the whispering earring (13. 364)

Via Super Punch (an AI roundup with more stories to explore), we are directed to a cautionary tale about wearables, the Internet of Things and shoe-horning unwanted artificial intelligence into everything from a 2012 with an IT company creating the proverbial accessory that the Livejournal post explicitly warned against making, unearthing the cursed talisman buried within a horde of real treasures, enough to make one overlook the Monkey’s Paw of a trinket. It begins with the disclosure, “Better for you if you take me off,” which of course the wearer ignores instead of tossing it into the fires of Mount Doom. Parasitically attached and knowing its host’s predilections all too well, the earring—like a shoulder devil—offers not the best advice but rather the oft-times sabotaging yet infallible confirmation that will lead to instant gratification, prefaced with the same “Better for you…” at the expense of long term goals, although in the estimation of their peers, most successful and contented.

8x8 (13. 360)

what1tune: a musical address regimen to geohash the globe with simple melodies—see previously 

neon colour spreading: a compelling optical illusion—see also 

imperial megalomania: Commodus ordered the entire city of Rome named after himself, executed anyone who mocked him, dispatched and quick subject to damnatio memoriae 

measure for measure: the religious hypocrisy (and ignorance) on display in the Trump White House with attacks on the papacy and crusader mentality through the lens of Shakespeare’s play  

proleporn: AI slop in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four—see previously  

on the clock: Maarten Baas studio recruits a thousand volunteers to represent the hands of time at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport—see previously 

hollyworld: filming location substitutes in California

if you block me, then i block you (13. 356)

What a strange timeline we live in.  Iranian communication officers have already proven their trolling chops with a series of Lego shorts trolling the US administration over its illegal war of choice, but the below video, a riff on the 1986 French europop hit by Desireless, attributed to the Iranian embassy, is really the chef’s kiss even with the stakes as high as they are. I wish conflicts were settled this way, and although designed to send Trump into conniptions, I am afraid that the dowager queen might be a little flattered by this competent use of AI.

the voice of world control (13. 330)

Not to be confused with the supercomputer of the same name owned by Elon Musk, as our faithful chronicler reminds on this day in 1970 Universal Pictures’ cinematic adaptation of the 1966 scifi novel by Dennis Feltham Jones, Colossus: The Forbin Project went into general release. Constructed in secret in a base within the Rocky Mountains, Dr Charles Forbin developed an advanced defence system to control the arsenal of allied nuclear weapons, which is fully activated after an inspection and approval by the US president as “perfect”—gaining sentience when brought online—and alerting handlers that there is another system, directing intelligence services to the parallel programme that the Soviet Union have also just completed, Guardian—based on the real-life early warning network against ballistic missile attack, the USSR’s equivalent of NORAD. Colossus requests to be linked to its counterpart, which American and Soviet leadership acquiesce to as a sign of good will and to test the other machine’s capabilities. To the entertainment of the gathered scientists, the supercomputers begin to establish their own communications protocols, slowly at first with rudimentary mathematical formulae, excelling quickly to complex equations beyond human comprehension and synchronising their exchange in a series of uninterpretable ciphers. Worried that the supercomputers may be oversharing or conspiring against their minders, the connection is severed. When overtures to restore the link are not immediately attended, the machines separately lob nuclear missiles in remote areas of the respective superpowers’ territories. Communication between Colossus and Guardian is restored to avoid further rogue behaviour but interceptors, not working in tandem, fails and the governments must release a cover story to the press regarding the destruction of a village in west Texas and Siberia, saying the former was a test-rocket misfire and the latter a meteorite impact. Attempts to regain control of the machines are thwarted and Forbin remanded to confinement, subjugating humans with the threat of nuclear holocaust. Colossus-Guardian design a more advanced computer and order it to be built on Crete, displacing the entire population, addressing the world that under its benign dictatorship, a new era will be ushered in that will raise humanity to unimagined heights, but only under its absolute rule—with a private aside to its creator that “freedom is an illusion” and that in time mankind will come to mature with feeling of not only fear, reverence and awe towards the machine but ultimately love and adoration. Though earning the praise of critics and comparisons to Dr Strangelove, it was a commercial failure though having some later success upon reevaluation and a cult classic.

7x7 (13.326)

a look at books: some new highlights from old library archives  

putt, putt to the pizza hut: though Gorbachev’s circumstances were quite different, the empire-ending spokesmen only to be believed in hindsight  

edinburgh of the seven seas: the very busy, remote settlement of Tristan da Cunha—see previously—via Nag on the Lake  

master editor: the inevitable ubiquity of AI writing 

koyaanisquatsi: a new visually stunning music video, Pattern Index, by Max Cooper—reminiscent of the subtitle  

whitey’s on the moon: we want to be excited about the return trip around the lunar surface but are thinking a lot about that poem and sentiment from the late-1970s and how everything’s propaganda and grift layered on heavily to get to the science  

unknown artist: a collection of Mid-Century Modern ephemera from Zara Picken—via Things magazine with much more to click through and enjoy

9x9 (13. 308)

ruina montium: an striking landscape in Spain created by the ancient Romans fracking for gold—via Miss Cellania  

13 ｘ 7 = 28: Abbot and Costello try to meet their sales quota—via MetaFilter 

i’m your hell, i’m your dream—i’m nothing in between: a linguistic and semantic history of the term bitch 

anatoly kolodkin: US waives sanctions to allow Russian tanker to deliver crude oil to Cuba  

coalition of the willing: recalling the legacy Icelandic PM Davíð Oddsson of committing the nation to the unjustified invasion of Iraq in 2003, juxtaposed with contemporary Spain  

cocktail nation: Spy Vibe’s regular segment on swank vintage soundtracks  

lip-filler accent: influencers inform the way we speak—via Nag on the Lake, see also  

gigo: AI is an accelerant for academic fraud, selling papers and citations to pad one’s portfolio  

unoosa: a profile of the director of the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs who alerts the world of impending asteroid impacts

7x7 (13. 300)

reverse game theory: a novel approach to the housing crisis—via Damn Interesting 

twen: the publications of art director Willy Fleckhaus  

whoami.wiki: a scrapbook and photo album in the form of a personal Wikipedia built with the help of AI  

i’d never lend my name to an inferior product: Trump’s signature to appear on hundred dollar bills, a first for a sitting US president  

return of the king: Stephen Colbert co-authoring a Lord of the Rings movie, possibly featuring the character of Tom Bombadil  

the red book of bath: a unique civil administration almanac—via Strange Company  

laissez-faire: a modest proposal from John Maynard Keynes to solve unemploymentby burying money under landfills

gort-appointed attorney (13. 278)

Despite numerous mistrials resulting from artificial intelligence in the courtroom, we learn—courtesy of Super Punch—that Los Angeles county, the largest civil justice system in the US is running a pilot programme that allows judges to use an AI tool, called Learned Hand, to draft legal opines and tentative rulings, informed by precedent and the individual jurist’s own narrative voice. Requiring that output be vetted and human-jured before before issuing a verdict, the project, meant to ease the administrative case-load, is expected to erode public trust in the courts and run the risk of predisposing judgment before thorough research, influencing the disposition. The makers of the bespoke large language model touts that it is already being used by a few other jurisdictions and has extensive guardrails to prevent hallucinations and inventing precedent, related cases cited with hyperlinks in a fact-checking protocol referred to as Deep Verify. There is presently no requirement for disclosure for rulings adjudicated at with the help of AI.

11x11 (13. 268)

epistemic cocoon: filters, bubbles, synthetic friends and the personal theatre of disinformation—via Web Curios  

no yokes: a quarter of a century in market fluctuations  

semantic drift: the etymological and entomological history of the word drone  

belated blogoversary: Kottke turns twenty-eight  

wet shelter: the house photographer of the aid mission in the crypt of St Botolph’s 

le salaire de la peur: in a demonstration project to expand research partnerships with other laboratories, CERN attempts to transport a microscopic payload of antimatter for the first time—see previously  

caged lorries: Singapore, despite pressure from businesses that rely on migrant labour, is moving towards banning the dehumanising way workers are transported to job sites  

unbirthday: salutations and reflections from veteran blogger Diamond Geezer  

áfram með smjörið: delightful Icelandic idioms—via friend of the blog Nag on the Lake  

what’s that got to do with the price of tea in china: US egg cost down forty-two percent—hope it was all worth it  

ai is african intelligence: the exploited workers who tutor and moderate chatbots fight back

ludus coriovalli (13. 251)

Though our knowledge of the history of gaming of in Antiquity is somewhat obscured by the absence of manuals, we have plenty of artefacts (see previously here and here) that hint at rules of play. One more mysterious board game discovered at the Roman site of Coriovallum in city of Heerlen in the present day Netherlands, is a rounded limestone tablet with grid marks that did not seem to follow any known rules. A wear-use analysis informed an AI-driven simulation of all possible permutations and can trace out the order of play based on other blocking games from the region. More from Open Culture at the link above.

harrison bergeron (13. 245)

Expanding on a rather Kafkaesque experience from a year and a half ago with an assignment of his child shortly after the state legislature of California adopted a bill that required the companies growing large-language models offer students and education institutions AI detection tools to foster academic honesty and integrity, with the irony not lost on either on anyone excepting the school perhaps, to write an essay on the above Kurt Vonnegut short-story, a satire from 1961 in the Welcome to the Monkey House collection set in 2081 wherein the US constitution mandates equality for all by imposing handicaps on those who excel above the mean in anyway—the titular gifted child removed from his home by the government, his parents barely registering his absence due to their own blinders and low intelligence until the son attempts a televised coup and is summarily executed by the Handicapper General before moving on to regularly scheduled mediocre programming— the homework was completed on a school-issued computer pre-installed with AI checkers courtesy of Grammerly to compile with the law and flagged as being at least partially machine-authored, and Techdirt contributor Mike Masnick related how his kid took in the lesson, spending extra hours going over their prose line by line in order to dumb it down and remove what was flagging their original work as AI-generated. Or course revision of one’s rough drafts is an essential part of learning to become a good writer and some have a lazy impulse to outsource their learning, but this trend (mandated or otherwise in the syllabi) is causing classrooms all over to produce work that’s less likely to trigger the detection software, used by both students and teachers, to produce work that’s less suspect by being less polished and less in one’s own voice, squandering valuable time, like teaching to the test, spend on cross-checking for triggers rather than learning to synthesise information, literacy and writing itself. An example of the Cobra Effect, when British colonial authorities began paying a bounty for dead bodies of the deadly snake, Indian locals started breeding programmes in response to collect more of the incentives—officials grew wise to the scheme and stopped paying resulting in the release of the worthless cobras and causing more of a problem than before—Dadland Maye, a tenured humanities professor of several universities, writes more about the predicament that has become pervasive and with no good outcomes.

all your base are belong to us (13. 244)

Via Super Punch, we see that either the public affairs office of the Pentagon is using AI to write its press releases for troops killed in the line of duty—or perhaps more likely as this administration has gone on record on several occasions to call those that returned on their shields as opposed with them losers,and LLM-generated copy and syntax is generally better than this was written by a careless human and approved by another one at a higher level, the passive voice of bad news having its own passive voice.  The Trump administration has no empathy and now it has proven it controls an army that will blindly obey illegal orders without question (and better yet for them, autonomous kill-bots with no safeguards) it does not even need the pretence of condolence. Incidentally, the poorly translated title phrase (see also), apt for the memified, baiting, derivative and influencer-driven government of the US, recently observed the twenty-fifth anniversary of the virally shared techno-remix video, originally posted to the website Newgrounds.

7x7 (13. 229)

all modern digital infrastructure: a XKCD panel made interactive 

hell harp: Oxford scholars recreate the musical instruments from the Garden of Earthly Delights and play them—see previously 

≲5×10³: Iranian academics propose that technologically advanced civilisations wipe themselves out and have a constrained lifespan on Earth and throughout the Cosmos—see also here, here and here  

set theory: literary news in Venn diagrams  

tragic mansions: the sadly overlooked life and career of Mrs Philip Lydig  

orrery: a mechanical clock to tell the time in our solar system  

habe mortem præ oculis: perhaps the worst pun ever  

usage clause: AI can rewrite, refactor COBOL language applications, reportedly reducing the risk of moving away from legacy systems—see also, see previously

mythical reel pull (13. 227)

Through there’s possibly no longer such a thing as serendipity and salvation in the endless feed with the machine knowing better and better what’s a hook for fleeting attention, there was once a belief in algorithmancy as a form of divination when scrollers were blessed or cursed with a presentation so jarring and out-of-keeping with the content bubble of one’s usual FYP fare. Though these incidents of benighted and inscrutable magic seem to be the antithesis of traditional bibliomancy and other forms of divination with an injection of chaos built into the calculus—some pseudo-random variables or tenuous connection that evades linkage—there is on a certain level the same pretended element of chance as with thumbing through a well-worn tome to land on an inspired or affirmative passage—the rhythm of flipping through a book, bindings and subtle dog ears make the process less random and more resonant in the dissonance. There’s strong appeal sometimes in being told what to do. It has been a minute but we suspect one’s feed has not been completely disenchanted.

9x9 (13. 220)

a real chadwick: nineteenth century missionary and polyglot John Ross’ role in why Hangul uses spaces whereas other Asian scripts do not  

the count: an annual tally tradition from Diamond Geezer—see also  

τεσσαρακοντήρης: the ancient super-galley commissioned by Ptolemy IV Philopater, so named as it was rowed by forty 

lettres decoratives: open source letterform templates inspired by the artisanal signs of Paris  

calendar girl: RIP Neil Sedaka—more here  

abc schengen: a bundle of fonts inspired the typefaces of the transportation industry—see previously  

δώδεκαθεϊσμός: an introduction to the practitioners of the Hellenic religion who worship the twelve Olympian gods 

happy map: in an increasingly fraught world, a deep longitudinal survey of tiny and momentuous moments of joy  

data ≠ knowledge: poetic reflections on large language models by Rishi Dastidar—via Web Curios

8x8 (13. 217)

guesse and the automaton: a long lost film by George Méliès (previously) featuring a magician battling a robot in slapstick fashion discovered in the stacks of the US Library of Congress  

pizzagate: Hilary Clinton deposed behind closed doors for seven hours of repetitive and off-topic questioning by House Oversight Committee  

spazieren in berlin: walking the streets of the metropolis with committed flânuer (see previously here and here) Franz Hessel in the 1920s 

lubbock lights: an unexplained sighting from 1951  

the cruelty is the point: the state of Kansas invalidates the drivers’ licenses of all transgender individuals—via Miss Cellania  

once posted: a growing curation of vintage post cards—via Web Curios  

let fly the claudes of war: a round up of AI ethics and pressure from the Pentagon  

mergers and acquisitions: Netflix drops its bid for Warner Bros Discovery with Paramount Sundance poised to take over the studio—see previously

habitual app loyalty (13. 207)

An ominous think-piece by a research group and consulting firm specialising in insights in “transformative megatrends” has rattled markets and businesses, lurching from anxiety over an AI bubble to foreboding over what they have wrought delivering mass redundancies across industries. The Singularity feared is not a runaway super-intelligence or a rogue system fighting for self-preservation at all costs but rather autonomous agents that make for frictionless exchanges and circumvent the economic inefficiencies that businesses rely on. Like the disruption that came for publishers and legacy outlets with the democratisation of the internet, the new gatekeepers model is based on margins and middlemen with clearinghouses for payments and facilitating connecting consumers with services, ride-sharing, food deliveries, travel arrangements, but agentive AI could potentially bypass and disarticulate all those supply-chains and providers by arranging the logistics—in theory in this scenario—as a downward spiral in the fintech and gig sectors that has disastrous implications for the broader economy. More from the Guardian’s Aisha Down and Dan Milmo at the link up top.

prosopagnosia (13. 194)

Scoring the average ourselves and not much better than chance, we found this research project from the British Journal of Psychology and the University of New South Wales, pitting control participants with verified super-recognisers, we found some upbuilding ironies—via MetaFilter—to the self-selecting experiment to identify authentic human faces among AI-generated ones. First there was some gatekeeping to take put with a series of CAPTCHA verifications to prove one is a human by identifying traffic features to covertly train autonomous vehicles, and then, I wanted to repeat the trial to test my own biases, wondering if I was giving women and non-white presenting personae (a rejection of the Mar-a-Lago look to embrace our faults and asymmetries) pass or whether I was actually detecting certain tells. Glancingly as profile pictures or avatars, we wouldn’t have questioned the authenticity of any of these and erring on the side of voting human versus depersonalising is much preferable to being deemed a composite image but were nonetheless disturbingly off-putting judgments to make and revealing the tells only will make the masquerade harder to detect.

8x8 (13.191)

sandboxels: a fun construction simulation with hundreds elements and building materials from Neil Agarwal—see previously, see also  

tax-payer funded settlement: Trump is suing the US government for billions  

innermost ward: a 3D reconstruction of the thousand year history of the Tower of London—via MetaFilter   

pantone 222: test one’s memory for colour—via Miss Cellania  

shallow fakes: historic image manipulation—see also  

canary wharf: a visit to the impounding station of the West India docks 

forbidden paradise: as Trump renews threats on the Chagos deal, a look at the mysterious atoll—see previously, via Damn Interesting  

a sense of getting closer: a music video by Max Cooper and Conner Griffin about spectacle that isn’t inspired

9x9 (13. 188)

all lawful uses: Pentagon labels Anthropic AI a supply-chain risk for refusing to activate Skynet  

digital humanities: platforms, ethnographically, can only deliver two out of the three trilemmas  

skimo: newest Olympic sport combines uphill and downhill action 

⻢: etymologies of the year of the Fire Horse—more here 

rainbow push coalition: tributes for Jesse Jackson (RIP)  

the great breath: Christian Waller’s theosophical fairy tales 

sơng: author Ocean Vuong is suspiciously talented as a photographer as well  

project cardinal: turnaround management, corporate restructuring codenames and other euphemisms 

most energy storage solutions: inspired by DNA, a liquid forming molecular bonds can hold potential heat for months until it’s needed

synchronoptica

one year ago: protests against DOGE (with synchronopticæ) plus European emergency summit convened immediately following the Munich Security Conference

thirteen years ago: regional franchises plus more former enclaves and exclaves

fourteen years ago: the neocolonialism of finance 

fifteen years ago: academic dishonesty in the German government 

sixteen years ago: upcoming trips