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The New Aesthetic

@new-aesthetic / new-aesthetic.tumblr.com

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"HELP! Guys I’m losing my mind, the lady in the wedding dress shop took this photo of me! I swear on my life this is real, what?! HOW?! Somebody please help!!! I’m freaking out" - TessaCoates on Twitter

[Likely cause of this image is that the iPhone used actually takes several images to compensate for low light conditions, and then stitches them together, producing a moment which never happened. See also: Google Best Take.]

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The climate crisis is not, in fact, a mystery or a riddle we haven’t yet solved due to insufficiently robust data sets. We know what it would take, but it’s not a quick fix – it’s a paradigm shift. Waiting for machines to spit out a more palatable and/or profitable answer is not a cure for this crisis, it’s one more symptom of it.
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AI machines aren’t ‘hallucinating’. But their makers are | Naomi Klein
Tech CEOs want us to believe that generative AI will benefit humanity. They are kidding themselves
the Guardian
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A woman living in Kenya’s Dadaab, which is among the world’s largest refugee camps, wanders across the vast, dusty site to a central hut lined with computers. Like many others who have been brutally displaced and then warehoused at the margins of our global system, her days are spent toiling away for a new capitalist vanguard thousands of miles away in Silicon Valley. A day’s work might include labelling videos, transcribing audio, or showing algorithms how to identify various photos of cats.  Amid a drought of real employment, “clickwork” represents one of few formal options for Dadaab’s residents, though the work is volatile, arduous, and, when waged, paid by the piece. Cramped and airless workspaces, festooned with a jumble of cables and loose wires, are the antithesis to the near-celestial campuses where the new masters of the universe reside.  Each task represents a stretching of the gulf between the vast and growing ghettos of disposable life and a capitalist vanguard of intelligent bots and billionaire tycoons. The barbaric and sublime bound in a single click. The same economy of clicks determines the fates of refugees across the Middle East. Forced to adapt their sleeping patterns to meet the needs of firms on the other side of the planet and in different time zones, the largely Syrian population of Lebanon’s Shatila camp forgo their dreams to serve those of distant capitalists. Their nights are spent labeling footage of urban areas — house,” “shop,” “car” — labels that, in a grim twist of fate, map the streets where the labelers once lived, perhaps for automated drone systems that will later drop their payloads on those very same streets. The sites on which they labor are so opaque that it is impossible to establish with any certainty the precise purpose or beneficiaries of their work. 

Refugees help power machine learning advances at Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon

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i.guim.co.uk
At your local animal shelter, roughly half of the cats up for adoption will be black or black and white. But black cats, in particular, face difficulty in finding adoption. Although some cultures regard black cats well (in Scotland they are said to bring prosperity and in England and Japan some say they bring good luck) in much of the world they are associated with evil omens and witchcraft. But now they face an added challenge: the cruel demands of the Instagram age, in which black cats are deemed less aesthetically pleasing than their more colourful comrades. Between 2007 and 2013 the Blue Cross saw a 65% rise in the number of black cats taken in each year, and the RSPCA, noting similar figures, blamed the fact that black cats are not “selfie-friendly”. “It’s not uncommon for many monochrome moggies to wait many weeks or months to be adopted,” says Gemma Croker from Cats Protection, which takes in 200,000 cats each year.

Adopt a black cat – here's how to make them look great on Instagram (Guardian)

On a long enough timeline, instagram filters will shift the evolutionary opportunities of whole species.

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Spotify appears to be creating and uploading x thousands of identical, procedurally generated songs under different names and cover art.

Other sources report that these are tracks licensed at low cost in order to fill playlists without paying record companies and their artists:

According to DN, Firefly Entertainment is doing a roaring trade in what some would call “fake artists” on Spotify.
These are the now-well-known pseudonymous artists on the streaming platform – artists with no discernible online footprint – whose music fills up many of Spotify’s own key mood and chillout playlists.
For a long time, music industry figures have wondered aloud whether Spotify has deals in place that see it pay less in royalties for streams of music from “fake artists” – whose cumulative streams now sit in the billions – than streams of artists signed to major record companies.
In its report (available here) DN obtained a list of 830 ‘fake artist’ names linked to Firefly, and discovered that at least 495 of these artists have music on first-party Spotify playlists.
This figure probably under-estimates the scope of Firefly’s artists on Spotify-run playlists, suggests DN, as the newspaper only examined 100 playlists out of the “several thousand [playlists] that Spotify is responsible for”.
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miro.medium.com

“The expectation was, you have to smile eight hours a day,” a woman Baker calls Sofiya tells her. A 41-year-old Russian émigré who had been living in the United States for the past decade, Sofiya “was a proficient English speaker,” Baker writes, but it was in her job as a bank teller that she “came face-to-face with her deficiency in speaking ‘American.’ This other English language, made up of not just words but also facial expressions and habits of conversation subtle enough to feel imagined. Smiling almost constantly was at the core of her duties as a teller. As she smiled at one customer after another, she would wince inwardly at how silly it felt. There was no reason to smile at her clients, she thought, since there was nothing particularly funny or heartwarming about their interactions. And her face hurt.”
This confrontation with the culture clash of smiling for an Eastern European immigrant in America hits close to home. Which is why seeing the relentless parade of toothy, ahistorical, quintessentially American, “cheese” smiles plastered on the faces of every civilization in the world across time and space was immediately jarring. It was as if the AI had cast 21st century Americans to put on different costumes and play the various cultures of the world. Which, of course, it had.

AI and the American Smile

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The very first citation in this stupid letter is to our StochasticParrots Paper, "AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity, as shown by extensive research[1]"
EXCEPT
that one of the main points we make in the paper is that one of the biggest harms of large language models, is caused by CLAIMING that LLMs have "human-competitive intelligence."

Timnit Gebru on Twitter

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i.guim.co.uk
One of Europe’s largest ammunition manufacturers has said efforts to meet surging demand from the war in Ukraine have been stymied by a new TikTok data centre that is monopolising electricity in the region close to its biggest factory.
The chief executive of Nammo, which is co-owned by the Norwegian government, said a planned expansion of its largest factory in central Norway hit a roadblock due to a lack of surplus energy, with the construction of TikTok’s new data centre using up electricity in the local area.
“We are concerned because we see our future growth is challenged by the storage of cat videos,” Morten Brandtzæg told the Financial Times.

Norwegian company says TikTok data centre is limiting energy for manufacturing Ukraine ammunition

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Samsung cameras claim to produce incredibly high-detailed photos, even at night. One example they use is shots of the moon. However, as this reddit user shows, they are in fact using onboard AI / machine learning to superimpose existing high definition moon images onto the low-definition images actually taken by users. Samsung is faking the moon.

Samsung "space zoom" moon shots are fake, and here is the proof

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Crochet enthusiasts asked ChatGPT for patterns. The results are ‘cursed’ | ChatGPT | The Guardian

A typical crochet pattern resembles coding in its own way, with abbreviations and punctuation marks denoting the creation process. “Ch” is used to denote “chain”, and “sc” is “single crochet”, for example. Meanwhile, an asterisk (*) implies an instruction should be repeated and brackets [] are used to separate repeatable steps in the instructions.
Woolner was impressed to find that ChatGPT returned comprehensive instructions that resembled a typical pattern. Following the pattern exactly, they created what was described as an “AI-generated narhwal crochet monstrosity”. Woolner said although the product was anatomically disturbing, it was impressive the language-learning tool created a pattern that actually yielded a sea creature.
“The consensus among people who have seen it is that it looks wrong and ugly, but also very cute,” they said. “It came out shockingly very accurate while still being very, very wrong. It’s a weird mix, kind of an uncanny valley.”
Source: theguardian.com
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Drones raining from the sky in Zhengzhou 
 Word on the street is that a rival drone company that lost the bid interfered to overwhelm the drones nav system!

Twitter: pitdesi

Video: 吴文行wenxingwu

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The human eye can’t really tell just how well plants have already been fertilised. But robotic eyes – in other words, multispectral cameras combined with the right software – can assess the nutritional status of the wheat at a glance. To this end, Argento is using the drone to make an aerial photo of the wheatfield – not in the visible spectrum, but in the so-called near-infrared radiation range. This shows the ‘emotional state’ of the plants, as it were. “When plants reflect a lot of near-infrared radiation, then they’re doing well. If they only reflect a little, they are under stress”, says Argento. Plants can get stressed when they are given either too much or too little fertiliser.

Sci-fi agriculture in the here and now - Horizons

Source: horizons-mag.ch
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“Pre-tiled imagery“ - ultrazool on Twitter

Iowa, United States (41.9°N 94.8°W), 06 Sep 2021