5,000 Podcasts. 3,000 Episodes a Week. $1 Cost Per Episode — Behind an AI Start Up’s Plan
September 10, 2025 at 08:52PM
Comments closedTag: ai
Something else that seems to have vanished off the streams. Playing a rip off the original CDr from 2011, I think.
Comments closedI have this little AI listening device I was given, and the weirdest thing about it is that at 8pm it pops a little summary of what I let it hear about my day, and it’s the most peculiarly positive uplifting hopecore message about my life. It puts the most calming, soothing spin on whatever it picked up, and it wants me to believe that I have a peaceful, creative life filled with love and affection.
Tomorrow I will tell it that it’s a fucking liar and see how it spins that.
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Artist and technologist the Rev Dan Catt had a spare Bee Pioneer unit and gifted it to me. it’s an AI listening device. I’ve lately gotten curious about the state of play in AI assistance – did a newsletter about it — with special interest in both intentional physical-operation devices like the Rabbit R1 and the things that melt into the background, which is what the Bee is. Wrist strap or, as I’m doing it, a clip that’ll attach to a shirt or belt.
On Dan’s recommendation, I’ve ordered a faraday pouch for it and I charge it in a silent room – because it will hear the tv as well as conversations when I wear it outside the office, and it will turn back on when it’s charging. It’s slow to catch up with work-account email – anything newer than a day or two, it can’t see — and it needs to be trained to look for the correct spelling of names in my work contacts.
You can change the voice on the associated iOS app, and the one I’m using sounds a little bit like Gildart Jackson pretending to be a 1940s BBC announcer, which amuses me.
I have no idea if this thing will have real utility or whether it’s just a nightmare ear in a box. But I’m going to play around with it, wait around and see what it can easily be connected to in the future, and see what it can do.
One Comment- China is building an AI supercomputer network in space
- hermits who became medieval celebrities
- the new rules of subculture (podcast with the author of ANTIMEMETICS, which I’ve pre-ordered)
The Nooscope manifested: AI as instrument of knowledge extractivism | AI & SOCIETY
“The purpose of the Nooscope map is to secularize AI from the ideological status of ‘intelligent machine’ to one of knowledge instruments. Rather than evoking legends of alien cognition, it is more reasonable to consider machine learning as an instrument of knowledge magnification that helps to perceive features, patterns, and correlations through vast spaces of data beyond human reach. In the history of science and technology, this is no news; it has already been pursued by optical instruments throughout the histories of astronomy and medicine.Footnote3 In the tradition of science, machine learning is just a Nooscope, an instrument to see and navigate the space of knowledge (from the Greek skopein ‘to examine, look’ and noos ‘knowledge’).”
December 04, 2024 at 01:02PM
Comments closedI’ve had a free subscription to Perplexity AI Pro for almost a year and have only just gotten around to adding its extension to Chrome. The subscription renews at full price next month, and I need to decide if it’s worth the hefty spend. My Rabbit R1 barely works in the office – wifi is terrible up here and its reception isn’t strong.
And, to be honest? “AI” hasn’t fully worked itself into my life yet. It’s an occasional tool for research, but I have too much muscle memory for “just typing shit into search bars on web browsers.”
Until relatively recently, I’ve considered AI to be basically a toy, one with significant ethical and social strikes against it. For me, it’s been a great occasional tool for research, or to confirm that was actually Christopher Walken in an episode of KOJAK. I may be missing something. Or I may not be and would be completely justified in going full Hojoki.
Comments closedReview: Buzzati’s ‘The Singularity’: The Sci-Fi Novella That Got AI (Mostly) Right
“A secret military project. A vast artificial mind. Questions of consciousness. These form the premise of Dino Buzzati’s The Singularity, originally published in 1960 at the dawn of the field of artificial intelligence (AI). The novella follows Italian scientist Ermanno Ismani, summoned by the Ministry of Defense to work on a top-secret project, as he ventures with his wife, Elisa, to a sprawling machine hidden in the mountains of the Italian countryside. The machine’s intelligence far surpasses that of humans—and its creators claim that the machine has come alive.”
August 05, 2024 at 11:57AM
Comments closedWhat grabbed me here was the accidental voice reconstruction.
The project group used machine learning voice changing software, off the shelf, made for streamers.
The scratches and taps on the metal were transformed by the proto-AI into fragments of voice: burbles and syllables that sound something like a person speaking, but not quite. You strain to hear.
(I didn’t ask but I got the impression that the group didn’t originally intend for this to be part of their project, even though it was part of their demo by the time I spoke with them. That’s what you get from working directly with material.)
And this is something new:
Where does the voice come from?
Novelty in the signal.
This is essentially Electronic Voice Phenomenon.
Within ghost hunting and parapsychology, electronic voice phenomena (EVP) are sounds found on electronic recordings that are interpreted as spirit voices. Parapsychologist Konstantīns Raudive, who popularized the idea in the 1970s, described EVP as typically brief, usually the length of a word or short phrase.[1]
Enthusiasts consider EVP to be a form of paranormal phenomenon often found in recordings with static or other background noise. Scientists regard EVP as a form of auditory pareidolia (interpreting random sounds as voices in one’s own language) and a pseudoscience promulgated by popular culture.[2][3] Prosaic explanations for EVP include apophenia (perceiving patterns in random information), equipment artifacts, and hoaxes
Those babbling voices from the sheet metal are not noise in the signal. They’re the point. Sources of creation are rare and here’s a new one!
What would happen if we listened to the voices?
Old radio in new graveyards.
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