7x7 (10. 484)

between two ferns: chats with “historical figures” have been regrettable—see previously

this concludes our broadcasting day: an alternate HBO signoff announcement (see previously) emerges  

nuscale for scale: US authorities approve design for the first generation of small, modular reactors  

all things bright and beautiful: a compelling argument to enjoy the All Creatures Great and Small reboot  

circular sun house: Frank Lloyd Wright’s final completed project (see also) on the edge of the Phoenix Mountains Nature Preserve goes on the market  

closed captioning: as a bilingual family, we always relied on subtitles and appreciated this primer on why we’re not alone  

content mill: CNET magazine suspends automated articles after an embarrassing disclosure

can’t do hands (10. 483)

Via Web Curios, we are directed towards a rather nightmarish gallery of the myriad ways that early and contemporary, cutting-edge image generators alike make malformed human hands. It took me a long time to see this mural in Wiesbaden as the interlocking fingers for rebuilding but it did eventually register. There’s uncanny valley to describe the off-puttingness of a simulation that’s just too close to reality but there’s no agreed-upon term for its corollary. What would you call it? Such mangled hammer-toes only are relatable in a society in an era beyond such imitations and manual simulacra. How would you like to be vetted?

7x7 (10. 481)

distressed property: no interested buyers for North Hollywood Crypto House—via Miss Cellania  

rabbit on the moon: some communities following the luni-solar calendar readying for the Year of the Cat

cartoon dynamo: a century later, a 1923 editorial foreshadows automated art 

high stakes brinksmanship: the US Treasury turns to extraordinary measures to avoid default on debt repayments  

peer-reviewed: many scientists disapprove of ChatGPT cited as a contributing author on research papers  

unbuilt: rendered images of Frank Lloyd Wright’s unrealised architecture  

childhood lottery dream home achieved: a selection of properties on the market, courtesy of Zillow Gone Wild

9x9 (10. 479)

under the gavel: a distressed Twitter is auctioning off office furnishings from its San Francisco headquarters 

best mates: a meta-study of attracting and retaining intimate partners  

demidecimate: Microsoft announces layoff five percent of its workforce 

from permacrisis to polycrisis: selection of global buzzwords for 2023  

style guide: an eccentric alternate spelling circulated in a newspaper for three decades—without explanation or apology 

wellipets: frog-faced galoshes make a haute couture return 

©: Getty Images is filing suite against an AI art tool for scraping its content—via the new shelton wet/dry

fechtbücher: early Renaissance depicts of duels between men and women 

silicon valley: a tech bust might be a net positive for the city

7x7 (10. 476)

inflection point: one young person’s crusade to salvage writing, journalism before ChatGPT changes it forever 

beasts of burden: the giant donkeys of Ancient Rome—see also  

birth-rate: China registers its first population decline in six decades 

ren faire: author Eleanor Janega’s Once and Future Sex  

level 100 schlamm zauberer: police attempt to clear remaining protester demonstrating against the demolition of the hamlet Lützerath for surface mining of coal—see previously  

☠️: a safety warning from the Electric Company (1973)  

midway in the midjourney of our lives: what AI does well and why AI is not intelligent

socks cousteau (10. 422)

No one can resist a fun novelty sock but it seems that neural networks are not yet exactly pushing the frontier on novel patterns as our AI Wrangler (previously) demonstrates, since as a rule it’s taught to rehash established answers, naming predictable and extant subjects but was impressively keen on alliterative gatherings of animals, like: Antelope Anarchy, Gazelle Groove or Elk Extravaganza with the various ungulates in party hats. Much more at the links above.

8x8 (10. 413)

rummaged in the roots: with only the dead in their graves as witnesses, we learned that the Hardy Tree of St Pancras succumbed to blight, via Strange Company  

terracotta army: archeologists are hesitant to unseal the tomb of China’s first emperor—and for good reason, via ibīdem, more here 

genuary 2023: a month of generative coding to make beautiful AI artefacts—via Web Curios  

alphaputt: this typographical, twenty-six hole course

know your meme: incredibly, there has never been an indexed search engine of the internet image macros—via Waxy

fossil fuel: industry scientists had a preternaturally accurate grasp on the consequences of burning oil five decades ago—via Damn Interesting’s Curated Links  

ucluelet: the largest Rogue Wave on record—see previously  

vauxhall: a tour of south London in the 1980s—via Things Magazine

zero-shot text to speech synthesis (10. 406)

Via Waxy, we are introduced frighteningly adept AI protocol from Microsoft called VALL·E that can extrapolate and convincingly simulate, imitate any voice with a sample of just a few seconds of audio. The underpinning code is not being published as an acknowledgement of its potential for misuse but there is a demonstration reel of its abilities that’s pretty amazing and are tuned for diversity, emotional maintenance and environment. Eleven benevolent elephants for your elocution.

8x8 (10. 395)

notional counting: amateur archaeologist proffers the theory that markings on ancient cave paintings may communicate information about quarry animals’ life cycles—pushing back the origins of writing ten-thousand years  

social recession: declining trust, friendship and adult activities by the numbers—via tmn  

brick and mortem: the surprising, seemingly non-sequir resurgence of a chain of bookshops  

arrakhis: the European Space Agency launches a tiny satellite to search for dark matter  

metroid as directed by paul verhoeven: imaging 90s video games as feature films—see previously  

little d: a Defender-style camper conversion kit unveiled at the Tokyo Auto Salon  

upward falling payloads: proposals for an orbiting warehouse and fulfilment centre  

mirabile scriptu: phony but possibly plausibly kanji generated by AI for abstract concepts—particularly appealing is one for the Chief Twit, 王 (pronounced wang, meaning king)

🎼 (10. 393)

Via Waxy and Things Magazine, we are introduced to an ingenious bit of coding, a sleek JavaScript application programming interface, a complier under twenty kilobytes for making generative remixes—like this stand-out reimagining of Jean-Michel Jarre’s 1976 Oxygène, Part IV, inspired by the track “Popcorn” by electronic composer Gershon Kingsley. Give it a spin yourself or browse the extensive catalogue of contributors.

and now for something completely different (10. 387)

Via Kottke, we are given over to ruminate on all the ways we can rush through reading, research and watching and optimising our time—our output and personal curation left in the able and dull-dealing hands of automation and outsourcing—and compelled to beg the natural and consequent question to what end. I have no pretensions about what others might call a good work ethics is just my motivation to be done with the tedious bits and to get to sneak away a little time for something that’s more interesting—and often not related to work and would entertain a degree of algorithmic enhancement if that might help me get swifter and better. While career wise, I wouldn’t exactly mind being made—regardless the inevitability and having little choice in the matter, this drive to get on to the next, equally loathsome chore is resonant and suggests being in the wrong business, addled and attended fairytales of endless growth and unbound productivity. See more from Alan Jacobs at his blog The Homebound Symphony at the link above.

down the garden path (10. 386)

Via Waxy, we invited to contemplate the awful prospect of a Web, already increasingly made for the interactions of bots and automation, totally overrun with generative artificial intelligence creating catchpenny content that estranges the human user further by expanding the Dark Forest of the Internet—a hypothesis borrowed from cosmology as one way to account for Fermi’s Paradox by positing that alien civilisations are silent and paranoid, reasoning that any other equally or more advanced life out there would pose an existential threat, that relegates us to our private, insulated spaces that echo and reinforce our points of view and preclude new discoveries. Seemingly more life-like, spaces become life-less with algorithms serving us exactly what we want and optimising visibility and virality with actual humans wise to avoid public-facing ventures lest they be ambushed by predictably pedestrian engagement and relentless marketing that we’ve let encroach on us in a complacence—which in all fairness only took a few months from funny and precocious to mealy, dull and wholly convincing.

may all jollity lighten your christmas hours (10. 363)

For Second Christmas, our AI wrangler Janelle Shane (see previously) hit upon another ingenious application for generative networks, remedying in one fell prompt the inscrutability of Victorian greeting cards and the relatively anodyne nature of contemporary cards, to enliven the iconography and sentiment for the industry. Yearly good tidings and descriptions were issued by machines fed on the corpus of inaccessibly weird cards, and where possible, illustrated by our programmer. The unrenderable caption that goes with the above 1889 motto calls for “a jester puppet with magic hat holding a leaping, toothed bird which brandishes a cane as it leaps.” Another favourite was for 1890—May You Feel Sturdy and Gay—picturing an elegant naiad lifting a pianoforte and wearing a striped bathing suit. Much more to explore at the links above. 

mistletoe and magic ✨ (10. 340)

Whilst OpenAI’s ChatGPT (previously) invent more plausible and predictably formulaic output instantaneously and in a way that addresses all the tropes—and stereotypes—in a more natural and less forced way, these rather vanilla spec-scripts for a generic Hallmark Holiday special, safe and concise as they may be, do fall short of the genius of an earlier artificial intelligence model’s product, set in a small town snow-globe refillery. Plus as a bonus treat, we are referred by Strange Company to the origin story of the Snow Globe—through the lens of its most famous cinematic appearance in the first few moments of Citizen Kane—from a Viennese family trying to provide surgeons with brighter operating theatre lighting, a convoluted story that sounds like it could have been written by the above neural network.  Give it a try yourself at the link up top and be sure to share.

fantasy films (10. 375)

Via Web Curios, we are directed to curated selection of more AI film stills—projects where cinema buffs working with Midjourney and Stable Diffusion labs ask their collaborators to especially conjure up The Little Mermaid but directed by Michael Mann. This montage takes us behind the scenes as well as imagining Star Wars, the Star Killer Dynasty through the filters of Fritz Lang and Stanley Kubrick. Much more, including the expanded concept treatments, at the links above.

zol and gel (10. 370)

Via Waxy, we are directed to the collaborative handiwork of Dylan Black from Maximum Effort, Minimum Reward whose exercise in a reversal of sorts with an OpenAI chat model (previously and trained on such dialogue originally) on inventing a new agglutinative language with grammatical rules and then to translate it back into an actual language is really quite astounding in terms of demonstrating the recursive nature of communication and inflection. Building off a series of a few simple prompts, the artificial intelligence constructs Glorp, the language of slimes—which albeit a little like Huttese and perhaps lacking the sophistication of an evolved language—is nonetheless very impressive. Gloop slog sploma slurpi. See the entire learning process, generated vocabulary and methodology at the link about.

jodorowsky’s tron (10. 351)

Returning to regular blogging after a restorative sabbatical, Kottke directs our attention towards surrealist, psychedelic version of Tron filtered through the lens of the style of filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky in an imaginative collaboration between an AI platform and creative prompter Johnny Darrell. These stills are pretty fantastic and makes one wonder how far away we are from realising Jodorowsky’s famously unmade adaptation of Dune. Much more at the links above.

oh-noetry (10. 348)

Ars Technica refers us to a sandbox experiment from Open AI for beta testing for the public that makes available its latest large language models that are better at understanding complex instructions and is capable of generating rhyming lyrics and verse.

There is an interesting aside to deflate the novelty despite the acknowledged breakthrough with a reference to the Eureka machine, demonstrated in 1845 by inventor John Clark that churned out Latin hexameter in the style of Virgil and Ovid. Give it a try and do share your results. 

Paratum, Roqueforte caseus
Mihi pretiosum esse videtur
Pinguem, sapidum, mollibusque
Mihi sapor est optimus!

7x7 (10. 334)

 the winnowing oar: an itinerant floating city in the Pangeos Terayacht and other mega projects from Saudi Arabia—via Things Magazine  

mönitör nøn: previously unheard audio from the first gigs of British rock band The Fall  

imperial isolate: gold coin in a museum cupboard proves existence of Sponsian, an emperor heretofore dismissed as fake—via Digg  

artificial gravity: spinning spacecraft don’t supply a wholly satisfactory solution to the effects of zero-g for human anatomy 

purple tomato: an anthocyanin-rich vegetable is a heuristic for exploring the distinction between genetic modification and selective-breeding—via Damn Interesting’s Curated Links  

feed-back loop: schema for artificial neural networks from the 1940s up to the present—via Web Curios   

anyox: an abandoned copper mining operation in British Columbia is Canada’s largest ghost town

6x6 (10. 329)

turkey in the straw: Thanksgiving with Liberache (1952)  

the blockchain eight: post-mortem of the collapse of FTX  

woty: the short-list for the publicly juried OED word of the year includes metaverse, #istandwithX and goblin mode 

ooh directory: an omnibus of blogs on every subject—via Waxy  

what sophistry is this: Facebook’s artificial intelligence labs design a negotiator called CICERO to gameify diplomacy—see also 

gratitude, don’t give me no attitude: the nine best Thanksgiving songs that I definitely didn’t just make up