarks Daily about Sapolsky vs Mitchell on Free Will. I'm team Mitchell and Sapolsky is wrong, completely ignoring emergent properties of neural networks like the mind and the self.
Stop Making Sense: The Most Neurodivergent Concert Film Ever Made
Philip Goff in Aeon on cosmopsychism and why he doesn't buy the multiverse theory: Why our universe can have cosmic purpose without God: "If we can contribute, even in some tiny way, to the good purposes of the whole of reality, this is about as big a difference as we can imagine making."
A Brief 200-Year History of Synesthesia: "Richard Cytowic, a pioneering researcher who returned synesthesia to mainstream science, traces the historical evolution of our understanding of the phenomenon."
A doc on the usual gang of idiots is deerly needed: Mad Magazine Documentary Is in the Works: "The feature-length doc will explore the origins of the magazine, as well as its irreverent, independent, and often incisive humor. (Jessica) Yu will also examine how Mad became a staple of American satire for generations and encouraged readers to question authority. Mad magazine, which is owned by DC, has authorized the doc and granted the filmmaking team exclusive access to its archives."
For the 25th anniversary of Half-Life, Valve released some updates and a documentary to "revisit the game as it existed in its earliest forms, and to talk about how and why it eventually took shape the way it did":
The Muppets Mayhem canceled by Disney+ after one season. Sucks. A series about the Muppets rock band was something somewhat original, but no, ofcourse we can't have nice things. Therefore, at least, Black Mirror renewed for Season 7.
Trailers worth watching: Marvel Studios’ What If…? Season 2, Urkel Saves Santa: The Movie, The Sacrifice Game, Gyeongseong Creature, Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths, Part One, and the Poor Things International Trailer makes this thing look even better than those that came before:
It's that time of the year: The 2024 Social Justice Kittens calendar is here. Liartown USA is Sean Tejaratchi who you know from inspiring the famous viral Banksy letter on advertising, and he's doing those Social Justice Kittens calendars every year for some time now. I love everything about them, expecially the Social Justice Puppies are a nice touch.
Each month features a charming kitten professionally photographed in a heroic pose appropriate to a small cat defiantly speaking out on the hottest social justice issues of the day.
A sassy, uncompromising declaration erases any doubts about each precious cat’s passionate convictions, sense of humor, and tough-as-nails attitude!
Each of these twelve adorable kittens was subject to a week-long, grueling interview process to ensure there was absolutely nothing problematic in its beliefs.
Kurt Vonnegut’s House Is Not Haunted: "The thing about the house, they told us, is that it was not haunted, because ghosts are not real, but also a copy of Player Piano, sitting face out on a bookshelf, kept falling on the head of one of their kids and as a result the family had this inside joke about it being Kurt’s ghost. Obviously, I wanted to see the haunted bookshelf so they showed me the haunted bookshelf. It looked pretty normal."
If you ever wanted to watch a video of someone building a Rowing Boat in the shape of Jeff Bezos head, here's your chance:
Gwern finds that CQK Is The First Unused TLA (Three Letter Acronym): "the first unused one turns out as of 2023-09-29 to be the three-letter acronym 'CQK', with another 2.6k TLA unused, and 393k four-letter acronyms unused. Exploratory analysis suggests alphabetical order effects as well as letter-frequency."
I actually watched the whole thing: A 4.5 Billion Year Video Timeline of Earth in 60 Minutes: "To mark the 10th anniversary of their YouTube channel, Kurzgesagt has released a video timeline of the Earth’s evolution, all 4.5 billion years of it."
Elephants give each other names — the first non-human animals to do so, study claims: "researchers found that African savannah elephants (Loxodonta africana) made vocalizations specific to individuals in their social groups — and that the recipients responded accordingly. In short, elephants appear to have names for one another. This makes them the first non-human animals to address each other in a manner that does not imitate the receiver's own call".
Orcas Sink Another Boat in the Strait of Gibraltar, but don't blare Ozzy Osbourne at them: Orcas Pummel Boat After Crew Plays Heavy Metal As Deterrent. An orca moshpit is just what the world needs right now, because Monaco yacht buyers shrug off climate concerns. Fuck Monaco yacht buyers. Rob Sheridan has a nice Sink The Rich shirt going with both orca memetics and yacht owners.
Icy Oceans Exist on Far-Off Moons. Why Aren’t They Frozen Solid?: "The moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn appear to have subsurface oceans — tantalizing targets in the search for life beyond Earth. But it’s not clear why these seas exist at all."
"Last year the brightest flash of light ever seen in the night sky disturbed Earth's upper atmosphere in a way that has never before detected before, researchers said on Tuesday. A massive burst of gamma rays from an enormous cosmic explosion around two billion light years away arrived at Earth on October 9, 2022, lighting up telescopes around the world. Quickly nicknamed the BOAT — for Brightest Of All Time — the flash lasted just seven minutes but its afterglow was visible to amateur astronomers for seven hours."
The article is somehow not accompanied by M83's This Bright Flash.
feels like we are about to witness a team-up social kittens with orcas. looking forward!!