“Just as the success of the automobile was enabled by enormous supplies of crude oil composed of microscopic bits of ancient life, rendered useful in the refineries of Rockefeller and others, so the success of Ai is enabled by enormous supplies of crude data — data composed of microscopic bits of human archive, interchange, writing, playing, communicating, broadcasting which we in our billions have freely dropped into the sediment, and which the eager Rockefellers of today’s big tech are only too happy to drill for, refine and sell on back to us.”
Source: AI: A Means to an End or a Means to Our End?
“Every Noise at Once was a long-running attempt at an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 6,291 genre-shaped distinctions at Spotify through 2023-11-19.”
Source: everynoise.com
“To step into the stream of any social network, to become immersed in the news, reactions, rage and hopes, the marketing and psyops, the funny jokes and clever memes, the earnest requests for mutual aid, for sign ups, for jobs, the clap backs and the call outs, the warnings and invitations—it can feel like a kind of madness.”
Source: aworkinglibrary.com
“Octopuses would also punch fish to keep the group moving. If the group is very still and everyone is around the octopus, it starts punching, but if the group is moving along the habitat, this means that they’re looking for prey, so the octopus is happy. It doesn’t punch anyone,” Sampaio said.”
Source: nbcnews.com
Khoi Vin on remakes and sequels:
[They are] enterprises very purposefully stood up for the specific intent of reminding us how great those previous experiences were. “Remember this?” each movies asks. “Wasn’t it great? Here it is again.” It’s as if, instead of sending us on a new holiday abroad, they’re showing us a carousel of vacation slides from great trips we took many years ago. The only “new” thing here is the sale of another movie ticket.
Yuval Noah Harari’s A.I. Fears:
“You know, the world is being filled with AI bureaucrats that in the armies, in the banks, in the universities, in the governments, more and more decisions, which house to bomb, who is a terrorist, whether to give you a loan, whether to give you a job, whether to give you a place in a university. These decisions are increasingly made by AI. And these decisions are becoming opaque to us.”
Living vicariously through Daniel Ding’s Outdoor Archive. Filter by type of trip, hover over photos, and a visual gear list.
“The solar panel is wizardry manifest. It literally prints energy from free shit that falls out of the sky. A very flat rock that whispers to the light of heaven and coaxes it into bottled lightning. Without even moving.”
Solar will get too cheap to connect to the power grid. / via SC 2.4.4
A collection of ghost words for our haunted world:
Ghost Hotels: “The “ghost hotel” nomenclature refers to an entire apartment building which is functionally a hotel because most or all units are short-term rentals instead of tenant-occupied.”
Ghost Network Healthcare: “…he, like millions of Americans, was trapped in a “ghost network.” As some of those people have discovered, the providers listed in an insurer’s network have either retired or died. Many other providers have stopped accepting insurance — often because the companies made it excessively difficult for them to do so. Some just aren’t taking new patients. Insurers are often slow to remove them from directories, if they do so at all. It adds up to a bait and switch by insurance companies that leads customers to believe there are more options for care than actually exist.”
Ghost Network Television: “Now MTV is a ghost. Its average prime-time audience of 256,000 people in 2023 was down from 807,000 in 2014, the Nielsen company said. One recent evening MTV aired reruns of “Ridiculousness” from 5 p.m. to 1:30 a.m.”
Ghost Kitchen: “A virtual restaurant, also known as a ghost kitchen, cloud kitchen or dark kitchen, is a food service business that serves customers exclusively by delivery and pick-up based on phone and online ordering. Virtual restaurants are stand-alone businesses that either operate out of an existing restaurant’s kitchen or from a separate kitchen set-up away from a restaurant.”
Ghost Knowledge: “Most fields have a problem with ‘ghost knowledge’, hard-won practical understanding that is mostly passed on verbally between practitioners and not written down anywhere public. At least in programming some chunk of it makes it into forum posts. It’s normally hidden in the depths of big threads, but that’s better than nothing.”
See also: American Suburbs Are a Horror Movie and We’re the Protagonists “That’s how I feel when I walk through the bare, people-less parking lots of my neighborhood to get to the grocery store. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen other pedestrians while making this trip. If not for the moving cars nearby, it would be like walking through a post-apocalyptic wasteland. It’s an isolating experience, one that makes me feel very small and vulnerable.”
I made a blogroll! A list of 60ish of my favorite places on the internet. Check it out if you want to find some new sites to follow.
The site for the Waltz cassette store in Tokyo is pretty awesome. A spinning tape over photos of the shop that the owner has called an “art gallery” for analog media.
More about Waltz: Interview with Waltz Tape Cassette Store in Tokyo found via Simon Collison.
Paul’s Boutique annotated. This album turned 35 yesterday. I am old.
Button Stealer: A Chrome extension that “steals” a button from every website you open. Kind of a neat way to see where you’ve been.
A second nice break by Ben Sledsens
Source: tumblr.com
“… a series of plates where photographs capture various clouds and are paired with drawings that schematize the clouds …”
Source: socks-studio.com
By Alberto Ortega
Source: albertoortega.art
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