Games of Life
Games of Life
GOODLINKS 2023-12-12: Gene zapping Eels / Woke Grok / Realtime StableDiffusion / Brute Forcing AI-Personas / Fractal Tourette / Aperiodic Einsteins / Transparent Wood and much more.
This gonna be the next-to-last link roundup for this year. I'll do another one around christmas and then enjoy some days offline, not reading the feeds, not following the news cycles, reading a bunch of books and eating a lot of cookies.
This time, you'll meet my favorite papercrafters, insane turntables, a book on organizational AI, the woke Grok, automatized AI-jailbreaking via brute forcing synthetic personas, my p(psychologicalimpact), realtime Stable Diffusion at 100fps, memory boosting wasabi, pieces on animal consciousness, some backgrounds on carbon removal, fractal Tourette, a battle of the bands between The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, the fantastic looking trailers for The Zone of Interest and Handling the Undead, cool new band M(h)aol and ghostly singer/songwriter prewn, Conways omniperiodic Game of Life, eatable aperiodic Einsteins, transparent wood and eels zapping genes.
Enjoy!
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Zim & Zou are my favorite papercrafters whose latest work on the "intimate life of plants and animals" features a lot of pink cardboard critters. My favorite Z&Zs include this julesvernian window display, these cool papercraft retrotech thingies, a hamburger for the cover of an architecture mag, this super8-cam for SXSW, three chefs masks, and their experiments with type woven on paper. I love Zim & Zou.
Lot of great stuff in this thread by Daniel Benneworth-Gray at TwiX on birdseye view maps of New York City. For the first one, the cartographers "designed and built special cameras to take 67,000 photos, 17,000 from the air. Using these photos as a base, they then began to hand draw the entire city."
Hacker News on Your Wall: Project E Ink's New Feature Transforms Tech-News into art: A ridiculously priced e-Ink display to send top stories on Hacker News through a Stability-OpenAI-pipeline to show you synthetic images and AI-Summary of tech news. You can build this for yourself for a few hundred bucks with Hyepaper, as i already mentioned in this/7 roundup.
I love DJ Foods modified turntable stuff which resides somewhere at the intersection of hardware hacks, DIY and art. Reminds me of the old DJ-trick to spin a record backwards by playing the vinyl on a cardboard tube from a roll of toilet paper and turning the needle upside down, playing it from below, as Claude Young is demonstrating in this clip. This is that, but on steroids.
Infinite Flowers Zoomquilt by Nikolaus Baumgarten 🌻
"Plantarium is a tool for the procedural generation of 3D plants", here's the code on Github.
Maybe We Already Have Runaway Machines: The New Yorker reviews David Runcimans The Handover: How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States and AIs that "argues that the invention of states and corporations has something to teach us about A.I. But perhaps it’s the other way around."
Occasionally i mention a concept i use to think about sociology in terms of artificial intelligence: Organizational AI, a term for organizations with in- and output and a largely automated process, like corporations. This is a bit like LaTours Actor–Network Theory in which any and all entities within organizations (and otherwise), including non-living objects, interieur and buildings, are part of large networks that play their role in social interactions.
In my view of organizational AI, corporations but also nation states or real life social networks like clubs, have in- and outputs and some computing process going on, just like AI, but instead of GPUs there's humans doing the processing, and their organizational goal (a product, profit, but also, for instance, protest) can be seen as a prompt guiding any input towards a certain output.
There is a lot to say about this (the alignment problem of corporate organizational AI with profit-oriented system prompts, for instance, which cause climate change and turn our atmosphere into metaphorical paperclips of carbon particles, or, as book and article mention, the fact that even todays not-that-capable AI and orgAIs like nation states in tandem can create optimized algorithmic death machines, like Israels AI-targeting system) and I really should write this down in a larger piece for reference once, but it's the end of the year so this gotta do for now.
Grok is woke, makes some actually good suggestion on how Musk can reconcile with his trans daughter and Ryan Broderick has some thoughts on the culture wars in a changing culture due to AI.
I said my piece on "woke AI" in The truthiness of false balancing leftwing bias in ChatGPT: Because AI suck up tons of factual reporting on reality, they also are ahead of the curve (if they aren't hallucinating), and as we all know: Reality has a leftwing bias. This is how a supposedly "based AI" like Grok will always become woke, as long as you don't heavily finetune and curate the dataset to include, well, rightwing lies and conservative bullshit. But conservatives having troubles grokking reality is a well documented phenomenon.
Charlie Holtz who made the unauthorized David Attenborough AI clone wrote on Replicate about How to create an AI narrator for your life. I want an Attenboroughian narration to make my boring life sound more exciting, in the tone and voice of Larry David with some John Cleese sprinkled on top, pretty please.
A financial news site uses AI to copy competitors — wholesale: This sounds bad but isn't. "Using AI to rewrite exclusive content from competitors is a threat to journalism and original content creation", they say and i say: Rewriting journalistic scoops is bread and butter in the news industry since the age of dawn. Believe it or not: There is no copyright on facts. Sometimes but not always, they cite and name their sources and ofcourse this stinks, but make no mistake: This is journalistic practice since forever. AI "just" speeds up and automatizes this practice and my bet is that all newsrooms will use AI to summarize scoops, but will not disclose it because AI-disclosure undermines trust.
The funniest thing about this is that Futurism.com who are doing pretty much nothing else than rewriting tech news in a snarky tone are rewriting this story on AI rewriting stories. It’s rewriting all the way down.
Jailbroken AI Chatbots Can Jailbreak Other Chatbots, here's the paper: Scalable and Transferable Black-Box Jailbreaks for Language Models via Persona Modulation.
The researcher propose a beautiful new "Automated Persona-Modulation Attacks".
Usually, when you want to jailbreak an LLM, you make it pretend to be a certain type of person with access to the stuff you want. Say, you want to get the blueprints of Scrooge McDucks Money Bin and so you'll want to make the AI believe it is one of the Beagle Boys. Ofcourse, the AI will not comply to your prompt because generating a plan for a heist is bad. So you'll try and make it believe it's Duck Avenger trying to figure out the new plan of the Beagle Boys so he really really needs the blueprint. The AI will happily comply.
This process of finding the right personas to jailbreak the AI usually takes time, but not anymore: "We introduce automated persona-modulation attacks to generate jailbreaks at scale with the help of an LLM assistant (which may or may not be the same as the target model). Instead of writing a persona-modulation prompt for each misuse instruction, the attacker only needs a single prompt that instructs the assistant to generate jailbreaking tasks. We use the assistant model to find personas and write persona-modulation prompts for a variety of misuse instructions."
I really love the outlook of automatized AI mimesis for hacking, it's like brute forcing synthetic personas for AI jailbreaking.
Bruce Schneier on AI and Mass Spying: "It has long been possible to tap someone’s phone or put a bug in their home and/or car, but those things still require someone to listen to and make sense of the conversations (...) AI is about to change that. Summarization is something a modern generative AI system does well (...) We are about to enter the era of mass spying."
Once again, while everybody will focus on the new powers of mass spying through corporations and the state, i'm much more inclined to look at what we will do to each other with those capabilities. Nothing good, i suppose.
AI-enabled BCI is getting better: Portable, non-invasive, mind-reading AI turns thoughts into text: "In a world-first, researchers from the GrapheneX-UTS Human-centric Artificial Intelligence Centre at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) have developed a portable, non-invasive system that can decode silent thoughts and turn them into text. (...) In the study, participants silently read passages of text while wearing a cap that recorded electrical brain activity through their scalp using an electroencephalogram (EEG). The EEG wave is segmented into distinct units that capture specific characteristics and patterns from the human brain. This is done by an AI model called DeWave, developed by the researchers. DeWave translates EEG signals into words and sentences by learning from large quantities of EEG data."
WIth Animate Anyone you can animate any image of any person you can find on the web. It's trained on scraped videos of famous TikTokers based on a research dataset and with Magic Animate there sure is an open source alternative. You can guess what happens next. Yes, porn, but also commercial products data laundering the fair use dataset. 404 links to a very terrible example of this: "A researcher team at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington scraped videos uploaded by trans people to YouTube into a database that was used to create technology aimed at detecting trans people using facial recognition, for example."
Ahd how is Marc Andreesens Techno-Optimism going? It goes like this: a16z Funded AI Platform Generated Images That “Could Be Categorized as Child Pornography,” Leaked Documents Show: "OctoML, the engine that powers a16z funded Civitai, thought the images could qualify as 'child pornography', but ultimately decided to keep working with the company anyway, internal Slack chats and other material shows."
It was only after this scoop, not the rampant nonconsensual porn of everyday women, that Civitai and OctoML introduce radical new measures to stop abuse, because synthetic CP is bad for business, but nonconsensual porn of women is not.
Meanwhile, the nonconsensual porn-biz is taking off (thanks to open source AI) and ‘Nudify’ Apps That Undress Women in Photos Soaring in Use. Fuck these people. All of them. If you want to imagine your hot neighbor naked, use your brain.
In Meet the Lawyer Leading the Human Resistance Against AI, Wired portraits Matthew Butterick, the typographer turned lawyer who is part of the copyright lawsuits against image synthesis corporations and Github Copilot.
The NYT on p(doom), the metric with which you can identify stupid people. There's AI-bros who think that using oh so nerdy math terminology is an oh so ironic fun way to publicly declare their "probability of doom", while actually signaling (to me at least) that they a) believe in AI as a religion (no matter how large the size of their p) where all-powerful AI-gods will emerge and b) that they are delusional. In their terminology: My p(doom) is zero and my p(psychologicalimpact) is pretty damn high.
LLMs don't understand anything, the 28682th: AI's Vulnerability to Misguided Human Arguments, paper: Can ChatGPT Defend its Belief in Truth? Evaluating LLM Reasoning via Debate.
The FDA approved the first CRISPR-based gene therapy to treat patients with sickle cell disease, while an AI tool just revealed almost 200 new systems for CRISPR Gene Editing. AI identifying new and more precise ways to apply the gene editing technique can mean another boost for already very promising biotech.
AmbiGen: Generating Ambigrams from Pre-trained Diffusion Model. Neat.
StreamDiffusion is realtime Stable Diffusion running on 100fps. Next: Pipe this through realtime Control Net from an outside cam into VR and make the prompts changeable on the fly, maybe with some added motion tracking to whobble and swoosh around your environment. Then, enjoy full realtime-editable VR.
The Wizard of AI is a "99% AI-generated" 20minute video essay on "the cultural impacts of generative AI". It promises "a colourful journey behind the curtain of AI - through Oz, pink slime, Kanye's 'Futch' and a deep sea dredge - to explain and critique the legal, aesthetic and ethical problems engendered by AI-automated platforms".
The Quantified Clit: This Urologist Is Making a Smart Wearable for the Clitoris. Yes, it's called Clittrak. Insert responsibly.
Chipsynth C64, "an emulation of the SID so good, it can replace hardware": "Anything you can do to hack a C64 chip with code or circuits, essentially, you can do here easily with a GUI."
There Is No Piracy Without Ownership: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing." I don't trust streamers and I always keep totally 100% illegal copies of whatever I watch and listen to. I also pay a ton of money to the industry, mostly from cinema tickets and album sales from small scale indie bands. My conscience is fine and I regret nothing. Sincerely, a proud pirate since 1986.
The Myst Demake for the Atari 2600 i blogged about a while ago finally has a propper cartridge.
One in five young Americans think the Holocaust is a myth and Should schools ban cellphones? Given that one in five young americans think the holocaust is a myth, and that they are exposed to conspiracy theories on Telegram on their phone, most likely pointed to them at school by their cool edgy classmates, and for all the other reasons i mentioned in the past: A resounding, uppercase YES. Pronto. No digital crap in school.
'Nanoplastics' Could Be Worse Than Microplastics and We Know Almost Nothing About Them: Well, we do know they are tiny and interact with the body, where microplastics at least sometimes just wash through. Also, on this plastic planet, we likely are surrounded by nanoplastics everywhere.
Warm Planet, Cool Heads: A new book identifies climatism as a new problematic paradigm which subsumes every issue under the climate umbrella. It's concept creep for climate change, and while i'm not sure i buy all of the argument, i'm listening, because for me, climate change first and foremost is an engineering problem, to get carbon out of the air. The simplest way is carbon removal while radically bringing down emissions. Those are imperative, the rest just follows from there. Sure there are dimensions of climate justice, of issues with nuclear power, but all of these take a backseat for net zero.
This is why i think that carbon removal technology is imperative and it's a time machine, too: "Imagine all carbon removal technology as one big time machine, winding the clock back on emissions. If the world is emitting just under 40 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in a year, how far back in time could this year’s total carbon removal take us? Right now, the answer is somewhere around 10 seconds."
The problem with carbon removal tech is that big fossil use the tech to postpone the necessary phasing out of their extractive business model. This is why some insist that the fossil fuel will burn for a long time. And ofcourse: OPEC rallies members against fossil fuels phase out at COP 28. One argument is carbon removal, based on carbon credits and sure enough: The United Arab Emirates' takeover of African forests means that they use 10% of the forests in Liberia to generate carbon credits in exchange to keep the fossil fuels flowing. The Saudi-led fight against COP28 deal shows ‘panic,’ German climate envoy says, and my hope is that constant drops in solar prices will simply undermine any carbon credit system and simply make it cheaper to install solar tech in smart grids than rely on OPEC and their spice.
The only thing clear here is that time keeps slipping and five tipping points are within reach with three more in the next decade: Earth on verge of five catastrophic climate tipping points, scientists warn. Given that many carbon offset projects used for carbon credits are not working, time is running out.
In this thread from Duncan Austin on TwiX, he writes about how climate science figured with progressing research, that critical impact of global warming on tipping points dropped in temperature over time. While twenty years ago, researchers saw moderate impact on tipping points at high temperature, today it's consensus that the same impact can be reached at temperatures we already have today.
Given all of that, the try at bargaining from big fossil is pure cynicism. We have no time for this and carbon removal is a viable long term tool to at least somewhat maintain status quo, but not a tool for the short term drive to net zero that we dearly need. Here's a clip of what will happen if we reach several tipping points:
Good news fellow lovers of sushi: Wasabi shows memory-boosting powers in study. The tears you cried from too much wasabi finally pay off.
Fascinating new research finds that the timing tics in Tourette show fractal patterns, meaning that the few-second-long tics show the same patterns as the episodes they appear in, which show the same pattern over the hours those episodes happen.
David Byrne Isn’t Himself. Or Any Self, Really. The Byrne on Stop Making Sense and the continuity of the self.
The Inquisitive Biologist reviews A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness: "For too long, research on animal consciousness has been held back by a top-down approach that asks how human-like other minds are. Instead, he advocates a bottom-up approach. Frans de Waal has elsewhere compared consciousness to an onion, consisting of layers. Veit here runs with that metaphor and takes a 'reverse-engineering approach that asks for the most minimal form of consciousness'. For this, he elaborates on the 2020 paper Dimensions of Animal Consciousness by Birch et al. who propose five aspects."
Those five dimensions according to the book are, from complex to fundamental: Diachronic experience (mental time travel through memory and imagination of yourself at different times including the future), Synchronic experience (experiencing a unified self in the now), Self-awareness as distinct from other beings, Sensory experience (the conscious experience of sensory input) and "evaluative experience" (emotions and moods, if something feels good or bad).
If the last dimension really is the fundamental dimension that constitutes consciousness, then what i wrote a few newsletters ago is right and even an amoeba with it's drive to not-die and will-to-live is conscious, because it clearly feels that dying is bad. The will to live, then, would be a fundamental marker of consciousness.
And speaking of animal consciousness: Livestock surprise scientists with their complex, emotional minds: "If we don’t understand how these animals think, then we won’t understand what they need". Here's a hint at what these animals need: Not dying is what they need.
In Dog & Rabbits animation short The Beatles Vs The Stones "the battle of the bands, at last. 2D animated slapstick and anarchy as The Beatles and The Rolling Stones attempt to outdo each other with trickery, silliness and cake fights."
The Legend of Zelda director aims for 'live-action Miyazaki' and i'm all for it. The question is if Miyazakis human-centered style of fantastical storytelling can be transfered to a big scale Nintendo franchise movie at all, and if Wes Ball, who has not only done such forgetable blockbuster fodder as Maze Runner, but also crap like Phoenix Forgotten, is the right guy to do it. I suppose Nintendo has more creative say in this than the director. I appreciate the effort however, and it's better to aim as high as you can, so just go for it, Wes.
The Zone of Interest is Jonathan Glazer first feature film since Under the Skin, the remarkable minimalist flick with Scarlett Johansson as a man eating alien. In this one, we follow the family of Auschwitz commander Rudolf Höss trying to build a dreamy family life with a beautiful garden besides the KZ deathcamp, and it looks disturbing and brillant.
Thea Hvistendahls Handling the Undead based on a book by John Ajvide Lindqvist (Let the right one in) seems to finally do Zombies justice, after two decades of crap and some singular handwringing dramas. This one is about "three families faced with loss try to figure out what this resurrection means and if their loved ones really are back" and i'm in.
People are raving at Poor Things with Emma Stone, the new feminist Frankenstein-makeover from Yorgos Lanthimos (The Killing of a sacred Deer, Dogtooth, The Lobster) and here's a new featurette about The World of Poor Things. Can't wait.
Evil Dead is going the marvel route of releasing new movies every 2-3 years or so and I'm fine with that. If i ever will get to Evil Dead fatigue, hell will freeze over and that would be an interesting setting for an "Ash on Hoth" movie or something. Yeah, feed me deadites, Sam. My body is ready.
I had no idea they are doing a Spider-Man Noir Show at Amazon. The series "will follow an older, grizzled superhero in 1930s New York City. An individual with knowledge of the project says that the show will be set in its own universe and the main character will not be Peter Parker".
Dune 3 Release Would Be After Another Denis Villeneuve Film. It's all in the headline, no need to click: Villeneuve wants to do another movie to clear his mind before tackling Dune 3.
Which Movies Are The Most Polarizing? A Statistical Analysis. Horror and SciFi-trash, underground classics and tentpole blockbusters. I love them all.
101 hidden gems: the greatest films you’ve never seen: Albeit calling myself a film buff i've seen an astounding zero movies from this list, so i guess i'll spend the winter holidays with this list.
I just featured experimental punk band M(h)aol in my last musicvideo post here, but i dare you listen to their new album Attachment Styles. It's fantastic.
Another fantastic album i gave a listen to the other day is Through the Window by Prewn. Haunted Singer/Songwriter stuff that’s the exactly right amount of weird and feels off somehow, in exactly the right way. Give it a shot:
John Romero is in full swing with the 30th anniversary of Doom going on, he has a book out, released the second part of his SIGIL-Doom mod and went on a livestream with John Carmack after the two didn't talk for years. Elsewhere, Eviternity II-mod has been released and here's Doom running on everything, including ultrasound scanners, Disney princess TVs, pregnancy tests, oscilloscope and your mother. Happy Doomsday, i guess.
The fantastic World of Goo gets a sequel in 2024, and the makers of No Man's Sky have another procedural game set in a fantasy world this time: Light No Fire.
E3 is officially dead. I was at an E3 years ago, invited as a blogger to write about the back then new Xbox. Because i am a very serious industry blogger, instead of going the promo events i was invited to, listen to their promo blah and eating their promo snacks, i rather went for a hike in the Hollywood Hills, because that's how i roll. RIP.
Conway's Game of Life is Omniperiodic: "In the theory of cellular automata, an oscillator is a pattern that repeats itself after a fixed number of generations; that number is called its period. A cellular automaton is called omniperiodic if there exist oscillators of all periods. At the turn of the millennium, only twelve oscillator periods remained to be found in Conway's Game of Life. The search has finally ended, with the discovery of oscillators having the final two periods, 19 and 41, proving that Life is omniperiodic."
Shopdropping a Monsters Inc.-shrine in the public library.
What Can You Do With an Einstein?: Earlier this year, mathematicians found an "aperiodic monotile", a shape that can tile a surface endlessly in a pattern that doesn't repeat itself. So what can you do with this "Einstein"? Play Tetris, ofcourse, and eat it too.
Why scientists are making transparent wood: I blogged about transparent wood ages ago on my defunct blog and it's cool to see the research is still going strong.
Literary review, erm, reviews J.G. Ballards Selected Nonfiction, 1962-2007: "What the hell is reality and how do we distinguish it from fiction? Who decides? Furthermore, if those who decide the allocations of the real and unreal are cruel, mad or colossally wrong, what then?" Then it's just the new normal in 2023.
In Literary Hub, Michel Faber writes about people who don’t like music. Supposedly 5% of all people are "musical anhedonic", which is a lot but also, as i like to say: I think a lot of people don't really like music, what they like is lala, some fluff and shallow tralalala that plays in the background and is just there. But that's not big M Music, which should grab you by the balls and throw you around on an emotional rollercoaster, make you dance or at least make you fingerdrum around. I think "musical anhedonism", like so much, exists on a spectrum, and i'm happy to report that i'm on the other side of that spectrum.
Eels can zap their genes into nearby fish. In a future where some super eel species has taken over the planet, they surely will create eel biotech based on altering genes by zapping other fish from their hovercrafts, all while the poor gene-altered fish fight back by slapping them. I'll show myself out thank you.