entropy

I use this blog to post random ephemera that amuses me. Much of it is stuff I think is stupid, but I also post stuff I think is cool. If you're interested in more erudite bookmarks, try my Pinboard.

[mcchris]

It was a pleasantly warm sunny morning where I lived. To boost my energy level, I thought to play the Olivia Tremor Control album Dusk at Cubist Castle. It hit the spot. 

[stml]

The climate crisis is not, in fact, a mystery or a riddle we haven’t yet solved due to insufficiently robust data sets. We know what it would take, but it’s not a quick fix – it’s a paradigm shift. Waiting for machines to spit out a more palatable and/or profitable answer is not a cure for this crisis, it’s one more symptom of it.

AI machines aren’t ‘hallucinating’. But their makers are | Naomi Klein

Tech CEOs want us to believe that generative AI will benefit humanity. They are kidding themselves

[brucesterling]

[new-aesthetic]

Spotify appears to be creating and uploading x thousands of identical, procedurally generated songs under different names and cover art.

Example playlist

Other sources report that these are tracks licensed at low cost in order to fill playlists without paying record companies and their artists:

According to DN, Firefly Entertainment is doing a roaring trade in what some would call “fake artists” on Spotify.

These are the now-well-known pseudonymous artists on the streaming platform – artists with no discernible online footprint – whose music fills up many of Spotify’s own key mood and chillout playlists.

For a long time, music industry figures have wondered aloud whether Spotify has deals in place that see it pay less in royalties for streams of music from “fake artists” – whose cumulative streams now sit in the billions – than streams of artists signed to major record companies.

In its report (available here) DN obtained a list of 830 ‘fake artist’ names linked to Firefly, and discovered that at least 495 of these artists have music on first-party Spotify playlists.

This figure probably under-estimates the scope of Firefly’s artists on Spotify-run playlists, suggests DN, as the newspaper only examined 100 playlists out of the “several thousand [playlists] that Spotify is responsible for”.

[new-aesthetic]

The very first citation in this stupid letter is to our StochasticParrots Paper, "AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity, as shown by extensive research[1]"

EXCEPT

that one of the main points we make in the paper is that one of the biggest harms of large language models, is caused by CLAIMING that LLMs have "human-competitive intelligence."

Timnit Gebru on Twitter

[new-aesthetic]

[Twitter]

[robhorninginternalexile]

Whenever the “easier to imagine the end of earth than the end of late capitalism” quote is attributed to Jameson, it comes from this, the first paragraph of “The Antinomies of Postmodernism.” 

His point is that “postmodern” could be used as a shorthand for that feeling of impotence and despair that comes from being unable to think beyond the horizon of individual action. When Mark Fisher replaced “postmodern” with “capitalist realism,” it dehistoricized the concept, at least at the level of the shorthand term, enacting the sense of endless futility it is also describing.

Fisher’s book is mostly an extrapolation of this Jameson essay, and more specifically this passage from it:

The persistence of the Same through absolute Difference — the same street with different buildings, the same culture through momentous new sheddings of skin — discredits change, since henceforth the only conceivable radical change would consist in putting an end to change itself. But here the antinomy really does result in the blocking or paralysis of thought, since the impossibility of thinking another system except by way of the cancellation of this one ends up discrediting the utopian imagination itself, which is fantasized as the loss of everything we know experientially, from our libidinal investments to our psychic habits, and in particular the artificial excitements of consumption and fashion.

This is also prefigures Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism” thesis, that our attachments to the consolations of a broken social order perpetuates that order, that our imaginations are conditioned by the limited and compromised pleasures our given world has to offer, that we can only imagine “a better world” in terms of sacrifice. The “new” as a source of hope is systematically blocked. I tend to see “AI” as the current expression of that blockage, in an automated form that pre-empts efforts to resist it. “AI” can be deployed to impose the cultural dead end on any future form of innovation, if one accepts the companies’ hype at face value. 

In its inverted form, this hype insists that AI makes human creativity and craft superfluous; to resist it means understanding “AI” not as an agent but as a tool in the hands of those who stand to benefit from promulgating the idea that human abilities are cheap and substitutable. 

[aiweirdness]

[brucesterling]

Forbes.  Business news you can trust 

[aiweirdness]

Original

It had generated a complete reference with title, author, and everything. Completely fabricated.

It’s not a search engine, it’s a crappy imitation of one.

[mcchris]

As I rushed out to catch a bus to Houston yesterday, I grabbed my #infrared camera as an afterthought. I suspect that everyone who takes an IR camera to H-Town snaps that shot of the Menil: it’s what I visualized when I saw the camera. (at The Menil Collection) https://www.instagram.com/p/CfAHO9MlKaG/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[mcchris]

#fence (at Austin, Texas) https://www.instagram.com/p/CetTb1Yu4bJ/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[mcchris]

#morningwalk #poppy (at Seattle, Washington) https://www.instagram.com/p/CdwnPWfpYUt/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[mcchris]

#eveningwalk (at Sunshine Community Gardens) https://www.instagram.com/p/CdrqH2Jt7kS/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[mcchris]

#morningwalk (at Austin, Texas) https://www.instagram.com/p/CdlvKgJl7ww/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[mcchris]

I did a lil’ street photography this morning. Thinking a child (or raccoon) might be delighted to find the egg, I moved it into the grass. (at Austin, Texas) https://www.instagram.com/p/CdYq58Wuklx/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[mcchris]

#OlympusInfinityMini #Kentmere400 #Rodinal #standdevelopment (at Austin, Texas) https://www.instagram.com/p/CdT-_TzFhw4/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=