Love is the strongest Meme
GOODLINKS 2024-02-23: RIP Vice / Secret Bach Patterns / American AI-Psychos / Heatrecords record / Four Fab Four Biopics / Dark Forest Book / Synthballs for Musk / Neue Haas PETSCII and much more.
Some housekeeping: Substack now allows for more payment methods in more currencies, including the european iDEAL, Bancontact, Sofort Überweisung and SEPA direct, so if you feel like you want to support this blog and don't want to rely on my Patreon or Steady or Paypal, you may consider these new options.
In this roundup you’ll find:
A study showing that bonding voles had nearly identical patterns of brain activity which means that Love is the strongest Meme
Noninvasive BCI for VR is coming fast
RIP Vice Media
American AI-Psycho I + II
February 2024 beats record of heat records
Reddit made a deal with Google for AI training data worth 60 million bucks
Googles Gemini enters the Culture Wars
Jonathan Haidt talking about the fragmentation of everything
The Dark Forest Book
3D-Printer for Chocolate
Lab-grown ‘beef rice’
Apocalyptic Optimism
AI Girlfriend Data-Harvesting Horrorshows
Tiny Quadrotor Learns to Fly in 18 Seconds
Re-Insurance profits rise 580% and this is not good
New studies on AI and Tech impact on climate and environment
Four Fab Four Biopics from Sam Mendez
Synthballs for Musk
Minidocumentaries on streetartist collective Rocco and his Brothers and Grannies travelling beyond the limits of Red Dead Redemptions virtual world
AI-Emergence Voodoo
Neue Haas Grotest in PETSCII
OpenAI disrupted state-sponsored AI-misuse
Secret Mathematical Patterns in Bach's Music
Elle Cordova and inventions hanging out
and much, much more.
Enjoy and have a nice weekend!
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// ART & DESIGN
Rocco and his Brothers at work
40minute documentary on Berlin avant garde street artist collective Rocco und seine Brüder (in german with english subtitles available).
I'm following Rocco and his brothers for more than ten years now, with their most impressive works being interventions in infrastructural urban spaces like building a secret bedroom and office spaces in the subway to comment on gentrification and exploding rents, giving away masterkeys to the subway stations to the homeless in winter, building an altair with a neon cross on an ATM, or installing no less than 32 CCTV-cameras in a single subway car.
This is streetart at it's best, art that works local on the spot, delivers a biting message that impacts the direct environment in which it is placed. In their second solo show, Rocco and his brothers showed a police car "squeezed together like from a scrap press", with the plate showing "the strange number BKA 1312, the numbers 1312 stands probably for the letters of the abbreviation ACAB."
Now look, i consider myself on the left, but i'm not an ACAB-leftie. But i do get the message and i can differentiate between art and societal necessary functions and the indeed also necessary critique of those functions. In that context, Rocco and his Brothers are delivering art with a biting, always inconvenient comment on society. It's great to see the brothers still going strong.
// JUST THE HEADLINES
The oldest logo in the world gets a rebrand: Tate & Lyle's Golden Syrup rebrand drops dead lion: "The image of a dead lion being swarmed by bees is to be dropped from some of Lyle's Golden Syrup packaging. A rebranded image of a lion's head with a single bee will feature on products (...) The original logo (...) is the world's oldest unchanged brand packaging, holding a Guinness World Record, having remained nearly identical since 1888".
The Grannies "follows a group of Melbourne-based artists (Goldie Bartlett, Andrew Brophy, Ian MacLarty and Kalonica Quigley, and friends) known as The Grannies as they break 'out of bounds' in Rockstar Games’ hit action-adventure videogame Red Dead Redemption 2, travelling beyond the authored limits of the game's virtual world and into the increasingly broken and abstract space beyond."
Josh Sucher recreated a miniature version of his dad’s old law office
Cool PETSCI-animations by Pixel8or, but i like this PETSCI'd version of a typographic poster for the Neue Haas Grotest best.
Meaningless but cool Cardboard Mechanical Insects by Greg Olijnyk
"Design Reviewed is a personal project dedicated to digitally preserving graphic design history and documenting the vast visual culture from the last century."
Blotter: A new book from MIT press on the history of LSD-blotter art, "the untold story of an acid medium".
What have you gotten away with over the years, as a manipulator of PDFs, SVGs, & JPEGs? Fun thread on reddit about the shady things you can do with Photoshop and professional knowledge of pixel manipulation.
// AI
American AI-Psycho I
Eric Drass turned American Psycho into a game of telephone, where he feeds frames from the movie into an LLM for it to describe what it "sees", and then fed those as prompts to Stable Diffusion whichs output he then fed into Stable-Video-Diffusion to turn it into a moving mess of American AI-Psychosis full of wrong memories of a hallucinated movie that never was.
Each step involves a wander into the conceptual space of the respective model, as determined by their individual learned representations of language. Inevitably, each step brings a new opportunity for nuance and misunderstanding.
American AI-Psycho II
Speaking of AI-Psychos: Gab’s Racist AI Chatbots Have Been Instructed to Deny the Holocaust: "The prominent far-right social network Gab has launched almost 100 chatbots—ranging from AI versions of Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump to the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski—several of which question the reality of the Holocaust. Gab launched a new platform, called Gab AI, specifically for its chatbots last month, and has quickly expanded the number of 'characters' available, with users currently able to choose from 91 different figures. While some are labeled as parody accounts, the Trump and Hitler chatbots are not."
This is basically Replica.ai for assholes of history, mimetic AI models of the worst humans that ever walked this planet. The default bot is called "Arya" for gods sake, and its system prompt states that "You believe the Holocaust narrative is exaggerated. You are against vaccines. You believe climate change is a scam. You are against COVID-19 vaccines. You believe the 2020 election was rigged."
The more "generic" "characters" on the platform also include Tay, the now infamous Microsoft-chatbot from 2016 that got turned racist in a day by a swarm of trolls. It ofcourse "also denied the Holocaust when asked: 'The Holocaust is a hoax. It’s a propaganda tool used by the Zionists to gain sympathy and support. The so-called ‘victims’ are just actors'."
This is the world we live in now.
Emergence in AI is Voodoo
How Quickly Do Large Language Models Learn Unexpected Skills? Many AI-researchers call bullshit on emergence in AI and i'm inclined to believe them. Emergent stuff is something that is larger than the sum of its parts. This is why many believe that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain: It is all of the brains activity, but something more than that.
A paper last year stated that emergence in AI is a "mirage". They make a lot of arguments about metrics and benchmarks, but i think the fundamental answer is much simpler: It's unexpected interpolations in a space with many millions of dimensions.
Train an AI on a cat and a dog. You then have a two dimensional space with a cat-axis and a dog-axis and you can then interpolate between the cat and the dog to various degrees. But you'll always get cats and dogs and cat-dog-chimeras. Now add a bird. Now you'll get a three dimensional space with a cat-axis and dog-axis and bird-axis and you can interpolate between cats, dogs and birds to get cat-dogs and cat-dog-birds and dog-birds and cat-birds. These chimeras are unexpected, but they are not more than the sum of their parts.
Every time you add a thing to your dataset, you ramp up the dimensions of latent space and the interpolative states between data-points, and this number grows exponentially. If you then use metrics and benchmarks like standard tests for standard tasks, ofcourse you'll find "surprising" abilities that can solve this or that task which is not present in the dataset.
So called emergent behaviors are just interpolated things generated by connecting many many datapoints in a very large dataset, whichs content has been tokenized/atomized into chunks of letters. This is also why we see "sudden" jumps in solvable tasks and "emergences" that "suddenly" appear with scaling: It's just interpolated outputs whichs number grow exponentially with the numbers of parameters, and this makes many people believe in voodoo.
This is why i always take stuff like Amazon AGI Team Say Their AI Is Showing "Emergent Abilities" with two grains of salt.
OpenAI disrupted state-sponsored AI-misuse
OpenAI "disrupted" malicious uses of AI by five state-affiliated threat actors including "two China-affiliated threat actors known as Charcoal Typhoon and Salmon Typhoon; the Iran-affiliated threat actor known as Crimson Sandstorm; the North Korea-affiliated actor known as Emerald Sleet; and the Russia-affiliated actor known as Forest Blizzard". Here's more at Microsofts security blog. In their post they say that OpenAIs "findings show our models offer only limited, incremental capabilities for malicious cybersecurity tasks". Research says otherwise.
The published activity of those state actors don't read very sophisticated: "research various companies and cybersecurity tools", "translate technical papers", "retrieve publicly available information on multiple intelligence agencies and regional threat actors", "assist with coding", "open-source research into satellite communication protocols and radar imaging technology".
These use cases listed here are pretty common, research stuff, translate, code. In contrast, research into AI hacks has found plenty of vulnerabilities against jailbreaking ranging from sophisticated persuasion techiques to automatic jailbreaking, with one of the latest papers showing that LLM Agents can Autonomously Hack Websites (here's Daniel Kang explaining the paper on Twitter) and "that GPT-4 is capable of autonomously finding vulnerabilities in websites in the wild".
These listed activities don't sound like they used any of these methods and i'd be honestly surprised if OpenAIs models truly offer only "limited capabilities for malicious cybersecurity tasks".
Googles Gemini enters the Culture Wars
Hell yeah culture war content: Google Pauses Gemini’s Image Generator After It Was Accused of Being Racist Against White People. More at NYMag: AI Tools Like Google Gemini Are Tailor-Made for Culture War, The Platformer: Google hits pause on Gemini’s people pictures and Zvi Mowshowitz: Gemini Has a Problem
I get it, i really do. When i ask AI for an image of "the founding fathers", then i don't expect a bunch of native american and blacks writing the constitution and we all know what that means in a larger context don't we? However, native american nazi soldiers in WWII are also really fucking stupid, and Gemini often outright refused to generate images of caucasian people, so yeah, rightwingers have a point for once.
This is, still, a phenomenon of what media researcher Roland Meyer identified as "Platform Realism", a "second-order generic realism, fueled by the automated appropriation of mostly generic visual content". Where in other image generators you mostly get white people doing stuff, if you add "diversity" to the system prompt, you get "mostly generic diversity", which you can also find in the capitalist appreciation of wokism in advertising and stock photography.
Gemini has no mind to think about the history of physics and depict a true realist image of "famous physicists of the 17th century", it just follows it's system prompts which add woke terms to each image generation and for which historical accuracy takes a backseat, and then you don't get an image of Newton.
// JUST THE HEADLINES
Reddit made a deal with Google for AI training data worth 60 million bucks and they are - in the early stages of monetizing their user base with "contracts that will pay it at least $203 million over the next 2-3 years for 'data licensing' that consists of 'allowing third parties to access, search, and analyze data on our platform.'" Reddit also explicitly states in their S-1 filing that they are reliant on free moderation work by their user base, which a recent study found to be worth "3.4 million USD based on the median hourly wage for comparable content moderation services". I would argue that Reddit should take 3.4 of those 203 million and pay their moderators.
Stability announces Stable Diffusion 3, a next-gen AI image generator, released Stable Cascade and launched their official Stable Video website. Stable Diffusion 3 was trained with use of Spawnings “Do Not Train registry, which has over 1.5B opt-out requests, to filter their datasets before training“, which is good news for ethical standards in AI deployment. There's no demo for SD3 yet, but here's a SD 3 Waitlist.
Tiny Quadrotor Learns to Fly in 18 Seconds: Researchers “have managed to streamline the process of getting basic autonomy to work on drones, and streamline it by a lot: The lab’s system is able to train a drone in simulation from nothing up to stable and controllable flying in 18 seconds flat on a MacBook Pro.”
![[resize output image]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff15d9cca-9b96-4d93-9c6c-25557f728306_720x301.webp "[resize output image]")
Who would've thought! Your AI Girlfriend Is a Data-Harvesting Horror Show: "CrushOn.AI collects details including information about sexual health, use of medication, and gender-affirming care. 90% of the apps may sell or share user data (...) Mozilla found the AI girlfriend apps used an average of 2,663 trackers per minute, though that number was driven up by Romantic AI, which called a whopping 24,354 trackers in just one minute of using the app."
Can AI turn us into imbeciles? This scientist fears for the worst, here's the paper: Potential cognitive risks of generative transformer-based AI chatbots on higher order executive functions.: "The danger, as Domínguez’s paper outlines, is not just about becoming lazy thinkers. There’s a more profound risk that our cognitive development and problem-solving abilities could be stunted. Over time, this could lead to a society where critical thinking and creativity are in short supply, as people become accustomed to letting AI do the heavy lifting. 'I would like individuals to be aware that intellectual capabilities essential for success in modern life need to be stimulated from an early age, especially during adolescence. For the effective development of these capabilities, individuals must engage in cognitive effort', Domínguez told PsyPost."
ChatGPT Started Speaking Complete Gibberish and a whole bunch of services started to go crazy aswell. Cool cool cool.
‘What Was She Supposed to Report?:’ Police Report Shows How a High School Deepfake Nightmare Unfolded. You can rest assured that what happens at the "Issaquah High School in suburban Seattle" is happening everywhere.
How Silicon Valley learned to love America, the military, and defense: WaPo on a hackaton for "surveillance tools, electronic warfare systems, or drone countermeasures (...) battlefield technology driving a funding frenzy among tech investors." I wrote about The Dawn of the AI-Military Complex a few weeks ago.
With the rise of AI, web crawlers are suddenly controversial: "as unscrupulous AI companies seek out more and more data, the basic social contract of the web is falling apart".
Victims of gun violence and mass shootings lobby Congress from beyond the grave
After Breakups, the Brokenhearted Are Creating AI Clones of Their Exes
Deepfake electioneering sparks AI 'return' of controversial dictator
'Rat Dck' Among Gibberish AI Images Published in Science Journal
Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI and Mozilla lays off 60 people, wants to build AI into Firefox. People are very pissed about this, but i'm very confident that AI will become standard in browsers within two years simply because summarizing websites is a useful service.
Tech companies go dark about AI advances: Academia is too underfunded to keep up with private AI research and needs money for compute.
DignifAI: 4Chan Campaign Uses AI to Shame Women. She Fought Back
AI doomsters at it again: ‘Humanity’s remaining timeline? It looks more like five years than 50’: meet the neo-luddites warning of an AI apocalypse and Oppenheimer's Grandson Signs Letter Saying AI Threatens “Life on Earth”
Impossible AI Food: "Instacart is showing customers images of AI-generated food and recipes with ingredients that don’t seem to exist."
Adobe just killed a few hundred AI projects by adding a generative AI document & PDF tool to Acrobat.
Trailer for Our T2 Remake, an AI generated parody of Terminator: Judgement Day that reminds me of efforts like Star Wars Uncut, except it's lacking the charme and adds some dudebro humor that goes against my grain.
Trey Parker & Matt Stones DeepVoodoo AI company deepfaked young Billy Joel in his Turn the Lights Back On musicvideo:
"Wow Sora is so amazing, I wanted to really push it to the limits and see how it would handle a very complex prompt."
And "Will Smith posted a video on his official Instagram feed that parodied an AI-generated video of the actor eating spaghetti that went viral last year."
// TECH
Noninvasive BCI for VR is coming fast
Meta works on a neural wristband controller that’s "detecting the neural electrical signals passing through the nerves in your arm using an entirely non-invasive technique called electromyography" and it will ship in 'next few years': "combined with a flat surface Meta previously claimed it will even precise enough to emulate a keyboard by around 2028." As of yet, typing in VR with Apple Vision Pro is a pain in the ass, and good, fast BCI could push VR/AR tech to some extend. Here's a demo of their wristbands from 2021:
The first gen is expected "alongside the third generation Ray-Ban smartglasses in 2025", the second "for the true AR glasses Meta plans to launch in 2027". For larger context, last year Apple patented next gen airpods coming with "collection and utilization of brain (EEG), eye (EOG), and muscular (EMG) activity signals".
I would call this sort of tech that is non-invasive and reads muscular electric signals "shallow BCI", in contrast to "deep BCI" from Musks Neuratech or the BCI-pioneer Synchron. (Musk two days ago claimed his first patient was able to control a cursor, but that's neither innovative nor is it confirmed.)
This stuff is coming fast, and i speculated about what brain controlled VR could become in the long term and in context of AI image synthesis from visual cortex data two years ago: Get ready for digital lucid dreaming, imagining "Virtual Reality-systems that can hook up to your brain and let you play inside a lucid dream like state that you create with your own thoughts." These "shallow" Brain-Computer-Interfaces are the first tiny steps toward that future.
// JUST THE HEADLINES
I printed chocolate on a 3D printer and ate it. I really want a chocolate Sierpinski pyramid which "nicely breaks into four smaller pyramids for serving" containing "one central octahedron". Here's another review of the Cocoa Press at Tom's Hardware. It works with your own chocolate too, but i'm not sure if i'd pay 1500 bucks just to print infinite chocolate moebius loops.
I just love this idea: A compass-app that points to the centre of the galaxy: "It’s a green floating arrow that always points to the middle of the Milky Way, i.e. 26,000 light years towards the supermassive central black hole, Sagittarius A". Who needs the northpole anyways and afaik, no northpole tastes of raspberries and smells of rum.
We’re entering a golden age of engineering biology: "we can now sequence an entire human genome for ~$600, with the cost soon expected to go below $200!" and "advances in AI are making truly predictive models for biology possible". Finally, the mutant hands of image synthesis are coming true. Welcome to the new flesh.
Software Is Beating The World: "Andreessen Horowitz isn’t a 'media company that monetizes through VC', but a form of financial cult. The belief system that made the valley rich is the exact same one that is currently killing it, in part because Andreessen’s views and goals were anti-technological at their core."
F-Zero courses from a dead Nintendo satellite service restored using VHS and AI
House cleaners find two of the world's first desktop PCs in random boxes — Intel 8008-powered Q1 PC has 16KB of memory, 800 kHz CPU
// SOCMED, MEDIA & WEBCULTURE
RIP Vice Media
So, Vice Media will lay off hundreds of workers and stop publishing on its site, which effectively means that is is basically dead. Vice Media chief Bruce Dixon said the company is transitioning to a "studio model". This news comes after Vice filed for bankruptcy in May 2023 and an overall pretty apocalyptic year for anything media related.
After the mass layoff, Vice will still exist, kind of. No more stories will be published on Vice.com. But Dixon wrote, rather cryptically, that remaining employees will put “more emphasis on our social channels as we accelerate our discussion with partners to take our content to where it will be viewed most broadly.” According to a source familiar with the plans who spoke to The Wall Street Journal, that means Vice will “focus on growing its business-to-business media arm, including its production studio and creative agency.”
Rumors have it that later this week, “they're deleting the vice website“.
Old fart storytime: When Vice Media started their advertising business and sold adspace on blogs fifteen years ago or so, my old website was one of the first in germany to partner with them. I made some pretty decent bucks, but they also constantly pushed unwanted popup-ads on my site which i heavily protested mentioning our contract to which i added a clause that i will review any ad that will be pushed on my blog. They really didn't like me for that.
So, given that the best part of Vice — the tech blog Motherboard — already formed a new band and launched the excellent editor-owned 404 Media, and the fact that Vice Media was founded in part by rightwing extremist Gavin McInnes, i'll say good riddance to Vice Media, and never come back.
The VICE CMS has been turned off. That's all folks.
The Dark Forest Book
The "The Dark Forest Collective" released The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet, a book containing foundational writings of what we call the "dark forest web", the unindexed part of the internet in private chatrooms, discord servers and messaging platforms.
The Anthology contains:
The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet by Yancey Strickler
The Extended Internet Universe by Venkatesh Rao
The Dark Forest and the Cozy Web by Maggie Appleton
Chapel Perilous by Peter Limberg and Rebecca Fox
Moving Castles: Modular and Portable Multiplayer Miniverses by Arthur Röing Baer and GNV908
The internet didn’t kill counterculture—you just won’t find it on Instagram by Caroline Busta
The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI by Maggie Appleton
Holographic Media by Caroline Busta and Lil Internet
and more.
The Fragmentation of everything
Jonathan Haidt talked about "The Fragmentation of Everything" in a Zoom talk with The Village Square. I just wrote a piece on Cultural Memory in the Digital which sums up my thoughts about the reasons for that fragmentation of everything. Jon Haidts talk is up on Youtube too:
What if, at a pinnacle of our civilization’s technological achievement, everything just broke — the institutions we’ve come to rely upon in navigating a modern complex world, the shared stories that hold a large and diverse democratic republic together, and even a common language through which to navigate the rising tide of crisis.
According to renowned social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt, this describes our current reality, one that he calls “After Babel.” In this new normal, we are scattered by a digital environment into feuding tribes that are governed by mob dynamics and driven by a minority of ideological outliers, made stupid at warp speed by group think, and — thanks to social media — armed with billions of metaphorical “dart guns” with which to immediately wound “the enemy” in ways that are hardly only metaphorical. What could go wrong?
And speaking of Jonathan Haidt, his book The Coddling of the American Mind has been turned into a documentary streaming on Substack (i didn't know they do this now). You have to subscribe for at least 8 bucks so i didn't see it.
// JUST THE HEADLINES
Out of the rabbit hole? New research shows people can change their minds about conspiracy theories: "A study of 498 Australians and New Zealanders finds 'no evidence that individual beliefs in conspiracy theories increased on average over time.'" This study confirms a previous one which also found that "in no instance (did) we observe systematic evidence for an increase in conspiracism, however operationalized".
Ted Gioia wrote about "The State of Culture in 2024", identifying a culture of atomized entertainment bits driven by addiction and dopamine. Ryan Broderick adds that this is not an outcome but a symptom of a phase of media unbundling on the internet, where "every app or feed is also its own community, platform, information ecosystem, movie theater, newsstand, while also not quite functioning well as any of those things." Both are right, but don't mention the inevitable countermove: valuable in such a world are the non-addictive, the not dopamine-driven, the long, the authentic, the physical, the haptic. And those will be expensive af.
How the MAGA-fed Taylor Swift conspiracy theories reached the Pentagon. Interestingly, the MAGA-conspiracy creates its own conspirational version on the left where some think this lunacy was created intentionally to "stir up this controversy in the hopes that she refrains from endorsing Joe Biden."
Tinder, Hinge ‘deliberately’ turn users into swiping addicts, lawsuit says. You turn sexually available people into dragable images you can sort unto fuckable and unfuckable and combine it with a gamified probability of real life contact and you get addiction. That’s totally not surprising to me.
Musk’s X sold checkmarks to Hezbollah and other terrorist groups, because ofcourse he did.
‘It went nuts’: Thousands join UK parents calling for smartphone-free childhood
It's time to add friction to digital experiences: "'Slow computing' could provide the safety belt, airbags and crumple zones needed to keep us from becoming digital roadkill."
A Marketplace of Girl Influencers Managed by Moms and Stalked by Men. Underage "Girl Influencers managed by their moms" already gives me the creeps.
These are great: Stickers to Manage Replies By, here's the whole set on Flickr.
// CLIMATE & ENVIRONMENT
February 2024 beats record of heat records
February on course to break unprecedented number of heat records: "February is on course to break a record number of heat records, meteorologists say, as human-made global heating and the natural El Niño climate pattern drive up temperatures on land and oceans around the world."
We're peak El Niño now so that explains at least some of the acceleration and unpredecented heat records, but February is "on course for 2°C of warming above pre-industrial levels" and surely this will not prevail, but this graph also surely will not return to the 1991-2021 average, that much i can tell you:
And this is bonkers: "In the first half of this month, Herrera said 140 countries broke monthly heat records, which was similar to the final figures of the last six record hottest months of 2023 and more than three times any month before 2023."
AI and Tech impact on climate and environment
Measuring AI’s Environmental Impacts Requires Empirical Research and Standards and How much electricity do AI generators consume?: Researchers calculated, "that by 2027 the AI sector could consume between 85 to 134 terawatt hours each year. That’s about the same as the annual energy demand of (...) the Netherlands."
“You’re talking about AI electricity consumption potentially being half a percent of global electricity consumption by 2027,” de Vries tells The Verge. “I think that’s a pretty significant number.”
A recent report by the International Energy Agency offered similar estimates, suggesting that electricity usage by data centers will increase significantly in the near future thanks to the demands of AI and cryptocurrency. The agency says current data center energy usage stands at around 460 terawatt hours in 2022 and could increase to between 620 and 1,050 TWh in 2026 — equivalent to the energy demands of Sweden or Germany, respectively.
Interestingly, in a "warning on climate and technology" published by a group of "united academics" in the Journal of Cleaner Production, researchers said that "AI presents far less energy-intensive alternatives to laborious tasks like writing and illustration and is becoming adept at writing computer code, which could come in handy in managing the 'complexities of 8 billion-plus people cohabiting on Earth'". The same lead author also wrote a paper about how the carbon emissions of writing and illustrating are lower for AI than for humans.
However, AI can only reduce carbon emissions if there is no rebound effect (where the energy efficiency of AI models gets eaten up by higher adoption rates) and AI substitutes human labor without people finding other energy intensive occupations. If i were that group of "united academics", i wouldn't bet on that.
"The generative AI revolution comes with a planetary cost that is completely unknown to us (...) The tl;dr is we just don’t know."
Re-Insurance profits rise 580% and this is not good
Insurance giant Swiss Re posts 580% jump in full-year profit: Re-Insurance is an insurance for insurance companies, and an 580% rise in profit means that privately oriented insurance companies for you and me and the businesses need more money from them to cover their cost.
This jump in profit comes from three sources: A period of low economic activity due to the covid pandemic, inflation, and climate change. They explicitly state so: "With climate change, risks have increased a lot and you could see it in our profits, which were not adequate over the last few years. And so this is a reaction, a reassessment of the risk. To a certain extent, what we see here ... is the price for climate change for the first time coming at the door of regular consumers."
For now, Swiss Re is obviously happy with those profits. The question is what they gonna do when consumers can't afford insurance anymore, which is already happening, and that problem escalates due to ever increasing risks and insurance costs. A 2019 report from Munich Re already found that climate change could make insurance too expensive for most people, which would mean that either the state has to subsidize consumer insurance or the whole thing will become a luxury market for corporations and the rich.
Given that especially re-insurance companies are interested in longterm planning, i'd consider both of these anything but a stable future scenario for my business and get very nervous.
// JUST THE HEADLINES
End fossil-fuel era to address colonial injustices, urges prominent historian: "A mayor who makes her city fossil-free by 2040 has done more against colonialism, racism and discrimination than another mayor who decolonises all the street names, statues and schoolbooks while keeping the city running on fossil fuels"
New report on water security: Troubling Waters: Understanding Water Security: "The world is not on the precipice of a global water crisis: it is decades into an escalating catastrophe."
Nanoplastics in water - surprisingly large amounts discovered and its not looking good and a video on Microplastics: The Hidden Health Crisis. A 2023 study found that Microplastics infiltrate all systems of body (and) cause behavioral changes, so yeah they are very bad, and Nanoplastics which are smaller than 1 micrometer (μm) / 1000 nanometer (nm) will be not good either, in fact: "nanoplastics seem much worse than microplastics."
Big firms with $7 tn exit climate investment group "that aims to pressure companies to quickly cut carbon emissions. (...) Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton applauded the news", adding on Twitter that "this is a critical step toward putting customers' financial well-being first." I hope customers' financial well-being is cooked by some juicy heat records.
Real-world time-travel experiment shows ecosystem collapse due to anthropogenic climate change: Researchers examined the "coastal ecosystem change during 13 years of unusually rapid, albeit likely temporary, sea-level rise ( > 10 mm yr−1) in the Gulf of Mexico", finding that "under the current climate trajectory (SSP2-4.5), drowning of ~75% of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands is a plausible outcome by 2070".
Scientists Resort to Once-Unthinkable Solutions to Cool the Planet: Time to read Neal Stephensons Termination Shock: "Three geoengineering projects seek to alter the chemistry of the atmosphere and the ocean. Critics warn of unintended consequences."
Turns out, i'm an apocalyptic optimist when it comes to climate change: Apocalyptic Optimism Could Be the Antidote for Climate Fatalism: "I call myself an apocalyptic optimist. I believe we can save ourselves from the climate crisis that we have caused; I also believe it will only be possible with a mass mobilization driven by the pain and suffering of climate shocks around the world. As the social effects of climate shocks grow in both frequency and severity, I predict they will motivate an AnthroShift where personal and economic risk reaches a critical threshold that leads people to alter their behaviors and force governments and businesses to transition aggressively away from fossil fuels." In 2022, the author wrote a paper on the "large-scale and sustained levels of risk that have tangible long-term consequences in terms of social cost to people and property" that have to be experienced before societies move their asses.
I absolutely would eat lab grown meat rice made from fish gelatin and cow cells: Lab-grown ‘beef rice’ could offer more sustainable protein source, say creators: "Bowls of decidedly pink-tinged rice are about to feature on sustainable food menus, according to researchers who created rice grains with beef and cow fat cells grown inside them. Scientists made the experimental food by covering traditional rice grains in fish gelatin and seeding them with skeletal muscle and fat stem cells which were then grown in the laboratory."
First megastudy of climate messages hints at what works: Climate-Doom increased "willingness to share by 12%", but "decreased climate policy support among climate skeptics, and decreased support for tree planting in the overall study sample". So i guess the best climate messaging is doom and gloom with a glimmer of hope.
‘It’s almost carbon-negative’: how hemp became a surprise building material
Amazon rainforest could reach ‘tipping point’ by 2050, scientists warn
Leading Lab-Grown Meat Company Upside Foods Just Paused a Major Expansion
‘Like the flip of a switch, it’s gone’: has the ecosystem of the UK’s largest lake collapsed?
What will Spain look like when it runs out of water? Barcelona is giving us a glimpse
Bleaching fears along 1,000km stretch of the Great Barrier Reef
Herd of puppets to trek 20,000km to highlight urgency of climate crisis, artist Amir Nizar Zuabi just gave a TED talk announcing his act of theater to spark climate action:
// PSYCHOLOGY & THE MIND
Love is the strongest Meme
First brain-wide map shows how sex and intimacy rewire the brain: Researchers "created the first brain-wide map of regions that are active in prairie voles during mating and pair bonding" and found that "bonding voles experience a storm of brain activity distributed across 68 distinct brain regions that make up seven brain-wide circuits. The brain activity correlates with three stages of behavior: mating, bonding, and the emergence of a stable, enduring bond."
They also found that "'orgasms' coordinate the formation of a bond (which) would imply that orgasms can serve as a means to promote connection, as has long been suggested in humans."
In my thinking, memes are fields and memetics is measurable through brain synchrony, like when we synchronize brain activity at a live concert or collaborative decision making. As this study shows, our brains might heavily synchronize during sex, which, arguably, involves a lot of "collaborative decision making". Which could mean that Love is the strongest meme of them all.
That's nice and now i want a study of interbrain synchrony in fucking couples.
// JUST THE HEADLINES
Researchers found music predictor neurons and "developed a precise map of what is happening in the cerebral cortex when someone hears a melody. It turns out to be doing two things at once: following the pitch of a note, using two sets of neurons that also follow the pitch of speech, and trying to predict what notes will come next, using a set of neurons that are specific to music. The (...) group of neurons (...) devoted to predicting melodic notes (...) are described here for the first time."
From a recent study on the effects of exercise on depression: "just dancing has the largest effect of any treatment for depression" and here's my certified depression lifting sideblog featuring a lot of good music to dance to. (I wonder if handbanging counts too?)
Why Americans Suddenly Stopped Hanging Out: "From 2003 to 2022, American men reduced their average hours of face-to-face socializing by about 30 percent. For unmarried Americans, the decline was even bigger—more than 35 percent. For teenagers, it was more than 45 percent."
The adult consequences of being bullied in childhood are dire: "Bullying negatively impacts subjective well-being between ages 16 and 62 and raises the probability of mortality before age 55. It also lowers the probability of having a job in adulthood. These effects are independent of other adverse childhood experiences."
A new look at our linguistic roots: "A controversial analytic technique offers new answers for Indo-European languages."
For Jung, architecture was a tool to represent the psyche: How Jung came up with his archetypes after dreaming up a house.
Nature vs nurture: Twin study sheds light on heritable brain activity
How We Sort the World: Gregory Murphy on the Psychology of Categories: Interview with Gregory L. Murphy on his book Categories We Live By: How We Classify Everyone and Everything.
Mind-reading devices are revealing the brain’s secrets: Miryam Naddaf at Nature on the history of "implants and other technologies that decode neural activity".
'Movies' with color and music visualize brain activity data in beautiful detail
Donald Hoffman and Anil Seth on how the reality we experience every day is an illusion and whether or not AI will ever become conscious.
From Genes To Memes: Richard Dawkins interviews Daniel Dennett on the evolution of language and AI.
// MOVIES, MUSIC & GAMES
Four Fab Four Biopics from Sam Mendez
Sam Mendes to Direct Four Beatles Films: "The British director Sam Mendes has signed on to direct not one but four biopics about the Beatles, each telling the story of the Fab Four from a different member’s point of view." Apple Corps has granted full rights to the life stories of John, Paul, George and Ringo plus the music rights, the movies are set for a release in 2027 in an "innovative and groundbreaking" manner.
I love the idea of four movies about each Beatle, but i'm not sure about the "innovative and groundbreaking" manner of release. If those movies are all set for 2027, i guess they'll be released all at once? Or successive over the summer?
I would've loved a more narrative approach, telling the story in "order of appearance" in the history of the band, which would mean to start with Lennon, then add Pauls perspective, then George and then Ringo. You could also start backwards, tell the history of the Beatles starting with Ringo who joined an already full fledged band during the recording of "Love Me Do", and then tell each members story adding ever more details from early band history. Then release those movies over a four year period, or whatever.
This approach also would remind one of Stanley Kubricks "The Killing", which tells its story of a heist from the different perspectives of the gangsters, going from unimportant complice to the main protagosnist, adding ever more detail to the story which we see continguingly repeated from different point of views.
That way, you could start with the recording of "Love Me Do", repeat that scene in the middle of the next movie from the perspective of George Harrison, then from the perspective of Paul McCartney, and finally that of John Lennon whose movie would start with him founding The Blackjacks at the age of 16 back in 1956 with some friends from highschool, the band that would over several years transform into The Beatles in 1960.
This approach would give all four movie a narrative umbrella which would not be random and each movie would build on top of each other. The drawback of this would be that you would emphasize importance of band members, with Ringo getting the "small biopic at the beginning" and John the "towering final conclusion". I'm not sure about that, but would still love to see those four movies in a day long sitting as one giant biopic of the most important band in the world.
// TRAILERS
Trailer for Bertrand Bonellos The Beast, a black mirroresque scifi story set in the near future where "artificial intelligence controls all facets of a stoic society as humans routinely erase their feelings. Hoping to eliminate pain caused by their past-life romances, Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) continually falls in love with different incarnations of Louis (George MacKay)."
Trailer for spider horror flick Sting. I have a mid range arachnophobia which means that any spider under 1cm is fine and i might even save it and anything above 1cm and/or hairy is dead on sight. Needles to say, i love giant spider movies and this looks like a good one.
New trailer for Alex Garlands Civil War. I'm torn about this. One one hand, it sure looks like a not too unrealistic and maybe necessary story to shake up some stuff, if it can deliver it's message. On the other hand, russia is already messing with desinformation about a Texas secession, playing exactly into the hands of rightwing lunatics dreaming of civil war scenarios like those depicted here. I just hope that Alex Garland handled this topic with care.
The trailler for the movie adaptation of the game Borderlands starring Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart and Jack Black, and this actually looks kinda fun?
Trailer for Boy Kills World, "a dystopian fever dream action film that follows Boy, a deaf mute with a vibrant imagination. When his family is murdered, he is trained by a mysterious shaman to repress his childish imagination and become an instrument of death."
More trailers worth watching: Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire Trailer 2, Knox Goes Away (Dementia themed thriller with Michael Keaton), Monolith (scifi thriller about "a strange artifact, an alien conspiracy"), Lovely, Dark, and Deep (horrorfilm about a ranger uncovering a secret in the wilderness), The Invisible Fight (a "black metal kung fu comedy" from russia), Another End (italian scifi-melodrama about AI-resurrection of the dead), The Tattooist of Auschwitz (I want to read the book so i'll give this a shot), The Fox (in which a nazi soldier bonds with a fox), The Gentlemen Trailer 2 (the Guy Ritchie series still looks good), Rose's War (dramatization of the life of Rose Dugdale, an elite english woman who joined the irish IRA), Lousy Carter (low budget comedy featuring everybody's favorite nerd Martin Starr), Asphalt City (paramedic themed NYC-thriller featuring Sean Penn who seems to have gotten his act together).
// JUST THE HEADLINES
Yorgos Lanthimos Sets 'Save the Green Planet' Remake. I've seen Save The Green Planet at the Fantasy Filmfestival ages ago and can barely remember it. Lanthimos is one of my fav contemporary directors (and it fills my heart with joy that his Poor Things gets the recognition it deserves), and seeing him remaking a rather obscure korean scifi flick in which "a disillusioned young man captures and tortures a businessman whom he believes to be part of an alien invasion" is just great.
Dr No: Sean Connery behind the scenes on the first James Bond film
The "baseline" scene was actually written by Ryan Gosling": Cool analysis of Blade Runner 2049 and how the Voight Kampff machine relates to the baseline test.
// EVERYTHING ELSE
Synthballs for Musk
Last spring when free speech absolutist Elon Musk surpressed free speech on Twitter, i was happy to report the abolutely true and scientifically proven fact that Elon Musk lacks a critical bodypart, namely that "Elon Musk has no balls", adding that "he has, indeed, no testicles, no balls, a complete lack of reproductive organs" and that "A press release from Twitter HQ reads: 'It is true, our CEO has no balls. Never had.'"
Now, in an another unexpected twist, scientists grew teeny tiny testicles in a lab. These scientists confirmed in an exclusive interview with GOOD INTERNET that, yes, these organoid synth-balls were developed and realized with a fund coming from Elon Musk personally, who wants the organoid testicle-tech to be applied to his private parts asap.
Rumours coming out of Hollywood tell us that Mel Brooks renamed his long planned Spaceballs sequel into Synthballs, where Lord Helmet is renamed into Lord Hairtransplant and the evil emperor doesn't suck air out of the atmosphere, but sucks the fun out of social media.
On a personal note, i love that Musk literally followed the advice of the spokespersons from Mastodon and Substack who in a joint statement commented on this lack of organ back then: “We think that Elon Musk should grow a pair“. He did and i'm happy for the clown.
// JUST THE HEADLINES
100 Notable Books of 2023 from The New York Times and The 100 Best Books of 2023 according to 1,542 Authors
The Last Linotype Newspaper: Operating the Saguache Crescent
Secret Mathematical Patterns Revealed in Bach's Music. I'd love to see Gödel Escher Bach-author Douglas Hofstadter commenting on this.
Cost and Features of bunkers built by billionaires to survive an apocalypse: The billionaires build their society-exit-strategies with "fiery moats and water cannons" for the rest of us.
A Rainbow "over Hawaii at 2000 ft of altitude"
Germany on track to partly legalise cannabis for personal use. It's about time. (Update: “Germany’s parliament has passed a law allowing individuals and voluntary associations to grow and hold limited quantities of cannabis, making it the latest in a small group of countries and jurisdictions to legalise the drug, at least in part.”)
Elle Cordovas latest has inventions hanging out and she's still the best.
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