Quantum Entanglement is tao-complete
Links 34/2023
I’m trying to find a way to make these link posts more structured, sorting them by topic and introducing new ways to seperate the sections. I’m not sure if this will stay that way, and if you have any ideas i’d like to hear your feedback.
For today, let me introduce huge yellow squares. They may not be tao-complete (see misc-section for reference), but they are very yellow with exactly 1,96078431372549% of red in it.
I’m also thinking about doing these linkposts more regulary because i read a lot, way more than goes into these posts and i constantly curate and scratch my head what is interesting and pressing enough to put in them. We’ll see how it goes. Enjoy!
Heidi AI Collection: Heidi, Girl of the Alps being a mainstay of AI-art is not so baffling. I've done a bunch of generative Heidis myself, and it's appeal clearly lies in the tension between the overromanticized view of "living together with nature in harmony", in an environment only barely touched by humans with some elements — the mountains — even being almost untouchable, and the still cutting edge technology that is AI image synthesis. It’s this tension that makes this one of the more interesting memes in AI-art.
The somewhat-flying sheep Heidi from Merzmensch takes the cake:
Weird science in found vintage photos by the always fantastic AirmindedAI. Here’s Higgs Bosom particles, spontaneous matter-phase changes, mathematically randomized dangers, molecular decohesion, spaghettification hazard and distortions in three-dimensional space. The whole thread is like this.
New AI app lets users ‘text' with Jesus, as impersonated by ChatGPT // Someone finetuned a GPT with the savior and baked the holy consultation into an app: Text With Jesus.
I'm still waiting for ChatBRIAN, which tells me that everybody is an individual except me, and can tell me how it feels like to fall from a tower, getting saved by a UFO, going to space, getting laserblastered by more aliens just to boink into an asteroid and then crash landing at the exact same spot, while one guy observes all of this saying: "You lucky bastard".Paralysed woman able to ‘speak’ through digital avatar in world first // Another milestone for BCI-tech: “Until now, patients have had to rely on frustratingly slow speech synthesisers that involve spelling out words using eye tracking or small facial movements, making natural conversation impossible. The latest technology uses tiny electrodes implanted on the surface of the brain to detect electrical activity in the part of the brain that controls speech and face movements. These signals are translated directly into a digital avatar’s speech and facial expressions including smiling, frowning or surprise.“
The video shows that the tech is still slow with huge latency in voice-generation once it’s extracted from the brainwaves, but Elevenlabs recently shown Real-Time Streaming for Text-to-Speech which should significantly speed up the process, which simply means: We’re getting to the point where we can speak with paralyzed people in realtime.
This, alone, is a reason to be excited about AI-tech and why i think that Generative AI will go nowhere soon, at least in more serious applications like these. Here’s another writeup on Techexplore with links to relevant papers.Old visualization project from Deepmind with some nice results: Visualising AI.
Gary Marcus recently asked if there is a name for the phenomenon revealed in a study which “revealed that 52% of ChatGPT's answers contain inaccuracies and 77% are verbose. Nevertheless, users still prefer ChatGPT's responses 39% of the time due to their comprehensiveness and articulate language style.“
There is, and it was dubbed receptivity of pseudo-profound bullshit in the by now famous paper On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit, which found that “some people are more receptive to this type of bullshit and that detecting it is not merely a matter of indiscriminate skepticism but rather a discernment of deceptive vagueness in otherwise impressive sounding claims.“
This paper made it’s rounds at the beginning of the Trump-era and it’s astounding that it translates nicely to the AI-era.I am skeptical about anything coming from Marc Andreesen, but his consultant-PR-bullshit-thing A16z may have a point here: The NeverEnding Game: How AI Will Create a New Category of Games, with the quibble that i don’t think that these will be a new category of games at all, but open ended sandbox games as we know them from SimCity to GTA — only they will be full generative driven by AI-tech.
Related take that i like is this piece by game dev Mike Cook on how Infinity Is Trash (And That's Okay). The built-in infinity in sandbox games is changing the narrative structure of storytelling, and when developing for such games we should be aware of that. Infinity introduces an atemporality into the game which you have to take into account: “Infinity isn't a number - it's a concept. We can't experience an infinite amount of something in the same way we can experience all three Lord of the Rings movies, so if we want to talk about infinity or infinite things where it appears in entertainment or art, we need to think about what role the infinity is playing. In Minecraft, for example, the pseudoinfinite surfaces of the worlds it generates are there to give the player certain feelings - the feeling that there is always more to explore, the feeling of being lost, the feeling of there being something new over the next horizon. The infinite nature of Minecraft's worlds isn't there so that we can consume all of it, or because we might run out of space, it's there because the knowledge that it is infinite does things to the way we play.“Nvidia AI Image Personalization Method Fits on a Floppy Disk and Takes 4 Minutes to Train // A new method for AI-image synth customization brings down the filesize to fit on a floppy disc while maintaining image quality at least somewhat. Remarkable.
You saw the “AI-art can’t be copyrighted“ and they are wrong: AI-art can be copyrighted, but you have to register your human involvement too — a prompt would be the simplest form of that involvement —, which this guy did not. He insisted his software acted fully autonomous and thus copyright was denied. This does not mean that your beautiful rendering of an anime-catgirl-illustration will be denied copyright just because it’s made with a machine, it just means that only you the human involved can register a copyright, not the machine.
Adobe co-founder John Warnock dies at 82 // Warnock was heavily involved with inventing the Postscript-language, which was a way to digitally encode typography, layout and images for prepress processing, and basically lead the whole print publishing sector into the whole new digital era of professional desktop publishing. The PDF-fileformat is built on Postscript, and every digital printer you know still works with this scripting language. For this invention alone, he is a legend of publishing. He also gave us the best design-software ever which is Illustrator.
Goodnite, John, and thanks for all the béziers:
People share misinformation because of social media’s incentives — but those can be changed: “Sharing widely read content, by itself, isn’t a problem. But it becomes a problem when attention-getting, controversial content is prioritized by design. Given the design of social media sites, users form habits to automatically share the most engaging information regardless of its accuracy and potential harm. Offensive statements, attacks on out groups and false news are amplified, and misinformation often spreads further and faster than the truth. Our research, presented at the 2023 Nobel Prize Summit, shows that social media actually has the ability to create user habits to share high-quality content. After a few tweaks to the reward structure of social media platforms, users begin to share information that is accurate and fact-based.“ // Good work, and it seems to me that this is also the reason why something like community notes on Twitter work pretty well in my impression. It’s a tweak in the reward function of the social network which creates incentives to share factual information, and it allows you to point at a wrong person, sometimes to hilarious results. This fingerpointing in the case of the tweetis, ofcourse, is it’s own can of worms, but it seems better than outrage economics in which factuality simply does not matter.
Huge study from Oxford claiming there is no evidence linking Facebook adoption and negative well-being and I'm not buying it.
This paper seems to be a very broad data analysis which can't speak for outliers and while it may be true that socmed doesn't harm the mental health of the population on a broad level, i suspect social media is increasing harm for people already prone to mental health issues, like girls that are already suspectible to eating disorders.
Also, the study mentions in its limitations that it only looked at monthly active vs daily active users, whereas young folks are active for hours, but not on Facebook but on TikTok and Youtube and Insta.
I also want to add that the main author of the study, Andrew Przybylski, is part of a camp of psychologists who claim that the impact of tech on mental health is neglectable, and they are having a row with the other camp which consists of Jonathan Haidt et al who claim that social media is the main cause of the rising mental health issues for teenage girls, especially. I'm camp Haidt, and you can read about the ongoing debate between those two camps in a good post from camp Przybylski here: Teens and the impact of social media, a deep dive into recent work from Haidt.
Years ago i summarized my position as “Its not about tech, its about peers“. Socmed increases peer volume by an order of magnitude, maximizes social comparison, distorts all of this with attention economics and allows for a highly curated, editable social world.
I think that while the impact of the tech itself may be neglectable, the digital speed up and the visibility and the mass of people on socmed amplifies everything, well, social, including the volume of aggressive behavior, psychological violence like bullying, tribalist behavior resulting in conformism and group think, and so forth. These do have a significant impact on mental health, especially for kids and especially girls, and these are downstream from the invention of socmed.
It's not new that kids bully other kids, but it's new that this gets shared to and by thousands in an instant. It's also clear that the victims of such bullying are not broader society, but individuals singled out for this or that reason, and who don't make a dint in a broad analysis like this one.
Not to mention that kids are not on Facebook, and the mental health crisis is most rampant for teens and twens. It’s these details that are missing in Przybylskis work. This is why i was doubtful of his studies in the past, and this is why i doubt the usefulness of this study too.Somewhat related, the unintended consequences of attention economics at scale: Social Media Could Be Contributing to More Violence Among Young People: “As shooting rates among the young remain stratospheric, evidence suggests social media is serving as an accelerant to violence. Taunts that once could be forgotten now live on before large audiences, prompting people to take action.“
More screen time for babies could slow development // The gist: “When 1-year-olds viewed screens for more than four hours a day, they had delays in communication and problem-solving skills when assessed at ages 2 and 4“.
For me, the takeaway is not: “Let your toddlers interact with screens less than four hours“, but “No screens for toddlers, at all“. This is me and you do you.
Here’s the paper: Screen Time at Age 1 Year and Communication and Problem-Solving Developmental Delay at 2 and 4.Nautilus has a nice piece about the history and psychological effects of emoji: Your 🧠 On Emoji.
German DJs and Their Living Rooms // Very old but i was delighted to find this series of photographs again. German Groove Magazine did a photoshoot decades ago in which they featured, well, the living rooms of techno deejays living in germany. They also did a follow up called Musikzimmer, online in two parts twelve years ago, so i guess this first series must at least be over twenty years old. Here’s the old living rooms from Richie Hawtin, Sven Väth, Ellen Alien, Ricardo Villalobos, DJ Koze and DJ Hell.
I love the V/H/S-franchise of anthology horror flicks and they are returning with another installment to Shudder for this years Halloween on October 6th. I really like that, despite the mixed quality of the single segments, they all get new fresh directors for the segments who try something new and sometimes even go experimental or plain weird. I still consider Benson & Moorheads Bonestorm from V/H/S: Viral , in which a bunch of skaters accidentally wake up mexican demons and then take them out while riding their decks, one of the most original horror vignettes in the past twenty years or so.
This time, we gonna see stories from Mike P. Nelson (who directed the surprisingly okayish Wrong Turn-reboot), David Bruckner (The Night House), Gigi Saul Guerrero (Into the Dark), Natasha Kermani (Lucky) and Scott Derrickson (Doctor Strange, The Black Phone). Here’s the freshly released Trailer:I've been following the development of the indie game Tiny Glade for a while now since i discovered the dev on the tweeties. I'm a sucker for building games and history, and in this game you can build procedural castles, not much else.
If i ever have the money, i'll make a huge trip around europe and visit old castles everywhere, while some tourist dude explains their history to me in all detail. I once did such a tour in an old ruin and the guy explained that the builders of the wells there worked in darkness for months and years and went blind when they came back to the surface, which could be right out of a novel by Umberto Eco.
And this just looks so sweet:
There’s a new trailer for the unbelievably still-in-development game-adaption of the 1988 schlock legend Killer Klowns From Outer Space, which still does not have a release date yet. I haven’t seen the movie in ages, but i remember that it was released shortly after Stephen Kings It came out which started the whole horror clown shebang. While I’m quite over the whole clown thing, i’m still looking forward to playing this game for a while.
When you are indicted in US state Georgia, they mandatorily take mugshots of the defendands. Trump is indicted in Georgia, and they are releasing the mugshots of his co-defendands now: See the mugshots for Trump's co-defendants in the Georgia RICO case who have turned themselves in so far. Here’s the mugshot of one of those fucks you might remember. The Orange fuck will have his mugshot taken tomorrow and i'll gleefully post it everywhere, because it deserves it and this gonna be the only appropriate photo ever taken of orange fuck and it's historic.
I seriously hope that orange fuck will go to jail, especially after threatening witnesses, but i’m also blueeyed and naive — but a man can dream amirite?Visualizing the mysterious dance: Quantum entanglement of photons captured in real-time // Quantum entanglement is tao-complete.
