dall·e (10. 185)

As NPR informs, there is no longer a waiting period and assigned window of time for lab use of OpenAI’s text-to-image generating software (previously here, here and here). Pictured are a few responses to prompts about the blog itself. Although the open-source, mini version was fun too, I like how this platform (registration required) curates and saves your put-it-on-the-refrigerator-door history—in all its surprise, serendipity and dread uncanniness—and reminds one of past iterations, whereas before I felt obligated to save a copy in some folder full of errata, feeling guilty I had summoned such things into existence. What computer-aided masterpieces can you dream up?

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8x8 (10. 162)

herbst: vintage Eastern Bloc matchboxes welcoming Fall  

αρνάκι: comedian Shari Lewis delivers One Minute Mythologies—via r/Obscure Media  

wie ist dein name, mann: adapting Hamilton in German for the Hamburg stage—possibly a bit rough for those who committed the original lyrics to heart but Lin-Manuel Miranda is deeply involved 

tl;dr: an AI powered tool that provides a summary of long videos—via Web Curios  

wolf hall: RIP historical fiction author Hilary Mantel  

not in my backyard: good luck getting anything built in Sim Nimby (see also)—again from Web Curios

voting integrity: Russian soldiers in occupied regions of Ukraine undertake door-to-door balloting in the referenda to ensure citizens choose wisely  

kirie: celebrating the onset of autumn with more of the Japanese art of leave carving

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7x7 (10. 136)

ernie-vilg: Baidu enters text-to-image generating AI—reinforces government censorship  

kusugibashi: a rebuilt bridge washed away in 2018 combines traditional carpentry (see also) with computational design technology  

naysayer: exocentric verb-noun compound agents 

if you give a bot a cookie: pop ups are ruining the internet experience—see also—outside of walled gardens, via Digg  

we’re making earth our only shareholder: founder of Patagonia gives his billion-dollar company away to combat the climate emergency 

bademaschinen: floating saunas for Oslo harbor—see also   

nervous laughter: researchers hope to deliver more natural human-robot conversations

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chapter and verse (10. 134)

Via Pasa Bon! we are treated to this automated, illustrated Bible by DALL· E 2 (previously) text to image, imago protocol. These initial compositions are prompted by Genesis but we wonder might what the fuller corpus might yield in terms of imagery and whether the earlier books influence the output. for the latter.  More at the links above.

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8x8 (10. 124)

the girl from ipanema: the Yahoo! GeoCities (previously) Midi project has gathered a collection of over one-hundred and fifty thousand chiptunes, via Web Curios  

summer island: a graphic horror novella that’s a collaboration between a story authored by a human and illustrations courtesy a machine 

bill-of-sale: receipts and letterhead of the Old East End  

null island: the imaginary location at the intersection of the Equator and Prime Meridian (see previously) that exists by necessity  

premium vector: a selection of 90s cursor effects (trails, rainbows) that can be incorporated into one’s website—via ibīdem  

trichromacy: fascinating etymologies of words for colours—via Damn Interesting’s Curated Links  

b-poty: avian photography of the year  

pattern recognition: more on mondegreens and misheard lyrics

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7x7 (10. 112)

all the news that’s fit to print: a curated collection of kiosks from around the world from Trevor Traynor—via Present /&/ Correct  

tomato cain: an anthology of the short fiction of Nigel Kneale—perhaps better known for his screenplays, like The Stone Tape Theory  

national defensive design strategy revisited: another look at the style book (see also) of the US government  

finding out that you accidentally wrote five pages in cursive: our AI wrangler Janelle Shane (previously) charges a neural network to explain human behaviour quirks  

flareup: a 1969 Raquel Welch vehicle  

wild palms: a 1993 cyberpunk soap opera that aired on US network television  

movable-type: the Ruckwanderer innovation and how the Chinese incorporated the keyboard—see previously

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8x8 (10. 091)

catenary curve: the relationship between arches and chains  

astrochickens: another one of Freeman Dyson’s theoretical constructs—albeit less famous than his spheres   

numeracy: a selection of books bringing maths to the masses 

click-wheel: design your next custom iPhone—add a headphone jack, handle, home button, etc. from Neal Agarwal (previously)  

safe neighbourhood: Madonna’s punk phase 

late-stage thatcherism: the UK under Tory leadership is in omnishambles 

chakumelo: a celebration of nostalgic words culled from Japanese dictionaries due to declining usage  

hìtëkw: an AI redesigns the tennis racket, named after Lenape word for tree due to its root-like design

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pandora’s box (10. 090)

Finally getting some lab time with Open AI (previously), Andy Baio of Waxy shares some of his first impression as he came to the realisation that the apparent virtuosity isn’t just a parlour trick but the unnerving, new uncanniness that comes with the wholesale laundering of the canon of human illustration and creativity—a genie that cannot be put back in the bottle. In addition to the ease of conjuring up any number libellous scenarios and the fraught, inadequate legal framework to address intellectual rights and licensing disputes. Though perhaps not the embodiment of the quandary and more of the magic remixing that make the platform so compelling and conflicted, but we were quite taken with the response to these prompts of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater and Pizza Hut and the highly specific, not disappointing “two slugs in wedding attire getting married, stunning editorial photo for bridal magazine shot at golden hour.”  See a whole gallery of images at Waxy at the link up top.

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9x9 (10. 059)

i’m sorry but this is quite clearly a haunted murder panda and/or the protagonist of moshfegh’s next novel. do not buy: an assortment of random oddities that one preeminent author is selling her online emporium—via Nag on the Lake’s Sunday Links (check it out!)  

quasi-modal: apparently “thy shall be done” is a thing now  

eye of the beholder: an AI visits a contemporary art museum 

printers’ auxiliaries: a beautiful 1940 book of typefaces from the Gujarati foundry  

if marisol and nilofer are the only non-white women at the staff meeting, how frequently will each be called by the other’s name: word problems for female professionals that aren’t so non-sequitur  

pulp power: the mainstay illustrative style of 1930s and 40s serial fiction  

heat dumping: searching for the etymology of the adaptive behaviour of splooting—which is referred to in England as squirrel “pancaking” 

world englishes: the OED on Irish’s contribution to language—see previously  

a lamb himself: an excerpt from Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel Lapvona

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7x7 (10. 055)

zone improvement plan: the Swinging Six ensemble sing the praises of the ZIP code (1967)—see also  

unsealed warrant: FBI recovered multiple boxes of top secret and classified documents from the Trump residence during Monday’s search  

coo-coo for cookie crisp: recreating vintage breakfast cereal with machine learning—see previously  

mulder & scully: full script of an unmade episode of the X-Files—via Super Punch  

that old black magic that you weave so well: Clavis Inferni (The Key of Hell), an illustrated spell book from 1775 

retrofit: more on the noir aesthetic (more here and here) of vintage automobiles converted in electric vehicles 

 like & subscribe: the long and short history of the newsletter—both print and digital

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7x7 (10. 050)

smokin’: Bill McClintock remixes Clarence Carter’s “Strokin’” (That’s What I Be Doing) with Boston’s “More Than A Feeling”  

s morgenstern’s classic tale of true love and high adventure, the ‘good parts’ version: wildly divergent book covers for The Princess Bride, via Super Punch  

we’re walking in the air: author and illustrator Raymond Briggs (previously) has passed away, aged 88  

development purgatory: more titles and properties never released by movie studios—see also—via Things Magazine   

scarborough faire: housing developer agrees to rebury unique Roman villa for future conservation a year after it was discovered  

the seventh seal: AI designs movie posters  

seona dancing: Ricky Gervais’ synth-pop group from 1983

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6x6 (10. 043)

blue plaque special: a curation of the City of London’s Blue Plaque scheme—via Nag on the Lake (see also)  

harry potter and the chamber of narcissism: McMansion Hell (previously) show a yassified property in the Atlanta suburbs  

warwolf: a closer look at Edward I’s siege machine—via Strange Company 

i² = -1: the fundamental realness of imaginary numbers 

pferd is the word: some AI-generated horse-hybrids from Janelle Shane (previously)  

delft on a shelf: a house on Fournier Street with some animated tiles

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8x8 (10. 027)

ògógóró: decolonising a West African palm sap spirit that unfairly unearned the reputation of a cheap gin substitute  

new delay for dover-calais tunnel likely: fleshing out the NYT headlines Stanley Kubrick had mocked up for 2001—via Waxy  

smaller footprint: updates on NEOM—the planned vertical skyscaper of Saudi Arabia  

hysterical urbanism: a counterpoint to the above—with several historical antecedents  

brominated vegetable oil: EU and Japan bans Mountain Dew and Fresca for ingredients that contribute to memory loss  

we intend to cause havoc: Andrew McGranahan’s psychedelic posters for Paul McCartney’s 2022 gigs and tours  

odonymy: an ongoing project revealing the origin of street names in Los Angeles—via Web Curios

mensascran: comparative studies of university and business cafeterias and canteens around the world—see also—via ibīdem

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7x7 (9. 999)

featherbase: a consortium of ornithologists join their collections and make them freely accessible on-line—via Web Curios 

cut-up technique: Artbreeder (previously) creates collages with your help—via Waxy 

harry and the hitman: Oklahoma man pleads self-defence, claiming potential assailant had summoned a Bigfoot to kill him  

deep scatter library: stellar cartography mapping a billion stars in the Milky Way  

culmen > columna > compagna colonnella > coronnel > colonel: explore etymologies with this interactive tool from the creators of Interlinear Books and Language Hat  

unsleeved: an exhibit on the art of the record cover and designer Alex Steinweiss 

trainspotting: an obsessive database of European rolling stock—also via Web Curios

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summer school

Sponsored and proposed by mathematics professor John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky (co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Nathaniel Rochester (computer engineer who designed IBM’s first commercial mainframe) and Claude Shannon, the extended brainstorming called the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence began on this day (or possibly 10 July) in 1956 and lasted eight weeks and was the foundational event that formed the field. The undirected group project, interspersed with lectures, broached the topics of computing, natural language processing, cognition, abstract concepts and neural networks and entertained various frameworks for testing their ideas—including playing chess against a machine. AI@50 was held at the same venue with half of the original delegates and attendees in 2006 to look back and reassess the challenges encountered and to better temper their understanding of the future.

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8x8

carina nebula: first five subjects for JWST announced  

a pharmacopeia with balneological appendix: a primer and point of departure for the mysterious pre-Renaissance volume, the Voynich Manuscript—see previously

putt-putt for the fun of it: a time-capsule of miniature golf courses 

trap daddy: spoof Russian history on Chinese Wikipedia introduces us to a catch-phrase for the deception hoax—see also, see previously  

jubilee: inflexibility applied to finance and debt contributed to the downfall of the Roman Empire  

spatter platters: morbid 1960s teen tragedy songs

hushed-tones: a neural network makes a nature documentary about ants  

hudf: JWST takes deepest image of the Cosmos without even trying plus other space news briefs

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dual process theory

Via Waxy, we are directed to Neal Agarwal’s latest exercise (see previously) in a series of increasingly preposterous trolley problems and the ethical dilemmas that arise from these situations where intervention is possible. Illustrative of the problems we have with inscrutable algorithms and the opaque artificial intelligence that’s supposed to be able to evaluate such decisions, not only do you get to make the moral call, you can also see how your answers stack up to three-quarters of a million other respondents.

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my cup of tea

Having encountered DALL·E Mini (the image generating AI model that responds to natural language prompts now known as Craiyon) return recursive text overlaid with the visual results or that somehow was off in an insightful way in the past, we were intrigued by Janelle Shane’s latest experiment (see previously) that calls on deep divining and reading the tea leaves. 

The algorithm recognises that flavour of divination, tasseomancy—so far, so good—and how one might represent a message or prophesy obtained wherewith, but I did need to try a few variations, iterations of “a message in the tea leaves at the bottom of a cup”—the first go around underneath the cup and in the saucer, and still wasn’t receiving clear signals that I could feed back to Dall·E and ultimately tried “Magic Eight Ball” and “Fortune Cookie Text” for a mysterious message and for a prompt to feed back but none were forthcoming. 

One should not try to force an oracle or wrestle an angel.  Be sure to check out AI Weirdness for what happens when you get the chance to feed these seemingly random strings of characters back to the machine that generated them.

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7x7

exascale: the world’s super computer might be surpassing benchmarks in secret  

hub and spoke: a suite of interactive maps that lets one scour the globe with creeping data spiders  

viral nightmares: more trials of an AI text to image generator  

witkar: a ride-sharing demonstration projection that ran from 1974 to 1986 in Amsterdam  

the firth of forth: some of the world’s best bridges for driving  

whiskey war: the fifty yearlong territorial dispute between Canada and Denmark over Hans Island has been settled  

zeroth law: an AI ethicist believes Google’s LaMDA has attained sentience

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9x9

web revival: rediscovering the serendipity of hyperlink daisy chains—via Joe Jenett  

free-range children: relocating from London, Ontario to Amsterdam  

sure-footed: a goat-like heavy-lifting robot called BEX under development—via Super Punch 

lavender fields of surrey: a seasonal stroll through an aromatic patch of land  

mono men: the Punk, Grunge aesthetic of Art Chantry 

hyakutsuki-in: a beautiful locker-style cemetery in Toyko  

hounds of love: a 1992 interview with Kate Bush (previously), breaking down her 1985 album track by track  

sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment: an enigmatic sign spotted on a nike trail 

jacob hive maker: first streaming film Wax; Or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees (1991)

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