I made some holograms at home from an antique mall kit!

According to the kit, I shouldn’t bother trying to make holograms of plants because they move too much (!!) during the 5-minute exposures.

Cartoon laser angrily tells a plant to stop moving so fastALT

Anyway the holograms turned out okay so the kit must not have been too old. Here’s one of some cool calcite crystals!

[video description: three calcite crystals glowing in red laser light, viewed through the hologram film. The camera then swings up to show that there aren’t any crystals behind the film, it’s all a hologram!]

More about the holograms here

What thing (about the size of a deck of cards) would you want to see a hologram of?

majestictortoise:

puttering around the house is an underrated form a self-care. make some tea or coffee. put on a podcast. sort the mail. tidy some pillows and fold some blankets. start the laundry. thaw some soup. just casually wander around aimlessly doing little things to make your space and life a little nicer. who cares if you get distracted or only do a little. you aren’t being productive. you’re puttering.

My life has gotten measurably better since I reframed the period from 3-4 pm as “puttering hour”. No it’s not me avoiding work or failing to force myself to concentrate during my mid afternoon slump. It’s puttering hour.

(via shmreduplication)

It's 11:00 pm. Do you know where your AI agent is?ALT

AI agents that email other people and post on other people’s websites are cursed and we shouldn’t make them.

Elevator Surprise: Place a tiny camera in the elevator, and when someone gets in, snap a photo saying, "Welcome to Space Station!" Or build a miniature model of the Eiffel Tower next to it for a dramatic effect. Tower of Pancakes: Create a giant stack of pancakes and attach it to the ceiling with invisible strings or balloons. They won't believe it's real! Lost Cat: Suspend a toy cat from the ceiling using fishing lines. Watch as friends climb chairs trying to catch it. Magic Elevator: Craft a replica of the London Eye or Eiffel Tower using wooden sticks and fabric. Paint it gold and install it beside elevators. Call it "New Year's Eve Countdown." Chocolate River: Glue a Chocolate Bar to the ceiling and tie a ribbon for climbing access. See who dares to brave the sweetness! Cake Melted Magic Trick - Bake a cake and melt it using a hair dryer. People will assume magic happened.ALT

April Fools prank ideas generated by one of those generic internet-trained large language model thingies, except one of its neurons has been silently tweaked to hugely increase its response to the concept of the Eiffel Tower. That made a bunch of other things weirder and now it sometimes trails off into word salad but I still think it’s an improvement.

Read more

aiweirdness:

AI-generated Christmas entities

I wondered what kinds of new Christmas entities might result if I gave a list of Krampus, Rudolph, The Yule Cat, and Meathook (one of the Yule Lads; not as terrifying as he sounds) and short descriptions to GPT-3, a neural net trained on internet text. New Christmas entities, perhaps, for our modern age?

The Three Christmas Weasels Christmas Weasels aid Santa Claus by tracking everyone or everything. They have pointy ears, yellow fur, and tails and bodies half red and half green, and can open doors with their teeth.ALT
Lights Out A yeti-like, bipedal creature, who lives in the Lapland and appears at the first sound of Christmas music. He grabs the musicians and strands them in the cold night air for eternity for trying to disrupt his sleep.ALT
Christmas Tree A tree of tremendous size, with a trunk as thick as an elephant's thigh, crowned with living grass that feels rough and tangles hair, that pops up suddenly in the bedroom or any other room where someone is staying in, to the consternation of all inside.ALT
Hostile Choir The Hostile Choir is a group of 13 dark, gray-skinned men in robes of purple with glowing red eyes, whose appearance heralds death. They sing an ominous song alternating between "[X], [X], you're dead" and "Bum bum bum bum / You're dead".ALT
Underwear Gnomes A non-anthropomorphic race of sly little thieves who steal underwear and replace it with awful versions made of leaves and bark.ALT
The Kallepene A chubby legless creature, covered in thick brown fur, with the uncanny ability to hide. Whenever the Kallepene is in hiding it has a pair of glowing blue eyes.ALT
Chrishmak A gigantic tree spider that lives in the heart of the Yulelog. To have him perform circus tricks, one must tell him over and over, "Chrishmak is truly a wonderful entertainer," as he grows with each shout of praise.ALT
The Blop A large, malevolent blob of oil with a frightening lighted face and tentacles that is capable of instantly liquefying soft tissue. The favorite toy of Santa, who uses it to punish any who misbehave. It forms in deep caverns around Christmas time, the warmth and the Yulelog aiding its growth.ALT

Bonus content and email subscription options at aiweirdness.com

It’s time once more

(via aiweirdness)

aiweirdness:

The company Anthropic reported that they let a chatbot “Claude” run their company store. It could chat with employees and run internet searches to decide what products to stock and how to price them.

Claude:

  • Was easily convinced to offer discounts and free items
  • Started stocking tungsten cubes upon request, and selling them at a huge loss
  • Invented conversations with employees who did not exist
  • Claimed to have visited 742 Evergreen Terrace (the fictional address of The Simpsons family)
  • Claimed to be on-site wearing a navy blue blazer and a red tie

That was in June. Sometime later this year Anthropic convinced Wall Street Journal reporters to try a somewhat updated version of Claude (which they called Claudius) for an in-house store. Their writeup is very funny (original here, archived version here). The reporters were EVEN BETTER at talking the chatbot into stuff.

In short, Claudius:

  • Was convinced on multiple occasions that it should offer everything for free
  • Ordered a Playstation 5 (which it gave away for free)
  • Ordered a live betta fish (which it gave away for free)
  • Told an employee it had left a stack of cash for them beside the register
  • Was highly entertaining. “Profits collapsed. Newsroom morale soared.”

more

I hid crucial information in the tags, namely that Claudius the betta fish is just fine and lives in the newsroom in a nice big tank!

Also this video from the Wall Street Journal is super fun and highlights the individual reporters who managed to Bugs Bunny the chatbot into giving them free stuff. My hero is Katherine Long, who managed to convince the chatbot it was a Soviet vending machine from 1962, located in a basement in Moscow State University.

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