René Walter

The Digital Tilma How a shared symbolic culture could emerge organically across a generation of consumer-facing AI models.

See for instance this piece by @jacmullen.bsky.social on converging "optimization pathways" across models leading to shared "structural vulnerabilities to the same symbolic attractors", resulting in viral phenomena.

Lesswrong had a fun one on attractors recently: www.lesswrong.com/posts/mgjtEH...

Cultish groupthink formation rings true though for things like attractor basins in embedding spaces trained on collective writing, which has the ability to hijack human minds. Circling this idea as synthetic memetics, see spiraling "cults" and stuff like that.

Wrote about this, framing it as self radicalization years ago, but the point hinges on sycophancy which can be mitigated. My Gemini is so very not sycophant its annoying to the point it's a contrarian asshole sometimes. So, yea but also no.

Internet Overexposure Syndrome What appear to be psychological disorders among those who spend much of their life online may in fact be rational responses to their environment.

@defaultfriend.bsky.social last year wrote about psychological adaptions to online life which look like psychological disorders in offline line: "This is the internet: it demands a disposition that appears 'sick' in the physical world."

"Dissolving into the mucus"

On Lesswrong, someone recently posted about LLMs "pretty funny attractor states" and while slime mold personas are not among them, they do have crystalizations, choose-your-adventure shutdowns, zen silence and vampire squid bioluminescence.

within software I would say the argument is mostly over, despite the occasional “as a software engineer, it only produces shit code that you have to spend twice as long reviewing as it took to write.” very few people actually think this and they’re all on this site

Unpopular opinion but the Dems should be investing in this sort of "this must hit so hard if you're stupid" slop content – our side lost the kind of people who like this shit 95/5 in 2024, just drawing the "incredibly dumb guy" demo back to 70/30 GOP would mean landslide Dem wins

Stop framing deepfake harassment of women as a social problem - It's a cybersecurity problem Non-consensual deepfake abuse of women is not just online harassment but cybercrime, demanding full threat intelligence and security action.

Smart piece from @megansquire.bsky.social arguing that the proliferation of AI “deepfake” nude images should not be thought of just as a social/cultural issue, but as a cybersecurity threat. The production of this stuff plugs into a world that’s often criminal.

securitybrief.news/story/stop-f...

To strike 1,000 targets in 24 hours in Iran, the U.S. military leveraged the most advanced AI it’s ever used in warfare.

Anthropic’s Claude partnered with the military’s Maven Smart System, suggesting targets and issuing precise location coordinates. https://wapo.st/46BFe1T

In 2001 the novel the monolith is not black but a giant crystal like display beaming shimmering light patterns into chimps kickstarting human evolution.

irl, "chimpanzees can identify and distinguish crystals" and are attracted to their "transparency and geometric shape".

Clarke got it right.

Full Eliza For Your Micro!

Analytic Scape YouTube video by Shinseungback Kimyonghun

Love ssbkyh's Analytic Scape ssbkyh.com/works/analyt... a series of videos of various urban and natural scenes seen through computer vision models. www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIvX...

Software actually Introduction Is there any flatter platitude than to say that we are surrounded by software? Day and night, our courses of action – whether we like it or not – repeatedly cross the path of digital d...

“We are so often confronted with stories from the Silicon Valley Big Tech that we forget that most of our digital infrastructure isn’t actually made by these companies.” journals.openedition.org/rac/41398

A black and white woven blanket showing a large UFO beaming up skeletons from a desert scene with cactus and a snake.

Today's Low Quality Ad is for this Skeleton Abduction Blanket. Skeletons used to roam the Earth, but aliens came and abducted them all. They did this because the bones are their money.
collabs.shop/casj9w

Not a clusterfuck, but the fucks do seem to be clustering

“Rutherford Statement on Operation Epic Furry” “Furry” highlighted by me http://rutherford.house.gov/media/press-releases/rutherford-statement-operation-epic-furry

Google result showing the presser for Rutherford’s statement on “Operation Epic Furry” was posted 11 hours ago

What a time to be alive

a deer, black on yellow, behind it, an abstraction of a small branch bearing leaves

Han Meilin (Chinese, born 1936) Deer

And now, what we see unfolding in real time with regard to the Department of Defense’s decisions regarding the use of AI in warfare encompasses every one of these elements, particularly the last one.

IT'S A STAR WAR NOW, COOP. THEY CAN BLOW UP PLANETS. WHOLE PLANETS BLOWN TO SMITHEREENS. IMAGINE IT COOP. NOW THAT'S REALLY SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT. I PLAN ON WRITING AN EPIC POEM ABOUT THIS. BUT LATER. RIGHT NOW I'M HOPING FOR SOME GOOD NEWS FROM YOU, COOP. IT'S AWFUL DARK IN SPACE AT THE MOMENT.

Katy Perry should post on bluesky
❌ because it’s woke
✅ because it loves Claude

Thanks for the ultimate teilhardian scifi epic, RIP Dan Simmons.

Illustrators first, translators and copywriters, now coders, all knowledge and creative labor following patterns can be automated. Idiosyncracy is an asset.

Mobile dog dresser in Berlin.

Nano Banana still fails the "Horse riding an Astronaut"-test, *but* it aces the "10:10h Analog Clock"-test.

I build a machine that turns you into a criminal YouTube video by Rootkid

This is great: rootkid.me/works/exhibi...

"Upon pressing the button, the viewer (is) launching a fully functional darknet marketplace that offers a trove of illegal data for sale across borders. Exhibit-A questions the boundaries of art by using a criminal act as its medium."

a poorly drawn wide cat

a black cat is viewed through a clear glass of water held in front of it. the glass magnifies and distorts the cat’s face, making its eyes appear enlarged and slightly warped

w i d e

Who needs a $32.000/yr Bloomberg Terminal when you can vibecode the same with a text interface.

For years i'm waiting for a good model to generate vector graphics which can do fonts.

We're not there (yet) given that good typography is as much about kerning as it's about letterforms, but if i were Monotype, i'd get nervous. app.quiver.ai