Noctalgia for a Nightsky full of Stars
Goodlinks 24/09/2023: AI-Child of Helvetica and ComicSans / The Acid Smiley Guy / Visual History of Hardcore / AI Grift Shift / Fireflies are vanishing / Ethics of brains in a dish / and much more
Meen Typeface is a font co-created with AI, an interpolation of Helvetica and Comic Sans. Print Mag on the font: Meen is a Collaborative Typeface That Embodies the Middle Ground.
A Brief Visual History of Hardcore, a great post on Rachel Cabitts excellent The Art of Cover Art-Substack.
Neat video about the man who made the Acid Smiley famous by designing a ton of early rave and techno-flyers in the UK.
Interpreted "is a series of woven tapestries portraying a year’s worth of global news as seen through the eyes of artificial intelligence (AI)."
Unusual Internet, the results of a design course in experimental user interfaces.
Money Is Pouring Into AI. Skeptics Say It’s a ‘Grift Shift.’: A good piece on the business bullshit going on behind the scenes of AI development, how corporations are shuffling money to create hype and convince investors.
Despite the comparisons with the crypto market, i don't think that AI is as useless. Crypto after more than ten years has pretty much no usecases, where AI already causes disruption in multiple sectors, which is a clear indicator that, while there is surely a bubble about to burst, there also is at least some substance in the principle of "statistical models based on big data able to navigate interpolatable latent spaces enabling vastly sped up generation of text, image and sound which then can be applied in all kinds of ways". That a revolutionary principle like this attracts grifters too is a nobrainer.
The Carbon Emissions of Writing and Illustrating Are Lower for AI than for Humans: This study compares the carbon footprint of AI-training plus per query with that of the working hours of writers and illustrators plus the carbon footprint of their laptops while writing/drawing and finds that "AI writing produces 130 to 1400 times less CO2 per page than a human author", and that "AI image creation produces 310-2900 times less CO2 per image than human creators".
I checked the methology and can't find any inconsistencies, but i'm also not a scientist, so I take these results with a grain of salt. Interesting nevertheless, and both climate activists and AI-criticism should keep these calculations in mind, because others will when they find out about it.
We gave a profession of bullshit generators access to GPT-4. You won’t believe what happened next: I already linked to Ethan Mollicks blue-eyed study on the performance of AI in consulting, mocking stuff like this as "automatizing the businessmen smile" in a previous piece.
David Karpf now has a much better takedown of this: "hey! I hear you think A.I. is a bullshit generator. Well, we gave a whole profession of bullshit generators access to A.I., and you’ll never believe how much more productive they became at generating bullshit! This is such a big deal for the Future of Work! (...) It sure would be great if our future-titans-of-industry devoted a little more classroom hours to thinking about the social consequences of McKinsey though. At least then they would have a clue what the critics are warning people about."
Related: If AI is taking white collar jobs, we should start thinking about B.S. Jobs and the Coming Crisis of Meaning, when AI is taking away agency and reducing human labor to "last mile jobs".
DALL·E 3 is here and I'm impressed with the illustration output which, mostly, can't be differentiated from human illus anymore, at least for their published examples. It's not public yet (but it will be integrated into ChatGPT+ and Bing soon), so examples in the wild are somewhat hard to come by.
You can find Dall-E 3 images on the Tweeties from Nathan Shipley, Rendo, Adam.GPT, Logan.GPT, Will Depue and Don Allen Stevenson.
By what i have seen, structured patterns like rows of windows, ceiling patterns, or pointilism in drawings (see this example), the overall line guidance in illustration all are vastly improved.
It can do correct spelling now, and sometimes hands are anatomically correct too. You can still see the AI-typical weird artifacts some of the time in the examples, but overall this is roughly on par with human illustration, at least for cute illus for advertising and books for kids.
But the true huge step forward for Dall-E seems to be the improved interpretation of user input with reduced semantic bleeding (the fusion of ambivalent meanings in a prompt), and it can handle some pretty complex descriptions. No weird word voodoo in prompt engineering anymore, simply describe a scene in natural language.
That's the promise at least.
I'm rather confident that Dall-E beats Stable Diffusion XL, but I'm not sure if it beats Midjourney in composition quality yet.
The Image Synthesis revolution keeps on rolling, and the timebomb of copyright lawsuits keeps on ticking.
Run LLMs at home, BitTorrent-style: Like AI Horde but for LLMs: distributed computing for p2p-AI. If mainstream AI usage will be open source, p2p-AI-compute might become one of it's cornerstones.
More on the Sextbot-industry i wrote about the other day: DIY Chatbots Unleash Large Language Models’ Repressed Sexuality: "I recently spent a morning chatting with Trainsley, an anthropomorphic train with giant breasts."
Why generative AI is 'alchemy,' not science: "The magic (of generative AI) comes from the way the model is matched to the interface. The magic people like so much is that I feel like I’m talking to a machine when I play with ChatGPT. That’s not a property of the model, that’s a property of ChatGPT — of the interface."
Franz Kafkas Metamorphosis imagined with AI-cinema by Roope Rainisto: "Over 10000 SDXL init images, over 3000 generated Gen-2 clips."
Confessions of a Viral AI Writer: "If AI constitutes a dramatic technical leap—and I believe it does—then, judging from history, it will also constitute a dramatic leap in corporate capture of human existence."
First Google Search Result for Tiananmen Square “Tank Man” Is AI Generated Selfie: At least for me, this is not true, with the first example of the AI generated selfie stemming from this very article. I guess Google cleaned it up as soon as 404 media contacted them for comment.
AI system found to outperform humans in creating urban planning designs, which doesn't mean it's creative, because there is no Creativity without intention.
For his new movie The Creator, in which humanity goes to war with AI, Gareth Edwards tried his hands at synthetic music generation for the soundtrack and ultimately failed: "AI generated a 7 out of 10-track. But the reason you go to Hans Zimmer is for 10 out of 10".
AI can't reason, the 42865th: Does a language model trained on “A is B” generalize to “B is A”? Our new paper shows they cannot! The researchers call this the "reversal curse": "LLMs don’t just get ~0% accuracy; they fail to increase the likelihood of the correct answer. After training on 'name is description', we prompt with 'description is name'. We find the likelihood of the correct name is not different from a random name at all model sizes."
George R.R. Martin, Jodi Picoult and other writers sue OpenAI: The generativeAI-timebomb keeps ticking, ticking, ticking. Repeat after me: Fair Use for research does not imply a commercial product. If you want to keep up, here's an OpenAI and ChatGPT Lawsuit List, which does not include the lawsuit against Stability and Midjourney.
This is funny: Over the past few weeks, outlets reported falling page visits for ChatGPT and how this is a sign of people losing interest in generative AI. Well: ChatGPT Usage is Rising Again as Students Return to School, which, lol.
Scientists Say New AI Can Translate What Chickens Are Saying: Sentences i always wanted to read in an AI-paper: "In this groundbreaking study, we present a novel approach to interspecies communication, focusing on the understanding of chicken vocalizations".
As bizzare this paper may sound, research is finding more and more hints that language too exists on a spectrum and that many animals are communicating with their own forms of speech. Just two weeks ago i linked to this piece in the New Yorker on researchers working on AI-enabled interpreters for whale song.
I don't think that translation of animal communication via AI is that far off the table and i ask myself: What will a pig at a slaughterhouse tell us about it's living circumstances in the face of certain death?
I'm very convinced that our treatment of animals, the mass slaughter for proteins, is one of the worst crimes in our era and that future generations will look down on us as literal bloodthirsty barbarians for exactly that reason and because meat alternatives could slash food system carbon emissions a third.
Now, I do eat meat myself and i like it, but i also regulary try out every veggie-alternative burger i can get my hands on. If true labgrown meat becomes available, I’m first in line, and if only for the reason that i just like to try out new things. The plant based burgers at McD taste pretty good, but the McNuggets need more texture so i keep on munching away on the crispy flesh of former feathered language users. Forgive me chickens.
Sweden brings more books and handwriting practice back to its tech-heavy schools: I'm against any and all digital technology in the classroom for lower grades and think that handwriting and books on paper should be mandatory up until a certain age. I'm also for a strict ban of smartphones in schools.
I don't care for screens in higher grades or universities, where kids are old enough to have formed the necessary mental skills to learn ("learning to learn", as they say) and are old enough to act responsible, but digital technology is proven to work against the mental processes necessary for learning. Especially handwriting is an essential skill to connect contents with spatial thinking and motor skills which anchors the learned subject much better in memory than typing, and reducing handwriting in lower grades is a terrible thing to do if your goal is, you know, education.
I think the "digitization of education" is a grift from the digital sector trying to grab government contracts, extracting money from the state on the back of the education of kids. I'm absolutely against that, so I welcome this piece of news wholeheartedly.
s32 unix clock: "When the red hand points straight down (hex 80), we'll have hit the 2038 problem." And while we are at clocks: Here's The Puddings' clock where the time is made of news headlines.
NFTs Almost Completely Worthless, Crypto Researchers Find: "Dead NFTs: The Evolving Landscape of the NFT Market is a new report from dappGambl, a community of experts in finance and blockchain technology. Upon analysis of 73,257 NFT collections, the authors found that 69,795 have a market cap of zero Ether (ETH), the second most-popular cryptocurrency behind Bitcoin. In practical terms, that means 95 percent of NFTs wouldn’t fetch a penny today — a spectacular crash for assets that reached a trading volume of $17 billion amid a frenzied bull market in 2021. The study estimates that some 23 million investors own these tokens of no practical use or value." //
If i were a business type of guy i'd now say something like "now is the time to invest" or something along those lines, but i'm not a business type of guy, so i say: Crypto is a scam.
The Pirate Bay Celebrates Its 20th Anniversary. Happy warez, pirates! Yarrrrr!
Birb 🐦 A programming language that only consists of bird emojis
We’re Thinking About Climate Risk All Wrong: "large uncertainties about dangerous surprises “are reasons to prioritize rather than neglect (risks). But this is what the IPCC and climate research and risk managers in the financial system have overwhelmingly not done."
American Exceptionalism: New Study Identifies United States as 'Planet-Wrecker-in-Chief': "The U.S. is one of just 20 countries that are projected to be responsible for nearly 90% of the carbon dioxide pollution from new oil and gas extraction projects between 2023 and 2050." John Kerry writes about this in the WaPo: The world must stop building coal-fired power plants "Tripling renewables without also halting the building of new, dirty coal plants would be like training for a marathon while smoking five packs of cigarettes a day."
Rise in global thunderstorm activity might increase the quantity of wispy cirrus clouds—accelerating global warming: This sounds whimsy and kind of neglectable, but it isn't.
Climate change has effects on cloud formation and vice versa. Cirrus clouds (the half-translucent blanket-like clouds high in the atmosphere) are warming the planet because they trap heat, while stratocumulus clouds (the big white blobs of cotton-candy in the sky) reflect sunlight cooling the planet.
This new study found that climate change increases the amount cirrus clouds, while previous studies found that stratocumulus clouds might vanish, if carbon concentration keeps rising. Taken together, that's very bad, not good at all.
A Summer Light Show Dims: Why Are Fireflies Disappearing?: "You can converse with most firefly species if you study their flash codes and imitate them with a penlight." But not for much longer if we go on like that.
Related: ‘Mutilating the tree of life’: Wildlife loss accelerating, scientists warn: "Study finds species groups are going extinct 35 times faster than the previous million years because of human activity".
Spider silk is spun by silkworms for the first time: CRISPR-Silkworms produce spiderstuff now as a green alternative to synthetic fibers.
Rivers are rapidly warming, losing oxygen: Aquatic life at risk, study finds: "within the next 70 years, river systems, especially in the American South, are likely to experience periods with such low levels of oxygen that the rivers could "induce acute death" for certain species of fish and threaten aquatic diversity at large."
Great: Companies Stall Climate Action Despite Earlier Promises: "One big factor is a lack of trust in voluntary carbon markets." Which is coming at no surprise because climate credits are not working and top carbon offset projects may not cut planet-heating emissions.
German police have long collaborated with energy giant RWE to enforce ecological catastrophe: A few days ago, a climate activist was sentenced to 8 months in jail without bail for gluing herself to the street and showing no remorse in court about it. As i wrote a few days ago, i view this kind of activism as a form of civil disobedience to uphold the law, and this sentence is disproportional compared to the commited transgression.
In that context, read the link above, which provides some fine examples of collusion of state, especially the executive arm of the state (the police), and corporate interests of energy companies. I wouldn't go so far and call that collusion "enforcing ecological catastrophe" as the headline suggests, but it's also not bullshit. This is what climate activists have to put up with, and i know damn well which side i'm on.
DishBrain: Bio-Computing's Rise and Ethics in the Age of Living Machines: The "braincells in a dish which learn to play Pong"-guys have partnered with a bunch of ethicists to write a paper on the ethics of, well, brains in a dish.
The pong-playing blobs of braincells made headlines last year and the researchers promise that these are absolutely not conscious or sentient in no way whatsoever, and now they wrote a paper around these questions, citing "early english philosopher Jeremy Bentham who argued that, with respect to the moral status of animals, 'the question is not, can they reason? nor, can they talk? but, can they suffer?." If only humans wrote as much papers on animal suffering like they write on blobs of braincells.
However, this paper on the ethics of Organoid Intelligence may also have to do with the fact that they received 600k bucks from australian defense to merge braincells with AI-hardware, so they want to be prepared for upcoming outrage cycles.
Related: 'Bioprinting' living brain cell networks in the lab: "researchers have successfully used "bioinks" containing living nerve cells (neurons) to print 3D nerve networks that can grow in the laboratory and transmit and respond to nerve signals."
This paper tries to reduce the many cognitive biases into a few foundational beliefs. If you know this cognitive bias codex , this is dearly needed.
Streaming Is Changing the Sound of Music: "'Pop Overture' (describes) a new trend in which a song will play a hint of the chorus in the first five to 10 seconds so that the hook is in your ear, hoping that you’ll stick around till about 30 seconds in when the full chorus eventually comes in."
Richard Brody reviews Talking Heads' “Stop Making Sense” and the Transformative Power of Collaboration in The New Yorker.
io9 has seen the new Toxie and it seems to be good: The New Toxic Avenger Is Stupid in All the Best Ways: "This is going to be very, very stupid. But how a filmmaker handles and delivers the stupid is key, and director Macon Blair’s The Toxic Avenger does stupid very, very well."
Experimental game-dev/artist Pippin Barr on pointless pursuits and the joy of queueing. I blogged about his games regulary back in the day, and his minimalist takes on Marina Abramovics The Artist is Present, the punishments from ancient greek mythology or his Pong Variations are completely unique and unparalleled when it comes to game design.
I remember blogging about this and think about introducing a web-oldie section on this blog: Johnny Cash Has Been Everywhere (Man). Also, i'm "I remember this link from the blog-era of the internet" years old.
Carrie — Anatomy of a Franchise: The YT-channel In Praise of Shadows does some pretty good hour long specials on horror franchises, and Stephen Kings Carrie is one of my favorite King-novels ever, with DePalmas adaption being one of the best King-movies ever. Other franchises in the series include Pumpkinhead, The Hills Have Eyes, Basket Case, Re-Animator, Hellraiser, Child's Play and Halloween, and the guy thinks that Tremors is a perfect monster movie which is always is a sign of top notch quality stuff for any YT-channel. Like and subscribe, he's good.
I recently wrote about Nic Cage becoming the greatest genre movie actor of all time and mentioned his latest movies including Dream Scenario. Here's the trailer and it looks fantastic.
Synopsis: "Paul Matthews, a hapless family man who finds his life turned upside down when millions of strangers suddenly start seeing him in their dreams. But when his nighttime appearances take a nightmarish turn, Paul is forced to navigate his newfound stardom."
The complete trailer for V/H/S/85 is here:
More trailers worth watching: Butcher's Crossing featuring Nic Cage, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes Trailer #2, The Doctor Who 60th Anniversary Specials.
Borges and Heisenberg converged on the slipperiness of language: A beautiful piece on how Heisenberg and Borges both described the impossibility of perfect perception and the inability to describe the totallity of reality. Only art in it's ambivalence is able to grasp what is undescribable by scientific language.
One thing you will not hear from me, despite my fun-interest in the paranormal and the occult, is stuff about UFOs. I find the conspiracies off putting and i want my paranormal phenomena to be fantastic, not polulated by idiots who think they are real. Having said that, here Is NASA's 36-Page Report Investigating UFOs, which found “no evidence to suggest that UAP are extraterrestrial in origin”.
Having said that: Together with a buddy, i saw an UFO once. No kidding. We were both high as a kite, sitting in a car standing in the middle of an acre in the middle of nowhere, hitting on a bong, when a floating 'plattform' (or whatever) with a rotating gear (or whatever) vanished behind some clouds. My buddy and me confirmed to each other that, yes, indeed, we both saw that thing and it looked like that — and then we pretty much never talked about it again. I'm one hundred percent sure it was of human origin, but i never saw a flying piece of tech like this after that incident again.
And having said that, here's possible hints of life found on distant planet: The JW Space Telescope found chemical signatures only associated with organic life.
Just because i don't think that extraterrestrial UFOs are a thing, it doesn't mean i don't think that aliens are very potentially real. I absolutely do. I just don't think they are human-like, or visit us, or are green angry men with big bald heads, or anything in that vain. I think the probability of us humans finding complex forms of life that goes beyond mere bacteria on one of our first missions to Jupiter moon Europa is pretty high, and it seems absurd to me that matter would organize itself into lifeforms exclusively on this tiny rock in space. That's why i think that aliens are absolutely real, while UFOs are not.
Everything, Everywhere, All On One Plot. Every object in the universe in one graph, from this paper: All objects and some questions.
Scent of the afterlife? Scientists re-create recipe for Egyptian mummification balm: I want to smell this: "Trying to re-create the scents and smells of the past is a daunting challenge, given the ephemeral nature of these olfactory cues. Now scientists have identified the compounds in the balms used to mummify the organs of an ancient Egyptian noblewoman, according to a recent paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, suggesting that the recipes were unusually complex and used ingredients not native to the region. The authors also partnered with a perfumer to re-create what co-author Barbara Huber calls the scent of eternity."
Today in melancholic space news: The loss of dark skies is so painful, astronomers coined a new term for it.
I'm born and raised in rural germany and moved to Berlin fifteen years ago and one thing i really miss is looking at the stars. Here, you can, see some of them at night, but it's nothing compared to where i was raised and spent my twenties, and that was hardly an unpopulated area in southern hessian, near Darmstadt and Frankfurt. But still i had a view over a good chunk of bright stars, and even a subtle shiny idea of the milky way when the sky was very clear.
In Berlin, all you can see is a flat dark surface barely identifyable as a sky that’s worth it’s name, with some five sad dim glowing dots formerly known as stars. So yeah, it seems i absolutely suffer from what they call Noctalgia now, which means 'sky grief'. Modern life is truly rubbish.
Here's the paper: Noctalgia (sky grief): Our Brightening Night Skies and Loss of Environment for Astronomy and Sky Traditions.
Related: Immerse yourself in some high quality noctalgia with the winners of the astronomy photographer of the year-contest 2023. Below, the winning photograph called Andromeda, Unexpected.
Why 'Unexpected'? Well, it has something to do with the hazy blue cloud you can see in the bottom left of the image.
The Andromeda galaxy is the closest spiral galaxy to our own Milky Way, and one of the most photographed deep-sky objects. Yet this particular photo, captured by an international trio of amateur astronomers, revealed a feature that had never been seen before: a huge plasma arc, stretching out across space right next to the Andromeda galaxy.
"Scientists are now investigating the newly discovered giant in a transnational collaboration," explain the photographers. "It could be the largest such structure nearest to us in the Universe."