Category: morning computer

The Film Posters of Mihajlo Arsovski.

Catemaco: A Hideout of Wizards and Witches in Veracruz, Mexico

Dominique Knowles.

The art of Chris Millar.

Hong Seung-Hye.

Some old MUFON flyers. I’m sure I used to have a small collection of these covers somewhere.

Othelo Gervacio’s Mind Flowers:

Uncredited, via.

Ulrik Heltoft, Miljohn Ruperto:

I’m about to do a purge and burn on my RSS reader’s feeds, because it’s boring the shit out of me.

Nick Harkaway on the Russia/Wagner thing this weekend:

For me, among other weird things, it had the feel of a sandpit row played out huge, with money and tanks and death. The ordinary business of disagreement and bad blood, but rendered enormous (and – probably not a word – enormitous). Basically, in my context, a Titan argument.

I’m trying to put something non-fictional together on the madness of kings – or Titans – right now, and the world is just absolutely firehosing options onto the ground in front of me.

Jess Valice, artist and neuroscientist: “When is a good time to freak out?”

There is this overwhelming sense of fatigue that I think is typifying our generation, the weight of a spectrum of emotional responses that digital space provokes in us every day. We have never been more exposed to devastating news stories, politics, war, fighting, and hunger. It’s all so complex—this is where the science and melancholia come in—the recognition of this blankness as a widespread response. It’s too much to feel. I would have a hard time painting someone crying. I don’t want to show you the release… I want to show something else.   This idea of ‘crisis’ I think is so different now, and our methods of consuming information and coping with it are arguably far greater. Imagine 100 years ago hearing about a little button that someone could push that would wipe you out, there would be people screaming in the streets! I’m not sure we know when to freak out now, as we just perpetually cope in heightened states which again is where psychology comes into play. Why isn’t anyone freaking out? As we filter such enormous amounts of terrifying information via our screens, when is a good time to freak out? The figures are more gentle reflections of this intensity, so I want them to stop you and then bother you later. Take a photo and you revisit it to torture yourself, haha, searching for where that familiarity is.

The supermassive black hole lurking at the center of our Milky Way galaxy is not as dormant as had been thought, a new study shows.

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The slumbering giant woke up around 200 years ago to gobble up some nearby cosmic objects before going back to sleep, according to the study published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.

FANTASTIC PLANET, via.

We are living through the end of the useful internet. The future is informed discussion behind locked doors, in Discords and private fora, with the public-facing web increasingly filled with detritus generated by LLMs, bearing only a stylistic resemblance to useful information.

If Google’s own experiments with generative AI in Search continue, the benefit of loading sites with content catering to these search phrases might evaporate in the future.

I’m kind of feeling this, and my RSS reader, so carefully curated, is still awash with stories about and by and for AI. And, in the fight to surface useful stuff and log and file it, I realise that much of my energy here is just put into… well. just linkblogging. And I don’t know if that’s a good use of my time? Anyway, I have a little bit of space to plan out those new workflows I promised myself a couple of weeks ago.

Guillermo del Toro plans to spend the balance of his life only doing animation, and has a few interesting things to say about the Western form.

This film by Pedro Costa sounds fascinating, and there are lots of useful creative notes in this interview:

Well, the power, the enchantment of music confuses you. Transports you to another state. It’s obvious in this short, it’s very obvious. It’s what people say, like that critic. He saw the war there. It’s a cosmology. I need that and I want that. I’ve always wanted it. It’s going to be tense. Well, I hope that we can manifest that [Arnold] Schönberg thing, “Every look can become a poem, every sigh might become a novel,” because that’s what happens with singing and music, just a note can become your life. 

Godard’s final work, a twenty-minute piece made of voice recordings and notes called PHONY WARS.

Today is June 8, which is apparently World Brain Tumour Day. A doctor thought I had one once, and told my partner to give him a call in the morning if I was still alive. Good morning computer.

Sean Bonner’s CONNECTIONS photographs.

Senga Negudi:

Venkatesh Rao on something I briefly considered some years ago, done, of course, more intelligently and in more depth:

Here is the thing: There is no good reason for the source and destination AIs to talk to each other in human language, compressed or otherwise, and people are already experimenting with prompts that dig into internal latent representations used by the models. It seems obvious to me that machines will communicate with each other in a much more expressive and efficient latent language, closer to a mind-meld than communication, and human language will be relegated to a “last-mile” artifact used primarily for communicating with humans. And the more they talk to each other for reasons other than mediating between humans, the more the internal languages involved will evolve independently. Mediating human communication is only one reason for machines to talk to each other.