The New Aesthetic

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If you're following this blog, if you've been here all along: last Wednesday, May 6th, was the 15th anniversary of the originating blog post. This Tumblr was started a few days later.

I'm still thinking about pixels, but a bit differently. I live on a Greek Island now, not in London. Things have happened. I wrote two books. I will write more. The NA was, is, a big part of that.

I still think the things that we've learned about technology can help us build better futures, but I don't think that has much to do with technology.

Thank you Tumblr. Here's to another 15.

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Russian Troops Strap Starlink Terminals to Horses as Russian Cavalry Makes ‘Historic’ Return - Kyiv Post

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Satellite images of a horse, pomegranates, and a camel, created from Solar Panel installations in China and Mongolia.

Via @[email protected].

The Horse image was created in association with Huawei, in a project that also includes agrivoltaics (growing crops between and underneath solar panels):

In the Kubuqi Desert of Inner Mongolia, the State Power Investment Corporation used Huawei's smart PV solution to build a 300 MW solar power station. The power station located in Dalad Banner, an administrative region in Inner Mongolia, boasts 196,000 solar panels that were installed in the pattern of a galloping horse. By the end of 2022, the power station had produced 2.566 billion kWh of green electricity, equivalent to saving 1.027 million tons of coal equivalent and reducing CO2 by 2.56 million tons. The project has also fixed more than 1,000 hectares of sand. The solar panels do far more than just generate electricity. Local residents have been able to plant herbs and shrubs under the panels and cash crops like desert false indigo and Mongolian milk vetch between the arrays. This prevents further erosion of the land between the panel arrays and contributes to wind and sand fixation and ecosystem restoration. This power station serves as a perfect example of how PV can support desertification control, and plans to replicate this success are being made in other desert lands of western China.

Alxa Right Banner, in Mongolia, the location of the Camel design, is a thriving camel business region. Hotan, in Xinjiang, China, is likewise a prominent pomegranate cultivation area.

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Interference patterns from LED street lighting creates pixelated shadows.

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British architecture studio Dowen Farmer Architects has released plans for Portal Road, a multistorey ghost-kitchen tower block in west London that would shuttle food to a public food hall like the "Ministry of Magic".

Dowen Farmer Architects' proposal for the site, called Portal Road, would measure 28,000 square metres and consist of 12 storeys, 10 of which would be dedicated to 260 rentable ghost kitchens for use by local shops and restaurants.

Dowen Farmer designs cubic ten-storey tower for ghost kitchens | DEZEEN

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Lee Sedol, reflecting on AlphaGo, eight years on.

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An update on the Samsung moon controversy from a Samsung executive:

There was a very nice video by Marques Brownlee last year on the moon picture. Everyone was like, ‘Is it fake? Is it not fake?’ There was a debate around what constitutes a real picture. And actually, there is no such thing as a real picture. As soon as you have sensors to capture something, you reproduce [what you’re seeing], and it doesn’t mean anything. There is no real picture. You can try to define a real picture by saying, ‘I took that picture’, but if you used AI to optimize the zoom, the autofocus, the scene – is it real? Or is it all filters? There is no real picture, full stop.

(Ed: of course there is no such thing as "a real picture". What there is, is a relationship: the person who takes the picture, the subject of the pictures, the context of that picture-taking. Pictures (like everything else) are relationships, not objects, and it is this which is revealed when you start doing weird things like Samsung/AI does to image making.)

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Amazon Is Selling Products With AI-Generated Names Like "I Cannot Fulfill This Request It Goes Against OpenAI Use Policy"

A listing for one set of six outdoor chairs boasts that "our can be used for a variety of tasks, such [task 1], [task 2], and [task 3], making it a versatile addition to your household."

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"HELP! Guys I’m losing my mind, the lady in the wedding dress shop took this photo of me! I swear on my life this is real, what?! HOW?! Somebody please help!!! I’m freaking out" - TessaCoates on Twitter

[Likely cause of this image is that the iPhone used actually takes several images to compensate for low light conditions, and then stitches them together, producing a moment which never happened. See also: Google Best Take.]

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[AP News Story]

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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

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A woman living in Kenya’s Dadaab, which is among the world’s largest refugee camps, wanders across the vast, dusty site to a central hut lined with computers. Like many others who have been brutally displaced and then warehoused at the margins of our global system, her days are spent toiling away for a new capitalist vanguard thousands of miles away in Silicon Valley. A day’s work might include labelling videos, transcribing audio, or showing algorithms how to identify various photos of cats.  Amid a drought of real employment, “clickwork” represents one of few formal options for Dadaab’s residents, though the work is volatile, arduous, and, when waged, paid by the piece. Cramped and airless workspaces, festooned with a jumble of cables and loose wires, are the antithesis to the near-celestial campuses where the new masters of the universe reside.  Each task represents a stretching of the gulf between the vast and growing ghettos of disposable life and a capitalist vanguard of intelligent bots and billionaire tycoons. The barbaric and sublime bound in a single click. The same economy of clicks determines the fates of refugees across the Middle East. Forced to adapt their sleeping patterns to meet the needs of firms on the other side of the planet and in different time zones, the largely Syrian population of Lebanon’s Shatila camp forgo their dreams to serve those of distant capitalists. Their nights are spent labeling footage of urban areas — house,” “shop,” “car” — labels that, in a grim twist of fate, map the streets where the labelers once lived, perhaps for automated drone systems that will later drop their payloads on those very same streets. The sites on which they labor are so opaque that it is impossible to establish with any certainty the precise purpose or beneficiaries of their work. 

Refugees help power machine learning advances at Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon

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Grumpy Locals Are Sabotaging Cruise and Waymo Robotaxis With Traffic Cones

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At your local animal shelter, roughly half of the cats up for adoption will be black or black and white. But black cats, in particular, face difficulty in finding adoption. Although some cultures regard black cats well (in Scotland they are said to bring prosperity and in England and Japan some say they bring good luck) in much of the world they are associated with evil omens and witchcraft. But now they face an added challenge: the cruel demands of the Instagram age, in which black cats are deemed less aesthetically pleasing than their more colourful comrades. Between 2007 and 2013 the Blue Cross saw a 65% rise in the number of black cats taken in each year, and the RSPCA, noting similar figures, blamed the fact that black cats are not “selfie-friendly”. “It’s not uncommon for many monochrome moggies to wait many weeks or months to be adopted,” says Gemma Croker from Cats Protection, which takes in 200,000 cats each year.

Adopt a black cat – here's how to make them look great on Instagram (Guardian)

On a long enough timeline, instagram filters will shift the evolutionary opportunities of whole species.

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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”.

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“The expectation was, you have to smile eight hours a day,” a woman Baker calls Sofiya tells her. A 41-year-old Russian émigré who had been living in the United States for the past decade, Sofiya “was a proficient English speaker,” Baker writes, but it was in her job as a bank teller that she “came face-to-face with her deficiency in speaking ‘American.’ This other English language, made up of not just words but also facial expressions and habits of conversation subtle enough to feel imagined. Smiling almost constantly was at the core of her duties as a teller. As she smiled at one customer after another, she would wince inwardly at how silly it felt. There was no reason to smile at her clients, she thought, since there was nothing particularly funny or heartwarming about their interactions. And her face hurt.”

This confrontation with the culture clash of smiling for an Eastern European immigrant in America hits close to home. Which is why seeing the relentless parade of toothy, ahistorical, quintessentially American, “cheese” smiles plastered on the faces of every civilization in the world across time and space was immediately jarring. It was as if the AI had cast 21st century Americans to put on different costumes and play the various cultures of the world. Which, of course, it had.

AI and the American Smile

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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