“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

Source: behance.net

“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.”

Touch Pavement

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