Good Links 2023/08/26
Paradoxa and Alan Turings Imitation Game / Solar Powered Game of Life / Porn at the Edge of Knowledge / Reading Ancient Scrolls / Octopus Garden
Cool Sound Installations at the Living Radio Lab by the Shortwave Collective, a group of artists working with radio frequencies as their medium. Here’s a “Hydrophone picking up an underwater disco, sent by homemade AM transmitter to an open wave-receiver, powered by an amp made in an oyster shell.“ Here’s more from that, and here’s “the elements of a radio circuit - a daily micro FM transmission“. Experimental Radio-Art ftw!
Solar Powered Conways Game of Life: “I made an e-ink based, solar powered version of the famous Conways Game of Life. Typically these celular automations run at whatever speed our eyes find to be visually pleasing [ed: here’s a recursive GoL where you can play with speed and which i found very intuitive to find out what is going on] but I wanted to see what a version that reflected the real worlds energy patterns would be like.
In my version the world and its cellular inhabitants must survive low power peroids each night along with reduced power peroids when its rainy or snowy. They also can only reproduce with any regularity in the brightest parts of a summers day reflecting our own worlds patterns.“
ABC: A C compiler for printable x86 // I’m a sucker for projects like these which reside at the intersection of science, programming and art. I don’t know much about modern development, but I’ve done my share of assembler programming in the 80s without following through on that path, and this is why i know that on the machine level, all they do is basically reading, writing and copying numbers from one location in memory to another. That’s all what’s happening, all the time. This is why stuff like this works: This is a scientific paper as a .txt-file that is also an .exe-file which you can run on your PC and is a compiler to render printable research papers that are also executable .txt-files. I love the recursion and i love the weird ass typography in the paper, a fusion of coding loops, tech jargon and data structures. This, right here, is algorithmic art it it’s finest.
Google and Universal Music partner up to develop standards for licensing in generative AI and the story hidden behind the corporate wording is rather simple: Google is gonna supercharge it’s Content ID-algorithm to detect voices from the catalog of Universal Music (and their future partners ofcourse) and invent a new privately enforced copyright for likeness this way. The winners are big labels and Google, the loosers are YT-creators. Money quote: “The social internet came up in the age of Everything is a Remix; the next decade’s tagline sounds a lot like ‘Fuck You, Pay Me.’“
As Hollywood Strikes, 96% Of Entertainment Companies Are Boosting Generative AI Spend
Good video dissecting the original Imitation Game-paper by Alan Turing.
One point that stood out for me was that Turing denies that machines inability to handle paradoxa is a valid objection to the idea of machine thinking. Turing says that human intelligence being able to identify paradoxa is an illusion as many people give wrong answers to paradoxical questions, too, just as machine can't compute paradoxa because they are built on logic. I think he's wrong here.
Just because some people give wrong answer doesn't take away the fact that many humans can compute paradoxa, where no machine can. Modern AI is not able to handle paradoxa. It might simulate a correct output by identifying the paradoxical statement, but it can't compute contradictions: There is a famous german poem made of contradictory statements, like ‘It was dark the moon shined bright, when a car drove very fast, slowly around the corner’. If you ask ChatGPT for a poem like this, it is not able to do it.
Humans can and do play with the irrational tension embedded in contradictory statements all the time, e.g. in the arts or in comedy. Human computation of paradoxa is therefore not an illusion, and as long as machines can’t do that, they can’t really think, at least in a human-intelligence sense, and this is a valid objection to machine thinking.404media has a follow up to their deepdive into nonconsensual AI-porn i wrote about here. In The Community Pushing AI-Generated Porn to ‘the Edge of Knowledge’ they describe how the limitless possibilities of generative AI create the weirdest fetishes: “People are wrangling images out of the AI that are on the edge of what’s popular, let alone possible in the porn world. We are approaching the event horizon of horniness.“
I’m not sure how familiar you are with the online porn world of sexual fetishes. Heck, I’m not really familiar with them, i just know there are Flurries and Tentacle-porn and for me that’s enough to know that internet rule 34 holds: “If it exists, there’s porn of it.“
With AI image synthesis, this becomes literal: If you can think it up, you can have porn of it. You can have people dressed as Slinky fucking tiny Spirograph in a vintage toy gangbang and boom, there you have it: “You, as the individual porn consumer, can now create your own special little fantasy and your own technological, disembodied sexuality“.Kind of unrelated: Scott Alexanders discusses What Can Fetish Research Tell Us About AI? and i wonder if fetish research trained on hyperweird festishes emerging in AI-enabled imaginative limitless environments also develop a form of Autophagy Disorder too, and, yeah, no, i won’t go further than that.
Eryk Salvaggio published the complete lectures including syllabus from his course Critical Topics: AI Images, which “was an undergraduate class delivered for Bradley University in Spring 2023. It was an overview of the emerging contexts of AI art making tools that connected media studies and histories of new media art, with data ethics and critical data studies.“
Eryk is one of the few exceptions in AI-art circles who’s pushing the medium both artistic and critically.A few days ago The Atlantic looked at The Book-Piracy Problem in Generative AI, and now Stephen King whose books were used to train the GPTs writes about it. Unfortunately, he is more interested in the question if AI is creative or sentient, than the fact that a multibilliondollar company is using unlicensed material to generate vast databases of weights that are not conscious and not creative but exploitative office tools.
Look, i’m very interested in the consciousness slash sentience slash creative angle too, but i will not phase out the fact that right now these are office tools created by OpenAI and Microsoft and if they’d use my book to create their product without paying me a dime, i’d sue them too, because that’s business. Simple as that.Letting AI Into “The Mind Club”: ”the psychology and morality of living amongst chatbots and self-driving cars”.
Browsh: “A fully-modern text-based browser, rendering to TTY and browsers (…) traditional text-based browsers lack JS and all other modern HTML5 support. Browsh is different in that it's backed by a real browser, namely headless Firefox, to create a purely text-based version of web pages and web apps“
Harley Turan developed a nice experimental interface for exploring his 75000 images photo library by EXIF metadata and hand gestures. Here’s a writeup about the metadata-part. He’s part of the dev team that works on the interface of Apples Vision Pro, so this stuff is coming soon.
YouTube’s recommendation algorithm is left-leaning in the United States // Many people point at this study to debunk past reporting about YT as a slipery slope to the far right, but ofcourse this new study only looks at current versions of the recommendation algorithm, not the one in place back in 2014 when the culture wars came into the spotlight.
The beauty of collective intelligence, explained by developmental biologist Michael Levin
In the journal Cell, twelve leading cognitive scientists — among them Jonathan Birch, Susan Schneider and Anil Seth — answer questions about AI and animal consciousness.
NASA Clocks July 2023 as Hottest Month on Record Ever Since 1880 // I have a whole tag in my Raindrop-bookmark-manager devoted to heat records since the 2010s and the speed they are dropping is constantly increasing. This will go on for a whole while, i guess. Especially because El Niño and La Niña multi-year events could become more common, which confirms a study from a few months ago which found the same. The heat is on.
How wealthy "super emitters" are disproportionately driving the climate crisis — while blaming you: “A new study found that the top 10% of households are responsible for 40% of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions (…) ‘For the first time, we also quantify the share of emissions related to investment,‘ Starr explained. ‘The share of emissions coming from investments increases as we move up the income ladder. For the top 0.1% households, more than half of their emissions are coming from investment income.’“
There’s some discussion about this in the Slatestartcodex-sub where some libertarian types try to push back against the idea that individual responsibility is less responsible for climate change than structural capitalist mechanisms like investments from rich people. This is nonsense, as the word structural already implies and ofcourse it helps somewhat when people eat less meat by individual choice, but what would really make a difference is when you change the food regulations so that meat prices reflect the real cost. Ofcourse, then nobody could afford meat anymore which would become a luxury good nobody ain’t nobody want to hear silly nonsense like that, right?Absolutely related: G20 poured more than $1tn into fossil fuel subsidies despite Cop26 pledges // Those low prices, not only for meat, are paid with subsidies from your tax money, which means that the rich super emitters the paper above talks about cash in twice: directly from your wallet, and indirectly from your tax money. This is why i have absolutely zero problem with introducing a carbon investment tax which targets the rich to make them pay, and this is why libertarians and their mental gymnastics are plain dead wrong.
Also related: Carbon Credits, the favorite economic tool of the neoliberals to tackle the climate crisis, are in for a credit crunch: “Carbon credit speculators could lose billions as scientific evidence shows many offsets they have bought have no environmental worth and have become stranded assets.“ // I’m all for pricing in carbon emissions into the economy, but the only way to do this is by introducing carbon numbers as true economic value and pricing in the actual cost of emissions. Everything else just delays the wakeup call when assets become uninsurable, but i guess that’s where we’re heading with the neolibs.
The bad news is not that carbon credits seem not to work, but the true economic prices of carbon emissions: Study reveals how much carbon damage would cost corporations if they paid for their emissions: “The world's corporations produce so much climate change pollution, it could eat up about 44% of their profits if they had to pay damages for it, according to a study by economists of nearly 15,000 public companies.“
This is what we’re facing: Half the economy is borrowed on carbon pollution, and as of now, the so-called economists at the neoliberal parties are turning a blind eye. I don’t want to be near anything when this goes off.
Trailer for the excellent looking scifi-film Foe which has an intriguing plot that absolutely resembles Black Mirror S06E03 in which an astronaut is replaced by a robot on earth to live with his wife.
From the Wikipedia-page about the novel: Foe is set in the near future, and is narrated by Junior, who lives with his wife Henrietta on a remote farm. One night a stranger appears at their door who introduces himself as Terrance from an aerospace corporation called OuterMore. Terrance announces that Junior has been selected to travel to the Installation, a large space station in orbit around Earth. He will remain there for about two years, before returning home. Junior is deeply in love with Hen and is not happy leaving her alone. Terrance reassures him that while he is gone, he will be replaced by a biomechanical duplicate that will care for her. Junior is horrified. Terrance visits the farm house regularly to interview him and collect data to help configure his replacement.
A Texas Chainsaw Massacre Board Game exists.
‘Dune: Part Two’ Delays Release to 2024 Amid Ongoing Actors Strike // As much as i love Frank Herberts Dune-novel and Villeneuves fantastic adaption, as much the striking actors have my solidarity and i don’t care too much if i wait a few months more.
“The ‘Octopus Garden’ is the location of the largest gathering of octopuses anywhere on Earth, and new research has an explanation.“ // Tens of thousands of breeding pearl octopus gather in what scientists termed “octopus garden“ because the “warm spots around the site’s thermal springs, which reach temperatures of about 11°C (51°F) in contrast to the surrounding deep-sea temperatures of 1.6°C (35°F)“, make the eggs hatch earlier. The accompanying video is fascinating to watch:
Ghost Town of Abandoned Mansions in China: “The State Guest Mansions were envisioned as the palatial homes for the upper crust of society. Now, their only residents are hurdles of cattle and the occasional adventure explorers meandering like ghosts around the arched verandas and stone façades of hundreds of abandoned villas.“
I linked to the Vesuvius Challenge a while ago, a “machine learning and computer vision competition to read the Herculaneum Papyri“, a set of ancient papyrus rolls that got burried in the historic outbreak of the Vesuv that also turned Pompeji to ashes. The Herculaneum Papyri are historically interesting as they are well preserved in ancient volcanic mud flow, and are “the only ancient library to survive to the present day“. But nobody knows what’s in it, and some early tries to open these scrolls destroyed a bunch of them. A breakthrough in 2015 introduced a new technique called virtual unwrapping, in wich x-rays and computer vision create scans of those ancient scrolls, but we’re still far away from being able to decypher them. The researchers who started the challenge scanned “two of those scrolls using X-ray CT at a resolution of 8 μm“, which is 8 millionth of a meter, or 8 thousandth of a millimeter. Each file has 5 terabyte of data while one scroll only contains 10000 letters.
Enter Casey Handmer. His post Reading ancient scrolls introduces a method to read those files, and i declare this deepdive into modern archeology, the decryption of ancient writing systems and AI-based computer vision the nerdiest writing on the web of the year. Awesome and extremely interesting stuff.Noise Album made from Barbiephonic toy sample dump: “Way Back In The Day, 2007, I found and scraped out a Barbie phonecall-generator service and compiled what I’d found into a single .ogg file, with the 17000 names in its dataset. (…) that recording made the rounds again in 2015, and soon after that somebody put it on Youtube. A little while later, the original files found its way to archive.org, for great benefit of posterity, and all was well.
Today I discovered that posterity had showed up, and in 2020 somebody used those files and made an edm/noise album called ‘One By One The Stars Were Going Out’. This, right here. This is what the internet is for.“
Pizza is good for people with arthritis, but only the good fresh neopolitan style pizza with mozzarrella and not my double-cheese bacon salami fatfest. Damn.
The mugshot. No. Just no. I initially did my part, but i regrett it because every attention to the orange fuck is only in service of his agenda. This fuck doesn’t even deserve ridicule, or worse: mythologizing like The Atlantic is doing in this piece. This fuck deserves zero attention and jailtime, period. I hope this will be the last time you hear from the orange fuck on this blog because i like to pretend that i have some dignity left.