randomWalks

This is an AI Free Zone! Text created by Large Language Models is spreading rapidly across the Internet. It’s well-written, artificial, frequently inaccurate. If you find a mistake on Spaceweather.com, rest assured it was made by a real human being.

SpaceWeather.com – News and information about meteor showers, solar flares, auroras, and near-Earth asteroids

I only know of him because I spent the entire 1990s in thrift stores and used bookshops, and everywhere I went, I saw Rod McKuen’s name.

Rod McKuen was the best-selling poet in American history. What happened?

Did I write this?!

When critics dismiss AI outright, I think in many cases this weakens the criticism, as readers who have used and benefited from AI tools think “wait, that’s not been my experience at all”.

Molly White: AI isn’t useless. But is it worth it?

Too skeptical to make many friends there, I frequently rode my electric scooter around campus to systematically sample the offerings at each of the 19 cafés, and then take advantage of the arsenal of targeted functions on the Japanese toilets in every bathroom.

Andrew Norman Wilson’s Workers Leaving the Googleplex, a critical examination of Google’s labor practices at the MoMA

“The day after shooting the video, I was fired.”

Eagle Pass’ Shelby Park — which, in a you-can’t-make-this-up level of irony, is named for the rebel Gen. Joseph Orville Shelby, said to have planted the last Confederate battle flag in the river in 1865 as he fled to Mexico

Eagle Pass is today’s Fort Sumter. Biden must federalize the Texas National Guard.

(Despite appearances, this is not an “impending second U.S. civil war” fansite.)

Q. We live in representative democracies where certain liberties are respected. We vote for the policies and the people we want to represent us. And if we don’t get the things we want, it doesn’t give us license to then say, “We’re now engaging in destructive behavior.” Right? Either we’re against political violence or not. We can’t say we’re for it when it’s something we care about and against it when it’s something we think is wrong.

A. Of course we can. Why not?

How This Climate Activist Justifies Political Violence - The New York Times

this domain is not for sale, lol

Some really intelligent, passionate, good citizens just don’t have the same need for literature and movies anymore. It doesn’t occupy the same space in the brain. I think that’s just how we’ve given over our lives, largely, to this thing that depletes the need for curating and filling ourselves up with meaning from art and fictional worlds. That need has been filled up with — let’s face it — advanced delivery systems for advertising. It’s sad, but what can you do? I also don’t want to go through life thinking our best days are behind us. That’s just not productive. So, in your own area, you just have to persist and do what you can on behalf of the things that you believe in. You have to believe that everything can change and that things can go back to being a little better.

Richard Linklater on ‘Hit Man,’ Why Indie Movies Might Be “Gone With the Algorithm” – The Hollywood Reporter

Civilization is six billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other’s shoulders and kicking each other’s teeth in. It’s not a pleasant situation, and yet you can stand back and look at this planet and see that we have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love and the community to produce a kind of human paradise, but we are led by the least among us — the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary — and we do not fight back against the dehumanizing values that are handed down as control icons.

I don’t really want to get off on this tear because it’s a lecture in itself, but culture is not your friend. Culture is for other people’s convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes, what have you. It is not your friend. It insults you, it disempowers you, it uses and abuses you. None of us are well treated by culture, yet we glorify the creative potential of the individual, the rights of the individual. We understand that the felt presence of experience is what is most important, but the culture is a perversion. It fetishizes objects, it creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness and false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines, meme processors of memes passed down from Madison Avenue and Hollywood and what have you.

Audience: How do we fight back?

It’s a question worth asking.

Ask Terence McKenna: Psychedelics in the Age of Intelligent Machines

Just came across this site, which is an effort to transcribe all of McKenna’s recorded lectures, and a lot have been transcribed! What an amazing resource.

They go, ‘OK, what book are you gonna read next?’ It’s like, ‘Well, we’re never going to read another book. It’s just one book, you know?’

28 years ago, a book club began reading one novel. It’s finally reached the end – Orange County Register
The Book Pages: What it was like as the ‘Finnegans Wake’ group read the final page – Orange County Register

If there is still mystery in Apple events, it is located here, in the uncanny fictional world suggested in these images: Who are these people? And what is wrong with them that they text like this?

A literary history of fake texts in Apple’s marketing materials

The Peter principle is a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter, which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to “a level of respective incompetence”. (source: 👔)

The OceanGate CEO is now on the list of inventors killed by their own invention, joining Thomas Andrews, Jr. the architect of the Titanic. (source: 🐦)

Until about now, most of the text online was written by humans. But this text has been used to train GPT3(.5) and GPT4, and these have popped up as writing assistants in our editing tools. So more and more of the text will be written by large language models (LLMs). Where does it all lead? What will happen to GPT-{n} once LLMs contribute most of the language found online?
…
Just as we’ve strewn the oceans with plastic trash and filled the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, so we’re about to fill the Internet with blah.

Will GPT models choke on their own exhaust? | Light Blue Touchpaper

In the beginning, the mushrooms exhibited less electrical potential, and we boiled this down to the lack of precipitation. However, the electrical potential began to fluctuate after raining, sometimes going over 100 mV.
— Yu Fukasawa, Tohoku University

Research News - Mushrooms and their Post-rain, Electrical Conversations | Tohoku University Global Site

Patten then asked Altshuler, “You’ve got some ethnicity in you?” The doctor said no. Patten asked if he was Italian. The doctor said no. Finally, after more questioning, Altshuler said he was Jewish. “Mazel tov,” Patten said.
— Rhode Island officials' behavior in Philly leads to investigations, Zoe Greenberg

I am re-subscribing to the Inquirer on the strength of this story alone.

I was amazed by how little the world looked different over the 12 years. Whereas my childhood, if you start in the late ’60s and go to ’80, you have very different looks to the world. Clothing, hairstyles, cars look very different. It struck me, [in] my own little anthropological, sociological-whatever study of all this, [that] the 21st century wasn’t changing very rapidly in its look. It was only in technology.

About a boy - As his experimental coming-of-age saga Boyhood is re-released, filmmaker Richard Linklater reflects on the legacy of his childhood opus

I’ve marveled at the same thing: our visual culture (clothing, hairstyles, cars, etc) has been pretty much frozen for more than two decades. Whenever I bring it up though I usually get blank stares, pauses, polite shifts to a new topic of conversation. At least Linklater understands.

The full interview requires Apple News+, sorry. Some crumbs available here.

This is the first step in my master plan to save local radio.

Radio Paradise Blog - My New Reality

It’s uncanny how much the proponents of ‘AI will kills us all in the future’ are white guys and how much the ‘clear and present actual danger’ group is intersectional, especially younger women of colour. If you pay attention, it’s really striking.

Why an Easier Life Is Not Necessarily Happier ⊗ What A.I. Risks We Should Really Be Worried About ⊗ Google I/O and the Coming AI Battles — Sentiers

Sentiers is a great newsletter! If you need more email, you could do worse.

The environment Potter creates in her tales shares similarities to that of a plantation – a dangerous world where the fight for food and survival is paramount. Despite the backdrop of gentle Lake District landscapes and an English cottage garden, her tales are set in a context of merciless repercussions for those who don’t have the wits to avoid capture – including Peter Rabbit’s father, who we discover has been baked in a pie.

Beatrix Potter’s famous tales are rooted in stories told by enslaved Africans – but she was very quiet about their origins

…You can take the guy’s clothes off so he’s only wearing, like, kind of super underwear type stuff, and he’s barefoot and he and he has a sword, and then he rides a horse like that… And it’s like, you can ride a bear. You can… I just run around picking mushrooms. I pick mushrooms, I make dishes, then I start fires.

Sometimes I catch a horse, I ride it.

I watch the sunset from a bridge. I found this one place where you can go and sit up on the top of the hill. And every morning the dragon of that area comes out and flies within, like, one foot of your face. And it’s the most beautiful creature.

From Vox’s Today, Explained podcast, 5/12/2023: How Zelda Changed Gaming (transcript)

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”

Quote by Brian Eno: “Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortabl…” | Goodreads

via Thoughts & Prayers - by Rusty Foster and camille butera

The black box can’t compute them. Whose are they? Is there a vagina somewhere, out of frame? Nipples threaten classification. They undermine the binary. They unveil the operator behind the machine, their insatiable need to codify who we are into data.

It Glitches at the Sight of Our Nipples | COVEN BERLIN

If we cannot come up with ways for A.I. to reduce the concentration of wealth, then I’d say it’s hard to argue that A.I. is a neutral technology, let alone a beneficial one.

Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey? - The New Yorker

How much do I love this?! James Weiner’s exquisite 1-bit version of Hokusai’s ”The Great Wave” was designed, appropriately, on an early ’90s Mac running System 7 with Aldus SuperPaint 3.0.

This painting has long attracted artists interested in the Great Digitalization — in 1988, our science and tech high school’s gym shirts featured Judy Kirpich’s Wave of the Future which was created, significantly and remarkably, using entirely analog methods.

Previously: July 12, 2001 - you must understand the “Great Wave” from right to left

via Kottke