smackwater jack (10. 538)

Released on this day in 1971 and featuring tracks “It’s Too Late,” “I Feel the Earth Move,” “You’ve Got a Friend” and “Natural Woman,” the second studio album from Carol King won four Grammy awards and is certified Platinum fourteen times over, making it one of the best-selling and culturally significant recordings of all time. Overall its charting record is only surpassed by Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and King herself held the record for longest time in the ten top for nearly four decades until being succeeded by Adele with 21 in 2017. Cover art features a tapestry that King stitched herself with her cat called Telemachus at her feet.

6x6 (10. 537)

bardolatry: Google stock sheds a hundred billion dollars after its premier AI search engine makes a factual error  

order 66: the Jedi Academy will no longer include the massacre of padawans by Anakin Skywalker in its history lessons  

manga [1977]: an animated short by Yōji Kuri 

kamishibai: literary a “paper play,” Spoon & Tamago presents this unique Japanese form of story board 

i know i’ve made some very poor decisions recently, but i can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal: Star Wars in the directorial style of Stanley Kubrick and 2001 by George Lucas  

pass notes: Noam Chomsky on outsourcing academics with Chat CPT

iso 7001 (10. 536)

As Paris releases its pictogram family for their upcoming Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2024, Present /&/ Correct directs us to an omnibus collection of universal signs and symbols developed for all the Olympiads from 1964 on, highlighting some of their favourites (and ours as well). See how these coats-of-arms for each event compare to earlier iterations.  Much more at the links above.

stardust (10. 535)

We are directed to an awe-inspiring data-visualisation from a Wikipedia contributor who colour-codes the periodic table to trace the Elements back to their source in nucleosynthesis, citing data compiled by a professional astrophysicist who in turn quotes Carl Sagan: “The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apples were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”

roses are red (10. 534)

In an ongoing and evolving experiment, our AI Wrangler Janelle Shane (previously) has again essayed and assigned generative chat bots to create increasingly sophisticated greetings and indulged their versical graps by taking suggested illustrations, verso and recto—including on the back ‘Excleeze Me” below a red heart. It’ funny how the algorithm focuses on pagination equally with presentation and notably addressing recipient Jack as a carnivorous plant. In its dreadful excellence our old romantic ChapGPT rendered “Roses are red / Violets are blue / This card may be old / But my love for you is brand new,” optimised for fluency and familiarity above all other sentiments.

verdens første bøssebryllup (10. 533)

Though not accorded legal sanction by the Kingdom of Denmark for more than sixteen years later, the Danish Evangelical-Lutheran Church became the first Christian communion in modern times to recognise gay marriage on this day in 1973 when radical priest—semi-retired for advocating social anarchy and protesting against NATO upbuilding but not defrocked—Harald Søbye, at the suggestion of a tabloid journalist who was one of the grooms, presided over the world’s first gay marriage. The reporter had met a florist at a discotheque in Vesterbro and asked Søbye to do the honours. From then to 1989 when civil unions were legally recognised, Søbye performed over two hundred blessings or full matrimonial ceremonies. The Church of Denmark in 2012 decided not just to bless and accept same-sex marriages (see also) but to moreover administer the vows and host the celebrations as well.

stochastic parrot (10. 532)

JWZ excerpts from a longer pair of complementary studies on ChatGPT and seeing through those statistical tolerances built into the overtures of a generally unremarkable plain of generative dialogue where with proper minding and limited exposure produce the glancing insight of an accomplished sophist but is otherwise the underlying coursing of conspiracy and misinformation that are the hallmarks of any ploy for attention, manufactured or otherwise. Especially arresting is the examination of the invitation to engage and use it as a partnership, many proponents and some educators and proctors, equating it to bringing calculators into the classroom, as it handily dismantles that comparison since calculators and other tools are made to be reliable and correct, not persuasive. What do you think? Are you a bit disappointed, deflated? There are woefully plenty of tasks where accuracy and objectivity don’t matter—filler, spam, splaining, search engine optimisation none of which seem to be very enlightening or ennobling applications, and money to be made from it but it only makes the internet built for people worse for it and we do ourselves a disservice pretending anyone is seriously reading that boilerplate.

giraffe confidence 43% (10. 531)

Without the need for camouflaging ones face so far, an Italian textile firm introduces a line of disruptive knitwear to safeguards ones biometrics, pitting AI against AI with adversarial patterns and patches designed to draw attention away from one’s face and other recognisable features, classifying a human with some other disposessing taxonomy before attracting too much notice.