Culture Study
"People have all sorts of reasons for wanting to work remotely. It might make them better workers. It might allow them to maintain their physical and emotional well-being in a way that’s incompatible with full time office work."
We have a unique opportunity to rethink how we do office work. I hope we do.
Esquire
"Elevated Stupidity stems from the idea that being good at arguing is the same thing as being correct. That rhetorical skill—or at least a degree of big debate-club energy sufficient to wear out one’s opponent—is the equivalent of intelligence."
This article makes me tired, but yes this big debate-club energy is powering The Discourse.
GCS
"Third party link-shortening tools can add unnecessary steps to your processes, create accessibility issues, threaten user privacy and undermine user trust – with no benefit to you as communicators."
Yes! The risks of using 3rd party URL shorteners outweighs any perceived benefit.
19thnews.org
"The act reflected many of the core tenets of journalism: Afflicting the comfortable, shining a light on wrongdoing, bearing witness on behalf of the marginalized, speaking truth to power."
She changed the world by being a witness.
Volkswagen Wolfsburg emblem with a castle and wolf logo
VW Wolfsburg Emblem
Silver Volkswagen logo on a vintage van
VW Grill Emblem
The New Yorker
“I would never have gotten to see what was underneath if there hadn’t been this forced interruption,” she said. “You know when botanists bisect a tree, and can tell by the thickness of rings what the conditions were like that year? This feels like we had that year, and this is what happened.”
Beautiful photographs by Elinor Carucci.
apnews.com
"After leading the world in new cases and deaths over much of the last year, the rapid vaccination program in the U.S. now positions it among the leaders of the global recovery. Nearly 64% of adults in the U.S. have received at least one vaccine dose and the average numbers of new positive cases and deaths in the U.S. are lower now than at any point since the earliest days of the pandemic."
Thanks Biden.
An osoberry with a red stem hanging from a branch
osoberry
Close-up of a bunch of strawberries
Strawberry season is go

VQGAN + CLIP + Unreal Engine + Surrealism

I enjoyed Rusty's explanation of the VQGAN + CLIP Unreal Engine trick in Today in Tabs yesterday (subscribers only, sorry). The gist is that people have found a way to improve images created with machine learning by including the phrase "unreal engine" (yes, the Mandalorian-powering video game technology) with their prompt when they ask a GAN to generate an image of that prompt.

Rusty included a link to a colab notebook that could run this particular GAN—VQGAN+CLIP—so I started playing around with it. I know next to nothing about AI or Machine Learning, but I can run code! I tried out the unreal engine trick and the results reminded me of Yves Tanguy paintings.

My next thought was, "why not feed it some lines from surrealist poetry"? (Or their English translations anyway.) So here are a few of those:

VQGAN+CLIP generated image using a surrealist poem phrase, vague castle in a blurry landscape "a meaningless castle rolled along the surface of the earth."
– André Breton, Soluble Fish

VQGAN+CLIP generated image using a surrealist poem phrase, vague night scene with various lights "it is the star struck under my heel in the night."
– Robert Desnos, The Landscape

"The river I have under my tongue"
– Paul Eluard, The River

VQGAN+CLIP generated image using a surrealist poem phrase, a vague flower and vague clock; some fire "where we live the flowers of the clocks catch fire"
– Tristan Tzara, The Great Lament of my Obscurity Three

The other day I linked to Nick Cave saying that AI lacks the nerve to create great music. How about visual art? Seeing machines struggle to make what humans make is interesting, but I don't think the results are inspired. Again, I have no idea how to tune these tools to get more interesting results and maybe further tuning or more attempts would create better images. Right now I think we haven't progressed beyond Hayao Miyazaki's thoughts on art by artificial intelligence. (spoiler alert: "I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.")
vinylsleeves.tumblr.com
Fun gallery of vintage record sleeves. [via webcurios]
« Older posts  /  Newer posts »