Come Together
Goodlinks 2023/10/03: Toxic Avenger / AI-Cobain covers Weird Al covering Nirvana / 2 Girls 1 DallE / 4chan turns 20 / Disco Lights visualize Neural Network / The Kleptones at Glastonbury and much more
Amiga Demoscene group Melon Dezign was hired back in 2000 by The Beatles to create some Flash Animation based musicvideos for their new website, and the one for Come Together became quite a legendary milestone in flash based animation and webdesign. Keep in mind that back then, 3D on the web was unheard of, even in a proprietary format like Shockwave Flash, and those renderings of The Beatles blew everybodys socks off. That animation is now being emulated at the Internet Archive together with their other flashbased animation for I Feel Fine.
All of which reminds me of this animated Beatles clip of them lipsynching Dead Kennedys California Uber Alles, which made the rounds on the blogs circa fifteen years ago. Here's both clips:
Weird A.I. Yankovic, a cursed deep dive into the world of voice cloning: In which Andy Baio reverse satirizes Weird Al Yankovics joke-versions of popsongs using AI-clones of singers voices. He "made the questionable decision to have A.I. Kurt Cobain sing Smells Like Nirvana, Weird Al’s 1992 parody of Smells Like Teen Spirit." Read and listen to the whole thing, it's absolutely worth it.
Here's AI-Curt Cobain singing Weird Als cover of Nirvana and it sounds exactly as you'd expect:
New roleplaying chatbots promise to indulge your sexual fantasies: New sextbots with audio-features are sold as interactive "audio erotica", which is just another name for Samantha from Her. I've written my share of critiques on the subject, but the makers do have a good point here: "The characters are very respectful and affirming of your desires, which could make this function helpful for people who are overcoming sexual trauma, relationship abuse, or body image issues". This may be true, but it may also be an addictive self-caging technology further isolating people.
AI Deepfakes used in Slovakia to spread disinformation ahead of election: One of the videos featured a leader of the progressive party discussing to buy votes" and it turns out, the progressive party lost, despite being the frontrunner. I'm not saying the deepfakes swayed the outcome, but it surely can't be ruled out.
Amazon will use real user conversations to train Alexa AI model. Because ofcourse they will.
"LeoLM, the first comprehensive suite of German-language Foundation Language Models trained with HessianAI on their new supercomputer 42!" As a born and raised hessian, i welcome this bembel overlord trained on an äppelwoi-green Supercomputer. (Äppelwoi means Apple-wine, it comes in a light yellowish green and is served in a Bembel. Now you know.)
This is why Microsoft is going nuclear to power its AI ambitions: Energy consumption 'to dramatically increase' because of AI.
2 Girls 1 Cup, the SFW-DallE-version. I wonder why nobody tried Goatse with ControlNet. (If you don't know what these words mean, don't look them up.)
AI forecasting memes in the fashion industry: ‘You’ve got to be data-driven’: the fashion forecasters using AI to predict the next trend. I don't give a hot damn about the fashion industry, the pinacle of western decadence, but i'm very interested in memetics and unfortunately for me, the "trends" in fashion are among the most visible forms of memetics anywhere. Now they use computer vision to analyse runway images, combined with data from social media to try and predict the morphing memetic fields of fashion. Also, they sell this as a way to reduce carbon emissions, which is just greenwashing.
Much of this sounds hogwash to me. Memetic fields morph in unpredictable ways and depend on very random factors. More often than not new trends emerge completely out of the leftfield, because one essential driver for aesthetic joy is surprise, a truism every artist and every creative intuitively knows by the trade. No predictable pattern in data ever surprised anyone, which is one of the reason why AI developers are hiring poets now to make their algorithms sound more original and fresh.
On the other hand, as AI is perfectly suited to automatize bullshit jobs, and the fashion industry is the most perfect embodiment of bullshit ever, this is a match made in heaven.
Robin Williams Daughter Zelda Criticizes Using AI to Re-create His Voice: Another example of dead artists brought "back to life" with AI-tech and without anyone consent, the first still being illustrator Kim Jung Gi, whose drawing style was immediately turned into a SD-finetune after his death.
There's already companies juggling the rights to the likeness of deceased actors and with the tons of available material, it's a nobrainer that the number of undead AI-actors will rise, licensed and unlicensed. These companies talk about a "decreasing need for actors" as if that’s a good thing, because yay the world needs less creative people hooray, which is why everybody should support the writers and actors unions in their strikes due to such developments, which are decidedly anti-art and anti-culture. AI-dudes seem to forget that the holographic Elvis in Blade Runner 2049 is not an endorsement, but a symbol of a declining culture frozen in time.
Grifter-teeth from nonconsensual Deepfakes: Tom Hanks says AI version of him used in dental plan ad without his consent.
Authors shocked to find AI ripoffs of their books being sold on Amazon, a new strategy from AI-bookspammers abusing Amazons Direct Publishing for Kindle.
Another major copyright lawsuit for genAI companies incoming: ‘Biggest act of copyright theft in history’: thousands of Australian books allegedly used to train AI model: "The Australian Publishers Association confirmed to Guardian Australia on Wednesday that as many as 18,000 fiction and nonfiction titles with Australian ISBNs appeared to be affected by the copyright infringement".
Related: AI from a legal perspective, an analysis from Van Lindberg, a lawyer specializing in IP and open source. He's saying that AI training amounts to fair use, but that outputs can be clearly infringing on copyrights.
Neural Network controlling a robot dog, visualized as disco lights
Yes, there's a paper about the use of commercial disco balls for astronomical observation of the sun because they can work like pinhole cameras: Why every observatory needs a disco ball.
This is Financial Advice: I haven't watched Dumb Money yet, that movie about memestocks and the GameStop run two years ago, but the title get’s to the point. As fun as it was back then, we shouldn't forget that is was also, well, pretty dumb and i'm not sure if i really want dumbness to be an inherent concept prevailing in finance at large — at least more than it already is.
The fantastic Dan Olson whose YT channel Folding Ideas you should definitely follow, and if only for his viral takedowns of crypto and the metaverse, now takes apart meme stocks driven by socmed frency:
Erin Kissanes writes an meticulous account of Facebooks irresponsible engagement in Myanmar, which lead to thousands of deaths: Part I: The Setup and Part II: The Crisis.
She quotes singer Kyaw Kyaw from the burmese punk band Rebel Riot saying "Technology is like a bomb in Myanmar", which reminds me when i was blogging about the emerging punk scene in myanmar and a subsequent documentary called Yangon Calling which focussed on the band. This was years before Facebook helped social media outrage to spread during the Myanmar military's "clearance operations" which lead to genocide of the Rohinga muslims and fucked up the county even more than it was before. I hope the punks are alright.
4chan turns 20. Hacker News thread. Despite some popular misconceptions, i never was a pro-chan guy, never hang there and never found it interesting, except for the clearly psychopathic tendencies of anonymous swarm-intelligence you can observe there.
Unfortunately for all of us, 4chan is an important piece of webculture history, but I refrain from congrats. Besides some mildly funny early memes, not much good came from chan culture, which gave us not only LOLcats and Rickrolling and some mildly effective anon-protests, but also stochastic rightwing terrorism and mass shootings, "weaponized autism", peer surveillance and Qanon. Fuck the chans, and i hope it won't last another 20. Sincerely, a zerotoleranceforinternetpsychos guy.
404 Media talks to the victims of the Tiktok-Dox-account: "all it takes is one random person on the internet to decide to target you and lead a crowd in your direction".
While many, if not all, early net activists in their work focus on state surveillance, i always had the bad feeling that more harm actually is done by peer surveillance and the fact that the web is throwing everyone into a new public sphere in which nobody can escape they watching eyes and everybody is always exposed to the merciless judgement of everyone, the difference to state surveillance being that there is no accountability to the actions of the swarm.
With Open Source Intelligence Tech becoming more and more available and new technology being able to, say, extract audio from video, it is just a matter of time before we use this stuff turn our world into an inverted Benthams Panoptikum, where not one institutionalized observer watches everyone, but the all seeing eye is available to all of us.
What was Elon Musk’s strategy for Twitter?: In a development which surprises noone, Musks "strategy" for the Twitter-acquisition seems to follow the suggestions of an 2022 article from hard rightwingers the book, accounting to be a "declaration of war to the elites".
Here's my Mastodon: https://sigmoid.social/@rawx and here's my Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/rawx.bsky.social.
Japanese Scientists Find Microplastics in the Clouds Above Mount Fuji: After microplastics everyhwere, from the depths of the Mariana trench to the snow in Antarctica, from human hearts to brains, they now found microplastics in the sky. I ironically use a hashtag for all things plastic called plasticplanet and it really is not very ironic anymore. Plastic is everywhere.
Parts of the world have already grown too hot for human survival: Grist looks at a new study about the "noncompensable heat threshold" which is reached before Wet Bulb Temperature and can lead to death during heatwaves.
Michael Mann, who calculated the famed hockeystick-graph, has a new book out: ‘We’re not doomed yet’: climate scientist Michael Mann on our last chance to save human civilisation.
Autumn heat continues in Europe after record-breaking September: Party like you just don't care: "Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Poland and Switzerland have all experienced their hottest Septembers on record, with unseasonably high temperatures set to continue into October, in a year likely to be the warmest in human history."
The hottest summer in human history – a visual timeline
The Guardian reviews the new biography of Daniel Dennett, for whom "our brains and bodies are machines that process information and the self is not a locatable entity but what he calls 'a centre of narrative gravity', a story we tell ourselves about our experiences. Or rather, stories: we continually revise our narratives about our experiences as more data is processed."
My personal theory of consciousness (everybody should have one) is that it is akin to the moiré effect every graphic designer knows. When you layer patterns above patterns, new patterns emerge. If you do this enough times, those moirés bring about their own aesthetics and phenomena, which can be observed and are more than the sum of it's parts.
This is what consciousness is to me: Patterns of firing neurons, layered on top of each other, resulting in an emergent composition which we learned to direct with attention and which became more and more complex over time.
Even if a Leading Theory of Consciousness Known as Integrated Information Theory is Wrong, That Doesn’t Mean it’s Pseudoscience, Argues Anil Seth.
Songs That Stop on the Word "STOP" Supercut
Rolling Stones Oral History of School of Rock with Richard Linklater, Sarah Silverman and Jack Black. I haven't watched it in ages, but i remember loving the movie and everything Jack Black made ever since.
Epic Games Sells Bandcamp Amid Layoffs to music marketing company Songtradr, which says it will "continue to operate Bandcamp as a marketplace and music community with an artist-first revenue share". They did not comment on questions regarding the highly valuable Bandcamp Daily, which i used extensively when i was a heavy user of the platform. Bandcamp is the best platform for music out there, and i hope it won't get enshittificated by marketers.
I'm not sure if this is what we need but Daft Punk announced a drumless edition of Random Access Memories and yeah, cool, okay, fine.
The Kleptones published their DJ-Sets from UKs Glastonbury Festival and, as everything Kleptones, they are a blast if you're into eclecticism and mashups.
Here's Set 1 from Thursday 4pm: Flac, MP3, Soundcloud, Mixcloud
and Set 2 from Friday 12 noon: Flac, MP3, Soundcloud, Mixcloud.
If you don't know The Kleptones, you're missing out, being one of the best acts to come out of the mashup craze of the early-mid-aughts twenty years ago. I remember blogging about their 24 Hours album, them shredding Flaming Lips into Yoshimi Battles The Hip-Hop Robots, or their fusion of Queens rock history with all kinds of Hip Hop-tracks in A Night At The Hip-Hopera. If you dig early Soulwax and their Too Many Deejays-series, you'll freak out at The Kleptones.
From Jomny Carbnter on Bluesky: "The Mystery of the Leaping Fish a movie from 1916 about a detective who uses cocaine to solve every problem from waking up to winning at checkers to winning in fights. He literally snorts, injects, and smokes cocaine 15 times in a 20 minute movie and his name is Coke Ennyday." Yes, the cop has a chest-belt full of cocaine-syringes.
Just in time for Halloween, the impecable Red Letter Media review The Friday the 13th Series. This comes in handy because i am about to rewatch in its entirety for this spooky season. (In my house, it's always spooky season, but you know what i mean.)
Trailers worth watching: Sofia Coppolas Priscilla, Leave The World Behind, and the first teaser for The Toxic Avenger-remake, whichs original movies are another rewatch on my list. As a sweet easter egg, they used the skyline from the Troma Vanity Logo as a background for the news segments here. This remake comes from Legendary Pictures with Lloyd Kaufman producing it.
This looks great and i can’t wait for the new Toxie:
Discovery of ‘Jumbos’ may herald new astronomical category: JWST discovered new dual planet systems traveling through space without a sun.
Tesla Factory Accused of Displaying Swastikas and Other Racist Material: You don't want to own a car from a company where Swastikas are graffitied on "vehicles rolling off the production lines", do you?
Restoration Magic is a pretty cool Tiktok-feed with a guy restoring everyday objects like Candles, crushed soda cans or cooked Spaghetti.