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.…
Satellite images of a horse , pomegranates , and a camel , created from Solar Panel installations in China and Mongolia. Via @russss @chaos.social . 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…
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…
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],…
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.”
“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…
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 |…
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…
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…
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”…
“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…
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…
One of Europe’s largest ammunition manufacturers has said efforts to meet surging demand from the war in Ukraine have been stymied by a new TikTok data centre that is monopolising electricity in the region close to its biggest factory. The chief executive of Nammo, which is co-owned by the Norwegian government, said a planned expansion of its largest factory in central Norway hit a roadblock due…
Samsung cameras claim to produce incredibly high-detailed photos, even at night. One example they use is shots of the moon. However, as this reddit user shows, they are in fact using onboard AI / machine learning to superimpose existing high definition moon images onto the low-definition images actually taken by users. Samsung is faking the moon. Samsung “space zoom” moon shots are…