IT'S COMING H[15 July Messi incident, thousands dead]
Mx Tynehorneâs link roundup, volume LXVIII
- âI probably had a weirder referendum week than youâ, or, the recollections of the creator of a Change.org petition for London independence, ten years on
- Skumsoft.ltd
- âTamatou was a wooden doll which, according to oral tradition, ruled as the 13th TuĘťi Tonga of the TuĘťi Tonga Empire.â
- Fictional Videogame Stills (1991â92)
- âGenerative artificial intelligence creates delicious, sustainable, and nutritious burgersâ
- Things unexpectedly named after people: âan incomplete and infuriating listâ
- Kyoto Aquariumâs penguin relationship chart is now available in English. Truly, a thing of beautyâŚ
- There are more than five POVs. Tempted to write something in the first-person plural nowâŚ
- The Forestiere Underground Gardens
- A cool polar âsun compassâ from the National Geographic Societyâs archives
- Iâm a huge fan of this New York cinemaâs fuckass website
-
King Charles III, Defender of
theFaith? - The Garfield Tea House, âthe only remaining structure directly related to President James A. Garfieldâs final trip to the Jersey Shoreâ.
- File under âwe do a little trollingâ: Using crowdsourcing and swarms of AI, a Seattle startup cracked Googleâs secret cryptography results within seventy-two hours
- Yeast architecture (via Linkfest)
- A retail T-shirt with a wonderful obfuscated Bash script printed on its back
Apologies for any recent downtime â the repairman had to turn off the power for a bit and my server-laptopâs been a bit finnicky as always in trying to get back up.
itâs too late. iâve already depicted you as the screeching, dangerous, overengineered trans-Atlantic hyperloop and myself as the cool, collected, romantic maglev gliding serenely over the Bering Strait
Mx Tynehorneâs link roundup, volume LXVII
Welcome back! Iâve had a stress-filled month, and i just saw Disclosure Day and thought it was naff, but letâs ignore that and focus on the beautiful things of the world for a moment. Like these links i found you. Please enjoy each one equally. :-)
- A history of Arabic typography, and why itâs still so sucky on the web
- Where to find the colours your screen canât show you. Thereâs some beautiful stuff out there in the world.
- CrankGPT: A small language model running on a hand-cranked computer. âProvided the electronics are kept dry and at a reasonable temperature, thereâs no reason this thing wonât still work in a hundred years.â
- âList of anachronistic contemporaryâ
- What Rothko is the weather today?
- Banana youth
- The Star Gauge (ççŁĺ), a fourth-century Chinese poem written in a 29-by-29 grid that can be read in three thousand different ways
- In similar vein: âOn the Page Lays Languageâ, one of many poems submitted to a writing contest for aliens
- A fun showcase of some Winogradsky columns and other jarred terraria
- Plot.fyi: âFilm discovery for film loversâ, recommending similar films based on plot/tropes/director quirks/&c.
- I Spy but for Wikipedia pictures
- Heikkiâs Garden of Flowers: a compendium of pre-Ascii typographic art
- A site devoted to Coventina, a Roman British Goddess of wells and springs
- âSocietyâs Resilience to a Total Loss of Agricultureâ: or, how to use natural gas and microbes to feed the population in the event that farms suddenly stop working
- This oneâs just for the real transhumanist sickos in the audience: A talk for mental-health professionals about the coming explosion of non-human minds. âThe road to transformative regenerative medicine leads directly to freedom of embodiment.â Yes⌠yes!!!!
- Some deliciously nineties panoramas of the view from various hills
Got into an argument with someone on the internet and we both deĂŤscalated to a reasoned conclusion where we agreed to disagree. What the fuck i didnât know that was allowed
Coming Home Status: Itâs
It is time to nuke Whitehall from orbit and start again
It is the position of His Majestyâs Government that sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds are old enough to vote, old enough to join the military, old enough to drink, old enough to have sex, and old enough to pay income tax, but not old enough to go on the computer after the watershed.
They want to protect the children by boxing at shadows, but all theyâre doing is trapping the sons and daughters of abusive parents tighter between the walls of their cruel homes. They are condemning the transgender child of a fundamentalist drunk to suicide instead of allowing them any outlet to discover themself, all on the back of flimsy evidence and moral panic.
And yes, the internet is shit sometimes. There are bullies and hate-mobs and vicious cycles and predators. But the approach that this country has taken has overwhelmingly been one that targets users, not companies, and only places them at further risk. Children, teenagers, and adults are made to submit sensitive biometric data to sketchy startups all so that it can get leaked out onto the open internet. Independent websites shut down under the burden of compliance, leaving only the faceless conglomerates able to operate.
They go to Australia to âfact-findâ, only to find that teenagers are less aware of the world around them and get around the age checks with ease. They decide instead to âgo further than Australiaâsâ, seeing that the problem must be that they have not placed enough restrictions on their countryâs young citizens, and enact an infantilising curfew on seventeen-year-olds â the very demographic they are trying to court to vote for them! â whose extent would make China blush. And the media laps it all up, because theyâre thinking of the children, and nobody who thinks of the children could ever be too restrictive of civil liberties.
All the while, the worldâs first trillionaire stokes pogroms from his chair on his personal echo chamber, Facebook does away with any pretence of fact-checking, and the Americans cut off AI access to anyone whoâs too forrin. But doing anything about that would require effort, thought, investment, and a functioning set of vertebrĂŚ.
I hope, dearly, that the NSPCC, and everyone who agitated for a censorship rĂŠgime to âprotect the childrenâ that will do anything but, can never look themselves in the face in the mirror again. Peter Thiel is laughing at us from hell.
When/if i die, my tombstone is going to read âThought for 2,682,000,000sâ
Pictures from the Northumberland Line
Thereâs something disturbing about modern McDonaldâs marketing where Grimace, Hamburglar, and the rest of the McDCU cast are there, but Ronald McDonald is absent. Like heâs been erased from history after falling out of favour with the rĂŠgime.
Mx Tynehorneâs link roundup, volume LXVI
- Weird Britain: The Guardianâs list of ten great British oddities you should visit
- I donât know what this is. A gallery of 100,000 seemingly random images, sourced from ??? and organised by ??? in order to ???.
- âLetâs hear it for small dicks and short sex!â Something about the url âplayboy.substack.comâ fills me with an unnameable emotion.
- A recreation of the star map from Project Hail Mary
- The Swingjugend
-
Trevor Paglen and Holly Herndon on actually coaxing art out of the machine.
As someone whoâs had an interest in what one might call âAI artâ
since before ChatGPT was a twinkle in Sam Altmanâs eye, there are so
many moments in this where i hit my fists on the desk and went âYes!!!â To quoteâ
A lot of those programs have preprompting under the hood that youâre not seeing. Midjourney has all kinds of tags that make it look a specific way, a kind of beautiful way. Suno has tags you canât see that make the output always sound âgood.â You canât interact directly with the weights of the model. Youâre being confined so the output always sounds quote-unquote âgood.â When Trevor and I are working with models, you can get way more gnarly because you have way more granular control. Itâs just not being precleaned.
- The race to preserve life on the ISS
- Experience: we found a baby on the subway â now heâs our 26-year-old son. Iâm not crying. Youâre crying.
- CinĂŠma LâAmour: The last porno theatre on Earth
- How are diamonds made?
- Homemade Gatorade
- Neft DaĹlarÄą
- Bins of Congleton
- Avian Visitors
- The body in the wheelchair: âTracey had no phone, no job, no GP registration, no passport, no friends or romantic partners. There wasnât a single photo of what she looked like. It was as if, in her far too public death, she had entered the public record for the first time.â
- Windowsâ 3D Pinball is getting a physical version
- âIs there a pianist in the house?â Or, how a Sydney student saved the show at a live performance of La La Landâs soundtrack
- âItâs basically a homemade analog chromecast as a UHF tv broadcastâ
- Claude, author of the Humanitas? đ¤ď¸
- A livestream of a volcano in the Philippines captures a meteor crashing down to Earth. As the Oracle of Delphi would say: âis that goodâ
- A Monument to Something That Never Happened (28 March 1983)
- I leave you with this excellent photo of a railway depot in Vancouver which i found while scouring for nighttime pics for the world clock.
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Forget Victorian children or mediĂŚval peasants; âThe American pope closes his manifesto on artificial intelligence by quoting Gandalfâ is a sentence that would instantly kill a 2003-era forum user
Mx Tynehorneâs link roundup, volume LXV
- A cool explainer of infrared photography, with even cooler photos
- Elizabeth Salokaâs painted rock snacks
- On grey literature
- The New York Times on minimal-comfort feeding, an emerging middle-ground in dementia care between prolonging unwilling lives and euthanasia
- Apocalypse Early Warning System: âIn the event of an imminent nuclear apocalypse, we suspect that many people who have access to private jets will immediately take to the skies and escape city centers. This site tracks this indicator in realtime.â
- Guy Walks Into a Bar
- âMixed media film about my cat â âThe Real Youââ. Absolutely delightful in every way.
- Britainâs deer are thriving. Itâs a nightmare for the countryside. (Iâve always wanted to try hunting⌠maybe if i can tell myself itâs an ecological good?)
- Natural-language autoencoders, a solution to the problem of âwhat is the AI really thinking1 right now?â
- Guess the Party, where you have to guess based on face alone whoâs standing for which party in the English local elections. Greens are the easiest to guess; Tories the hardest.
- Moth in Relay, a delightful little net-art project asking âwhat if Grace Hopperâs bug never left the tape?â
- Barter Books boss funds landmark U.S. artwork (okay, yes, itâs in small-town Missouri, but still)
- Calgacus-MLX: Hide a meaningful text inside another using language models
- Retyping a Library
- Halupedia, the entirely AI-hallucinated encyclopĂŚdia. The Kentucky Gnome Computer Incident is my small personal contributionâŚ
- Putting AI in charge of a greenhouse in Colorado. Absolutely bonkers â and probably a future replacement for the now-inactive âClaude grows a tomatoâ page on the LinkrollâŚ
- The UK needs a new âcreative directorâ
- How a recording mistake created the sound of Phil Collins
- đ¨ď¸ BREAKING: đ¨ď¸ The State of Oregon has purchased a waterfall from a community of Benedictine monks
- You should have a kitchen slide rule
- In 1626 a giant explosion at a gunpowder factory in Peking killed twenty thousand people and noĂśne knows why.
Whenever i hear the phrase âseparating the art from the artistâ it makes me imagine something like the anti-dĂŚmon guillotine doohickey from His Dark Materials.