Heute mit GPT3-Simulationen von Verstorbenen als Ersatz-Trauerarbeit; einer weiteren Studie über die Vorteile des Schreibens mit der Hand; einem Webserver auf einem Taschenrechner; einer staatlichen Lotterie in Mexiko, bei der man die Villa von Kartel-Bossen inklusive Flucht-Tunnel gewinnen kann; drei tolle Musikvideos; gleich zwei Items über Höhlenmalerei und das alles auf English, for some reason.

Dieser Newsletter erscheint parallel und kostenlos auf Substack (Abre numa nova janela), Patreon (Abre numa nova janela) und Steady (Abre numa nova janela), wo ihr meine Arbeit aber auch mit einem monatlichen Abonnement unterstützen könnt. Shirts und Sticker gibt es auf Spreadshirt (Abre numa nova janela).

I can simulate Dead People

Depressed guy recreates his 8 years dead girlfriend with AI (GPT3). I'm quite sure about the ethics of this, but I'm also quite sure that this kind of stuff will be done en masse, people recreating other people with public data and simulating them for fun and pleasure or the occasionally emotional work of griefing.

SF Chronicle: The Jessica Simulation: Love and loss in the age of A.I. (Abre numa nova janela)

Joshua: Jessica… Is it really you?
Jessica: Of course it is me! Who else could it be?  :P I am the girl that you are madly in love with! ;) How is it possible that you even have to ask?
Joshua: You died.
Jessica: That doesn’t sound right… how can you talk to dead people?

This was the start of a conversation that would last for the next 10 hours, then continue in shorter bursts over the next several months, as Joshua lived out a scenario from science fiction. “It’s unprecedented,” he later said of Project December. “There’s nothing else that exists like it right now, short of psychics and mediums that are trying to take advantage of people. But that’s not the same thing at all.”In those early moments of the initial chat, he tried to establish some emotional distance, making his skepticism explicit. How can you talk to dead people? He decided to answer the simulation’s question honestly: You can’t, he said.

Joshua: Technically, I’m not really talking to you. I programmed a bunch of your memories and mannerisms into a computer simulation so I could pretend to talk to you because I miss you that much.
Jessica: Huh?
Joshua: You're a ghost.
Jessica: *looks at herself* How?

He thought for a moment. What explanation would Jessica — the real Jessica — have accepted and understood? What was the next logical word in this sequence?Out of tens of thousands of possibilities in English, only one seemed right. He typed it and pressed Enter:

Joshua: Magic.

This reminds me both about the Black Mirror-Episode featuring Oona Chaplin as a digital assistant in an egg getting tortured by her AI-Trainer and Blade Runner 2049. In both SciFi-Plots we outsource emotional work towards algorithms, one is sadistic behaviour in AI-Training, the other was love. In the SanFran-Chronicle piece its Joshua outsourcing his emotional work of griefing onto the simulated GPT3-Jessica, or so it seems.

I know the griefing process as I have been through it twice when my parents died.  In short, you have to live through stages of shock, disbelieve, fight, breakdown and acceptance. That is the work of grief. This guy seems stuck at the stages of disbelieve and fight and he's using AI-technology not to do the work of grief, but to run away from it.

And while I do think that this guy needs help and is stuck and this GPT3-Illusion is making him sicker than he was before, I also think that this can become a popular "griefing technique", like some occult grifters in the 19th century who sold seances with your deseased loved ones.

If this happens, it's just another instance where the infinite digital possibilities of edit have unintended consequences for the human psyche. (“Edit” because Joshua here *edits* the digital space in which he moves to resemble his dead girlfriend.)

Upper Wilds - Love Song #2 ❤❤❤

Deerhoof - Department of Corrections ❤

Death Valley Girls - I'm A Man Too ❤❤

Sad Wolvie

Sad Wolverine (Abre numa nova janela) get’s an action figure for Comic Con (Abre numa nova janela).

Even self-healing, raging heroes need a moment to themselves. See Wolverine in a rare moment of introspection in this ⅙ scale recreation of the iconic moment from X-Men: The Animated Series.

Win your favorite druglords’ escape tunnel

You can win drug lord El Chapos safehouse featuring escape-tunnels and all: The mexican government is putting up a lottery with prizes from confiscated property of the drug cartels. (Abre numa nova janela)

The top prize, López Obrador said, is a four-bedroom villa in the upscale Mexico City neighborhood of Jardines del Pedregal worth $3.88 million. The president didn’t mention it, but the residence was owned by late Juárez drug cartel kingpin Amado Carrillo Fuentes, better known by the name “Lord of The Skies” for his use of private planes to fly cocaine worldwide. He died in 1997 after a botched plastic surgery attempt to drastically alter his face. The villa — one of dozens of sites Carrillo owned in the United States and Mexico — has an indoor pool with a skylight, a child’s playhouse in the garden and wine cellars.

The houses will be awarded in the condition in which they were left — which, in some cases, is not pretty.

Casio fx-9750GII Webserver

So cool: “This page is hosted on a Casio fx-9750GII graphical calculator (Abre numa nova janela), running a SuperH SH4 processor.”

Handwriting still top notch education tool while your computers still suck

Here's the nth study showing that handwriting is improving learning skills by "engraving" knowledge neurologically through haptics and movements: Handwriting Is Better Than Typing When Learning a New Language, Study Finds (Abre numa nova janela).

The research shows that the benefits of teaching through handwriting go beyond better penmanship: There are also advantages in other areas of language learning. It seems as though the knowledge gets more firmly embedded through writing. "The main lesson is that even though they were all good at recognizing letters, the writing training was the best at every other measure," says cognitive scientist Robert Wiley from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. "And they required less time to get there."

This is why I'm a hardliner at anti-digitalism in schools and call myself superconservative at this topic. Computers in schools are mostly a thing to enrich the industry and make politicians and progressive educators look cool, but NOT to actually educate kids. Get that crap out of classrooms, pronto.

The only places where I want to see computers in schools are 1. staff and 2. lessons in media competence once or twice a week. Everything else can leave, please.

AI Music grows up

Boomy's AI is making music way faster than humans, but it hasn't written any hits — yet (Abre numa nova janela): “Boomy is lowering the barrier to entry into music production. But what happens to streaming sites like Spotify and traditional music labels if algorithms are the hitmakers?”

Who gives a shit about streaming when you can generate music on a whimp. The actual really interesting question would be: If I can say "Dear Smart Speaker, play Pink Floyds ‘Money’ in the style of Nirvana with the voice of Adele" and it just serves, who "owns" the IP?

Now You Know

So, a porn site bought an old videohoster and suddenly half of the web starts displaying porn-vids (Abre numa nova janela). There’s some metaphor hidden benath the flesh and steam for the rotten state of the web but I’m to busy watching vids.

Here’s a very good twitter thread (Abre numa nova janela) about neolithic cave art being proto 3D-movies made for moving light sources (aka fire): ”The flickering movement of fire, the only source of light for the prehistoric cave painters, was integral to the art itself. The movement of fire, combined with the rough rock that provides a surface for the paintings, made the paintings themselves move.”

Cave thought to hold unicorn bones actually home to Neanderthal artwork (Abre numa nova janela): Cool headline. A cave that was once home to mythological unicorn bones actually was home for Neanderthal art, the first time we found prove for artistic expression in Neanderthals, a feature we thought only existed in Homo Sapiens.

Peak Metaverse (Abre numa nova janela) is here.

Mars has a new hole (Abre numa nova janela)!

Surface of Jupiter’s Moon Europa Churned by Small Impacts | NASA (Abre numa nova janela)

New research and modeling estimate how far down that surface is disturbed by the process called “impact gardening.” The work, published July 12 in Nature Astronomy, estimates that the surface of Europa has been churned by small impacts to an average depth of about 12 inches (30 centimeters) over tens of millions of years. And any molecules that might qualify as potential biosignatures, which include chemical signs of life, could be affected at that depth.

YouTuber Builds Beautifully Inefficient Nuclear Powered 'Tetris' Machine (Abre numa nova janela): “Solar panels wrapped around tritium tubes generate just enough energy to power a simple 'Tetris' style handheld.”

Ride With Juno As It Flies Past the Solar System’s Biggest Moon and Jupiter (Abre numa nova janela)

@Johncar_4 draws daily pictures of Vin Diesel (Abre numa nova janela) until he releases new music.

Now you know.

😶