During April my new short films premiered at the Kino event, my wordy tarot decks finally hit Amazon so I did a reading about leaving twitter, and we continued to talk about AI and Decentralization of social media as the monarch prepares get a new hat while sat on a magic rock that doesn’t even have a sword in it.
Me
Some stuff from my diary on the fediverse:
My new short film, “Payment” premiered at the Kino short film event where everyone clapped politely like they did for each other’s films there. There’s also a behind the scenes development log.
You’ll be able to see that film online at the website from this bank holiday Monday!
A few thoughts upon watching Max Tegmark talk about AI on Lex Fridman’s show, I like “artificial neuroscience” and Max’s rules on AI safety that we aren’t following at all.
Speaking of Lex, someone faked up an AI voice video in which Yudkowsky argues for acceleration of AI in order to get more catgirls. Obviously this isn’t Yud’s real views but be aware: You can’t trust voice ID at all now. Voices are easily faked.
I also tried asking the current AI about a function I needed to write. It kinda helped, but also lied about which library functions are available to use, making one up.
I’ve been playing some impressive VR games, still playing No Mans Sky with a photo-blog and you can play Quake Arena on Oculus now which is great fun and made me laugh with nostalgia.
With the coronation imminent, I’m reminding people that you should cut a monarchs head off it’s tradition you know? And anyway a monarch can be replaced by a cheaper GTP chat-bot now so what’s the point?
I got the test of the emergency phone alert like most others a minute early.
Nice to have something to bring the whole nation together in a spirit of disillusionment and dread just before the big one tomorrow when they put a hat on a man.
Some folks did some vote in the UK and others were denied. probably more voters were turned away than ever committed fraud. I didn’t get to be turned away though, because no votes were even on offer in my ward.
As parcels bounce back from Europe and hit me with increased postage and customs issues and re-posting attempts I just want to say Fuck Customs, Fuck Borders, Fuck Brexit.
Releases
Devlog
Not the actual film, but a film about me making the film over the last few years. Projected onto the display of a holo-video on board the flying saucer while the crew goof around.
The actual film will be online from Monday, at starshipsd.com or you can subscribe to be the first to know.
Tarot Show
A new tarot show, now that the cards are available in Amazon: show we leave Twitter? Yes. Yes we should. No more posting Tarot shows on Twitter.
Big social is the suck.
Reading
The Righteous Mind – Jonathan Haidt
Why good people are divided by politics and religion.
Haidt argues that there are six bases for moral senses, and that liberals only really focus on half of them. This ignoring of the other half of the moral principles is what divides liberals from conservatives who use all six.
Fairly enlightening, the central image of a rider barely able to influence the elephant under him is vivid. The ideas might help understand why conservatives believe what they do, but it doesn’t stop them being so wrong and their moral feelings so often driving their elephants to trample people.
Watching
The Cleaner – BBC
New series of Greg Davies’s series about a crime-scene cleaner was funny and weird and he’s great.
Star Wars Andor – Disney
There’s another one of them /link https://ondisneyplus.disney.com/show/andor Disney Star-Wars shows
I avoided all spoilers for this for ages and so was confused watching, coz I was thinking that Andor was where the ewoks live. But it turns out that’s Endor. Andor is just some guy doing terrorism against the Empire.
So it’s a good little sci-fi adventure but I was sad there were no teddy bear people. Mid range out of the the many Disney Star Wars series.
Links
AI
* Eight things to know about Large Language Models Excellent summary of the new AI systems here: 1) They get better with more investment, 2) behaviors emerge unpredictably, 3) they learn and DO use representations of the world, 4) We don’t know how to align them, 5) We don’t really understand how they work, 6) They can do better than humans at things, 7) They don’t express the values of their creators or the text they are trained on, 8) Brief interactions with them can be misleading.
* Jaron Lanier on these models being mash-ups. Jaron is usually smart and right, and he understood social media perils well. He’s not wrong here either: their output is a mash-up of work people did, data dignity is important, we need to ensure workers and users who generate the data are rewarded not just the capital that takes that work and privatizes it and trains and owns the models. That is a problem. But existential risks can’t be dismissed by pointing out other risks. There can be more than one problem. We should care about data dignity while also taking care we’re not making a super-intelligence.
Comedy
* Rich Herring’s Can I Have My Ball Back? Rich Herring’s new audio show about his ball cancer is vivid and raw and funny. Better than his more improvised work that he mostly puts out. Educational too if you don’t currently know much about having a ball cut off.
* Stewart Goldsmith’s I Need You Alive Stu Goldsmith is sort of a friend. I think he is aware of me as a friend of his friends at least. His new standup show is on Youtube now and was very good, about moving out of London and having a family only funny.
CGI
* Captain Disillusion on a monkey card-trick. It’s not a card-trick of course, it’s computer imagery which the Captain dissects and explains in his usual hilarious comedy manner.
* Ian Hubert’s “Pete” His special-effects laden films are very good and this one is very strange, with Pete seeking the “king of them all” in a dreamy sci-fi fantasy world. 15 minunte short.
Science
* Kurzgesagt talk about Robin Hanson’s “Grabby Aliens” work. I wonder why Kurzgesagt decided to say “Loud” instead of “Grabby” when looking at it? Maybe they decided there’s no opposite to “Grabby”. Or its too technical? It’s a good description of the logic of Hanson’s ideas on where the aliens are and when we can expect to see them and our choices on whether to become them anyway.
Media
* Media Lens on the media “So, if you still harbour the illusion that ‘mainstream’ journalism can be relied upon to report the truth to the public, rather than covering it up, you may have to reconsider what even the ‘best’ news media, including the NYT, the BBC and the Guardian, do routinely.”
Economics
* Frances Coppola on banking and inflation. The bank governor said that we have to all get used to being poorer, because of Brexit and wars and sanctions and pandemics and tens of millions of workers killed by the virus but Frances points out that “we all” includes businesses and rich people who need to accept they are poorer first and be taxed more in order to protect the living standards of the poor.
more…
That’s just the highlights this month, there’s more in my full public bookmarks from my link-bot on the fediverse or an RSS feed
Around The Fediverse
We’re taking over the means of communication. Ripping control from the surveillance capitalists and giving it to the people.
Notable Newbies
* Journal Ars Technica joined mastodon.social They publish articles about tech things. Strange they don’t have their own server yet but at least they have an account on the big one.
* Wikipedia joined wikis.world Their account is run communally like their website
* the X-Org foundation joined floss.social They make the most popular (and most unpopular) Linux windowing system.
* @TrueSciPhi@mastodon.truesciphi.org maintains lists of scientists If you want to find people who actually know what they are talking about.
Fediverse on Fediverse
Fediverse is bigger than just one app. I use Calckey for the cartoons and tarot accounts, and Mastodon for my diary.
* Mastodon announces new release It will have Quote-posts and search and groups. They also change their app so it points every new user at mastodon.social by default now, to much criticism. Keep Fedi Decentralized!
* @Frequency is a new server that forks Mastodon to make it focus more on photo-sharing. Mastodon is open-source, so anyone can take it and adapt it for their needs, and the fediverse is open so anyone can follow a Frequency account from their own servers. Frequency is in very early beta and the fact I note their launch is no recommendation.
* Calckey launch their new landing site Calckey is also not a fork of Mastodon: it’s a fork of Misskey. Both of which already has quote-posts and search and groups and more. Calckey also have a directory of all the different Calckey servers instead of just one default.
* Pixelfed had a new release with a new landing page. Pixelfed is a Fediverse photo-sharing app that is *not* a fork of Mastodon, or Clackey. It’s entirely different source-code for photo-sharing, but does connect openly to the fediverse network. Pixelfed is indeed a recommendation. It seems great. I follow many pixelfed accounts from both my Calckey and Mastodon profiles.
* Audon.space is a audio-streaming service Similar to Clubhouse or Spaces, they use your already existing Fediverse social graph for login.
Spam Attack
* the network had a spam-attack through crypto people using mastodon.social The thing I found most notable is that the perpetrators were blocked and stopped within hours, and that the fact there was spam on the network is a thing everyone noticed. It isn’t just a background thing that everyone has a special folder filled with tons of.
People with new things
* @DoctorDeathray@retro.social – has a new album. Much anticipated, and with much acclaim.
* @davidrevoy@framapiaf.org – new web-comic with Pepper and Carrot. Pepper is a witch and Carrot is her cat, his drawings are beautiful and his work is all creative-commons licensed.
* @mattgreencomedy@mastodonapp.uk – all sketches for the month He is doing some phenomenal short politics satire videos. Most weeks.
blogs & threads
* @mmitchell_ai@mastodon.social – a thread on AI training data. What do companies with “open training data” actually make open? What data exactly? How open? She takes you through it.
* @rysiek@mstdn.social – “Bluesky is Cosplaying decentralization” They are getting press for their decentralization but they only have one server so how can anyone tell if it’ll be easy when they’re trying to moderate users at scale while explicitly trying to not censor anybody even nazis and trolls and spammers?
* @cstross@wandering.shop – blog: fuck the monarchy Yes. Fuck the monarchy.
* @ct_bergstrom@fediscience.org – GTP’s inner crow He demonstrates how easily you can jailbreak GTP chat-bots to show their inner crow. The point being that any “ai jailbreaks” you may see are no more revealing of the inner nature or motives of a machine than convincing it to say “caw caw”.
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