Smiley Shields and Blue Noise Dithering
Goodlinks 2023-10-20: Realtime Brain2Images / Letraset Quicksilver / LLM Stylometry / Digital Afterlife Industry / Datassettes sing / Bandcamp Union Busting / Pepper X / Born to be mild and much more
James Cauty of The KLF-fame still sells these great smiley shields made from actual riot police shields, "hand-painted by acid house experts in South London". They come in standard yellow smiley, Watchmen, and Gold Glitter variants and then there's stamps too. I love them all. I blogged about them several times in the past and i'd totally hang them on my wall if i were rich, but i am poor -- and still i'd hang them on my wall.
Werner Herzogs biography is out in english and The Guardian and a bunch of famous people interview him: ‘I am not that much in pursuit of happiness’: Werner Herzog on beer, yoga and what he would ask God. This would usually belong to the entertainment section of this newsletter as Herzog is a filmmaker, but he always was and is more about a particular no bullshit attitude towards the artistic process -- the guy has a filmschool in which he teaches lessons in the "art of lock-picking, traveling on foot", or "the exhilaration of being shot at unsuccessfully" after all.
I love these GIFs by loackme applying Bayer- and blue noise-dithering algorithms to 3D-shaders in the same frame.
John Coulthart looks at the "old Letraset font (...) Quicksilver (...), one of the foundry’s many quirky type designs from the 1970s whose novelty inspired brief flushes of popularity before they were replaced by trendier designs."
Brian Eno: why I sculpt sound: "The thrill of making music is not when you succeed in meeting the brief, but when something happens that you hadn’t expected — some moment of synergy when you put together two or three familiar things and something emerges that is much bigger, more complex and surprising. The feeling at that moment — 'now I’m somewhere new' — is the sense of freshness you get in creative art. For me alertness, being attentive, is the key state for creative behaviour."
In Paul Trillos Absolve, "a leak in the ceiling of the Louvre pulls Jacques into an emotional vortex where a cosmic teardrop dissolves the museum’s masterpieces into their rawest forms. (...) The film fuses traditional VFX with a variety of boundary-pushing AI techniques that give way to a new aesthetic and offer an alternative to how visual effects will be approached in the future."
In a new paper, Meta introduces real-time decoding of images from brain-activity in your visual cortex. They do this by applying "magnetoencephalography (MEG), a non-invasive neuroimaging technique in which thousands of brain activity measurements are taken per second" and training an image generator on the brainwaves of people who are looking at more than 20000 images. Then, the system is able to generate a realtime anteater-tapir when you look at a leopard. It's not quite there yet, but we're slowly approaching tech-telepathy. Here's a writeup at VentureBeat, summary from research scientist Jean-Rémi King.
New unfixable problem just dropped, and it's a big one: AI Chatbots Can Guess Your Personal Information From What You Type. Simply by sucking in all of the web and building a highly sophisticated statistical model, LLMs can apply a new form of stylometry to your prompts and infer personal information like your location, age, occupation or gender from mundane text input which lacks references to that information. Whatsmore, they do this even if the training data is anonymized with common RegEx techniques. Here's the paper: Beyond Memorization: Violating Privacy via Inference with Large Language Models.
Somewhat related: Can You Hide a Child’s Face From A.I.?: "Parents have been stressing out for at least two decades about what to share about their children online. Powerful new technologies present a more urgent risk."
Kudurru is a new "AI web scraping defense network" from Spawning.ai which detects web scrapers and can reroute them to any data you like, poisoning datasets or do any other shenanigans. Holly Herndon just rickrolled ChatGPT with it, but you could also reroute your vast image collection on the web to a folder full of Goatse, if you know what i mean, or reroute the scraper to an automatized mirror of your blog written by a RSS-GPT4-Zapier-pipeline in the style of early inconsistent AI-Chatbots and induce Model Autophagy Disorder. Ah, possibilities.
Training AI to Play Pokemon with Reinforcement Learning
Dazed looks at the latest AI-developments in pr0n: Inside the booming AI-generated porn industry. The new hotness there is adult performers creating synthetic versions of themselves and deepfaking them on porn videos: "They’re men and they’re horny. Of course they believe the girl is real".
How Everything Became Data: Ben Tarnoff at The Nation reviews Chris Wiggins and Matthew L. Jones’s new book, How Data Happened: A History From the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms, which traces the origin of modern statistics and shines a light on their embedded politics.
Margaret Atwood Reviews a “Margaret Atwood” Story by AI: "You, dear author, would never write anything so gawd-awful, and neither—unless my brain leaves for another planet—would I."
From High Life Hackers to National Menace: The Rise and Fall of Digital Bandits 'ACG': "Hackers 'ACG' popped champagne and bought sports cars. Then the group and its associates ushered in a bold new era of crime where anything is possible."
The Datassettes: "Four Commodore 1530 Datassettes get together to sing a barbershop classic."
The Creepy New Digital Afterlife Industry: "Our digital profiles—our datafied selves—provide the means for a life after death and possible social interactions outside of what we physically took on while we were alive. As such, the boundaries of human community are changing, as the dead can now be more present in the lives of the living than ever before."
Fascinating paper by Michael Levin et al which tries (and fails) to apply phenomena of collective intelligence in biology, where new behavior emerges from collective cell behavior, to machine learning and text: "In textual context, words can organize themselves into sentences, which further organize into chapters, ultimately forming complete books, etc., as in biological organisms, cells organize into specific structures, which then combine to form organs, culminating in fully grown organisms and swarms. Certain machine learning algorithms, such as neural cellular automata, have shown remarkable ability to replicate aspects of the behavior of cells in biological organisms. Here, we demonstrate that attempting to teach a machine learning algorithm to generate text by simply providing each word with information solely from its neighboring words is unsuccessful in achieving self-organization. In this paper we will prove that this is due to the fact that text is a 1-dimensional sequence of words, and self organization in 1D is impossible. Biological organisms are 3-dimensional so don't have this problem."
Trust & Safety Tycoon, "a video game simulating what it’s like to run a trust & safety team at a fictitious, rapidly scaling social media company called Yapper (...) You have to set policies, deal with various dilemmas, face internal and external pressures, weigh tradeoffs, determine resource allocation and more, all while trying to keep your website from descending into a cesspit of hate, driving away users and advertisers". More at Techdirt.
Latest numbers on teenage socmed use are staggering: Teens Spend Average of 4.8 Hours on Social Media Per Day, 6 hours for 17 year olds, textbased services loosing out big time.
Radical Energy Abundance: Moore's Law, Solarpunk version.
Uninsured "is a four-part Grist series examining how climate change is destabilizing the global insurance market". I repeatedly mentioned in my climate links that the insurance industry is in for a giant shakeup. When nobody can afford insurance anymore, the companies go belly-up including reinsurance, we're in for a global economic hellride. That's when we will wake up, and i can't wait, as harsh as that may sound. Better a global economic desaster than a wet bulb event.
Inside Climate News asks many climate scientists about the recent heat records at the end of summer, beginning of autumn. Mann stays calm, Rahmstorf is worried and Hansen panics.
Solar-powered off-road car finishes 620-mile test drive across north Africa. If i'd be rich, i'd want one, but i'm poor and i still want one.
Climate-driven extreme heat may make parts of Earth too hot for humans: A new study looked at the frequency of heat-events reaching wet bulb temperature according to various climate change outcomes. Right now, we're heading towards roughly 3C+ preindustrial levels at the end of the century, which means "heat and humidity levels that surpass human tolerance would begin to affect the Eastern Seaboard and the middle of the United States -- from Florida to New York and from Houston to Chicago. South America and Australia would also experience extreme heat at that level of warming." Long before that, we'll have had a wet bulb event in India or Pakistan, and thousands and thousands, if not millions, of excess deaths due to heat. And the fossil fuel industry aswell as their partners in politics will be directly responsible for them.
Could superpowered plants be the heroes of the climate crisis?: Gene edited plants which suck up more carbon and grow larger may help, but scaling this up gonna be a problem.
Study finds we can respond to verbal stimuli while sleeping: "Our research has taught us that wakefulness and sleep are not stable states: on the contrary, we can describe them as a mosaic of conscious and seemingly unconscious moments". Here's the paper: Behavioral and brain responses to verbal stimuli reveal transient periods of cognitive integration of the external world during sleep.
This Is The Largest Map of The Human Brain Ever Made: "Researchers have created the largest atlas of human brain cells so far, revealing more than 3,000 cell types — many of which are new to science."
People Who Speak Backward Reveal the Brain's Endless Ability to Play with Language. Relatedly, i can mirror-write with my left hand. I never trained this, i just found out by accident some years ago by trying out. I can also simultaneously write the same sentence forward with my right, and backwards with my left hand.
New podcast with Anil Seth: Perception, illusion, hallucination, dream machines.
Ben Wheatley has a zombie series coming out called Generation Z. I love Ben Wheatley since his fantastic folkhorror-thriller Kill List and interviewed the guy back when High Rise came out and i’m looking forward to what he does with the zombie lore. Here’s the plot: "In a small British town, tensions come to a head when a mysterious military convoy crashes outside the Sunnywise Retirement Home. The vehicles were carrying a toxic substance, which, as a result of the crash, leaks into the local environment and infects the residents of the retirement community. The symptoms of this infection quickly manifest – an overwhelming appetite for raw flesh. They’re old, they’re angry and they’re on the rampage. As the military scrambles to control the outbreak and keep everything out of the media spotlight, a group of regular teenagers find themselves in the thick of the battle against these flesh-eating baby boomers."
Chuck Norris and Vanilla Ice wrapped Zombie Plane. I bet it will be a marvel of modern filmmaking.
Eileen: "Set during a bitter 1964 Massachusetts winter, young secretary Eileen becomes enchanted by the glamorous new counselor at the prison where she works. Their budding friendship takes a twisted turn when Rebecca reveals a dark secret — throwing Eileen onto a sinister path."
Saltburn: "A student is invited to an eccentric classmate's estate for an exciting summer."
Trailers worth watching: American Fiction, The Zone of Interest, SHARE?, I Don't Expect Anyone to Believe Me, Criminal Code, Rustin Trailer 2, Ferrari Trailer 2, Napoleon Trailer 2.
People are obsessed with Obsidian, the darling of notetaking apps. I'm an avid Obsidian user for two years now and everything i do goes through this app. I use raindrop.io as a catchall bookmark manager, which is also integrated into Obsidian via iframe, but everything else happens there. Coming from fifteen years of using Wordpress and using all kinds of apps for notes, and being not the most orderly person in the world (to say the least), this software is a blast. I can't say that my Markdown files are especially well organized, but i find what i'm looking for when i need it and in combination with journaling and Zettelkasten-features, this actually helps me to think somewhat more clearly. The article is a good entry point if you're interested.
Beautiful piece of writing by Talia Lavin: All the Things I Want: "I want a small companion—a tiny homunculus, a goldfinch, a tortoise the size of my palm, a fish in a glass bubble—who can speak eloquently and soothe me and soothe others". Who doesn't.
About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off and Entire Bandcamp union team laid off in cuts to beloved Oakland firm. Everyones favorite indie music platform is being union busted. I know what to think of this -- bastards --, but i don't know what to make of it.
What's the deal with juggling in animation? "A deep dive into how juggling has been depicted in various animation mediums featuring over 200 unique instances of animated juggling across television, movies, video games, and more."
"During a solar eclipse, the gaps between leaves on trees act as multiple pinhole cameras, and each gap projects its own crescent-shaped image of the eclipsed sun onto the ground."
Pepper X is named world’s spiciest by Guinness World Records and it causes "horrible cramps". The beast has 2.69 million Scoville, more than 1.5 times than pepper spray and roughly the double amount of a Naga Viper. The hottest thing I've ever eaten, a habanero, which made me cry in agony when i was 12, is a mild joke against this. I'll never try it.
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory published a talk on Youtube on the upcoming Europa Clipper mission going to Jupiter moon Europa: Exploring Ocean Worlds. They explain why the moon is our hottest candidate for extraterrestrial live and details about the Clippper spacecraft that's currently being assembled which you can watch on a livestream too. Can't wait.
Apropos mild: Born to be mild is a cool shortfilm about the "uncommon hobbies practised by the members of the Dull Men’s Club – an online community that connects 'dull men, and women who appreciate dull men'." Be brave, be boring. In always-on, always-excited, super-outraged times like these, dull and boring should be celebrated.
mad left hand skills there! and me highly excited about Europa as well!