Luke Skarth

What if AI Doesn’t Get Much Better Than This? - Cal Newport In the years since ChatGPT’s launch in late 2022, it’s been hard not to get swept up in feelings of euphoria or dread about the ... Read more

Cal Newport has some useful commentary generally on AI, e.g. calnewport.com/what-if-ai-d...

Sorry, link is medium.com/@shwetasingh...

Here's a semi-decent summary, in particular: "LLMs are essentially statistical models; there is no mechanism for them to perform novel causal reasoning, abstraction, or symbol manipulation other than by copying examples from their vast databases." They aren't reasoning, it's marketing hype.

Not really. DeepSeek had the reasoning display first, and you'll see the reasoning doesn't always match the outcome. It's not actually talking to itself. It's there to give you an illusion of reasoning. It's marketing mediated through user interface to make it seem more than it is.

Whilst we're at it, can we have more MPs who've had proper jobs please? And not left Oxbridge for a Think Tank, SPAD job, Telegraph column or been propping up the Sunday Politics sofa for years?

Whatever confluence of events led to me being able to watch The Running Man (a remake admittedly) a few months ago, and Good Luck Have Fun Don't Die today, well, b-movie schlock is back on the menu and I love it. Especially when it is Saying Things about the current moment. Delicious, both.

New Wavefinder single next Friday.

“BOMBERSTAGE” out 2.20.26

Maybe... Maybe Affinity Photo and WINE might not suck too bad for this, but agreed.

Take My Books, Please Reflections on the Settlement of Bartz v Anthropic

more in "they're doing to books what they already did to music" @dadadrummer.bsky.social dadadrummer.substack.com/p/take-my-bo...

Dream with this: solenoids, percussion, and circuits in live Torso session - CDM Create Digital Music Here's a perfect way to treat your ears at the start of the week. Sound artist and percussionist Lorenzo Colombo recorded this ethereal, cosmic live set at Torso Electronics in Copenhagen. The dadamac...

Exactly the sounds I wanted to start out this week ... four transcendent performances. And love the way Lorenzo Colombo is combining percussion/acoustic/electroacoustic with the machines -- expect this will inspire some of you!

Revealed: How Substack makes money from hosting Nazi newsletters Exclusive: Site takes a cut of subscriptions to content that promotes far-right ideology, white supremacy and antisemitism

Look, I know discovery is hard, especially with other services, but I once again implore you, if you're using substack, just don't.

They clearly dgaf about the paradox of tolerance.

The defining feature of AI today is infrastructure: the rapacious buildout of data centres; the transnational configuration of labour exploitation; the grafting of AI onto processes of capitalist accumulation.

Oh I'm just doing it on a trial, but I like the higher level objects and Ableton familiarity in places. Plug Data is a nice GUI over PD if you haven't tried it. I'm probably going to get Max when it's on sale on a crossgrade though, I've suffered enough in the past 😂

Any scratchy sound artefacts are thanks to *video compression*. Still, nice, a guy could spend a lot of time making things and not making music with this.

Max/MSP Drone Experiment YouTube video by Luke S

And here's the v basic drone I made. Some percussive elements from playing with the resonance. Controlled via pots on my MIDI controller.

All in all a very nice evening experiment.

Maybe don't have headphones on with volume up high if listening, even with the limiter in place.

Barnsley rebranded UK’s first ‘tech town’ as US giants join AI push Minister announces Microsoft, Cisco and Adobe to help apply AI to local schools, hospitals, GPs and businesses

Skittering, many-clawed, the delivery bots all tapped the glass, as if to say, "Let us in, please, for our batteries run low." But the high street's Wilkos had long closed. The agent-coddled kids, who'd ordered 1500 vapes to the dead address, watched mute, having forgotten what laughter is.

To be fair the ABL devices, importing abstractions of devices from Ableton Live, help hugely to get some of the pain out of the way.

I'm also uhh looking into visualisers via Jitter (part of Max/MSP) so I can get back on that trip.

An image of a custom Max/MSP patch I made that uses MIDI controls to drive changes in cycle frequencies and a filter cutoff and resonance to make a sort of drone synth that is driven through a phaser, echo, reverb, and limiter, before being sent to audio out.

Oh no, I think I might be getting into Max/MSP.

Continuing this thread...

Skate Story is incredible. An audiovisual feast. A surreal skate game fable music video psychedelic journey filled with strange heart. No notes. Mostly one guy made it! It goes into my personal canon. Play it.

And now I sleep from games once more.

What technology takes from us – and how to take it back | Rebecca Solnit The long read: Decisions outsourced, chatbots for friends, the natural world an afterthought: Silicon Valley is giving us life void of connection. There is a way out – but it’s going to take collectiv...

What technology takes from us and how to take it back.

Thoughtful writing on why tech has contributed to modern life feeling artificial, disconnected and empty.

www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

Feels adjacent to Peter Watts's Blindsight.

Do it. I love all the parts between "proper" things on so many albums.

Peter Thiel’s spyware firm Palantir is wiring itself into critical UK services - with over £630m in government contracts.

We need a full Parliamentary debate on Palantir’s role 👇

(Graphic via @thenerve.news)

Looks like you're getting your technical debt in right from the off, would you like some help with that?

Time to get your invoices in, they've told you what they are worth and it's not £0 below 1000 or 0.0003 a play!

What the fuck are we doing here as a country, hell, as a species? People have lost their minds. There is zero critical thinking or care here. They're probably all just really worried about their investments... Gotta reach that critical mass of adoption! Use kids even!

This government has what I would describe as a god-mode majority in parliament. They could be nationalising the water companies. They could have brought in a robin hood tax. 1/5 people in this country are living in deprivation. And we get this cavalcade of soundbytes.

Alright, I've got the rhythm of Skin Deep now, and I see some good parallels to Quadrilateral Cowboy. It's a nice design with some fun systems. Caveat being I tend to cheese it rather than engage with a lot of those systems. Still, great indie execution, you'd expect no less from Blendo.

More than half of new articles on the internet are being written by AI – is human writing headed for extinction? As AI floods the internet with text, it could mean human voices will matter more – not less.

"Writers may feel more creative when they use artificial intelligence for brainstorming, yet the range of ideas often becomes narrower."

theconversation.com/more-than-ha...

I'm about four levels into Skin Deep. Love Blendo stuff deeply on aesthetic and world building fronts, but this game is nails. To be fair, I'm massively out of practice with stealth and shooter games of my yoof. But there's a mix of jank and level finish reqs putting me off here.