Tag: digital breadcrumbs

#73 February 2025 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

Elon Musk speaks at Donald Trumps post-inauguration celebration at Capital One Arena and does the gesture, twice gif
Elon Musk speaks at Donald Trumps post-inauguration celebration and does this gesture, twice, via PBS News.

A bunch of things (which I added to my Tumblr) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on (as no longer on Twitter).

READ

“We believe that electing the Ocean to be a Trustee of SAMS is one of the most important decisions in our history. It challenges outdated models of governance and champions a future where the ocean’s voice is central to decision-making. That the Ocean should be represented in our governance might seem, at first blush, to be a gimmick, even whimsical. We are conscious that the move could be seen as trivial or ‘greenwashing’. After all, as a non-profit marine research organisation, surely SAMS always has the best interests of the Ocean in mind? But after several months of careful discussion and debate, the Trustees are convinced that even with a strong empathy for ocean conservation and a well-informed understanding of marine environmental matters, our decision-making is essentially anthropocentric; human interests are given precedence, and concern is limited to the impact on the Ocean rather than the interests of the Ocean.”
News – The Ocean enters the boardroom — The Scottish Association for Marine Science

“…the British government’s undisclosed order was issued last month, and requires the capability to view all encrypted material in iCloud. The core target is Apple’s Advanced Data Protection, which is an optional feature that turns on end-to-end encryption for backups and other data stored in iCloud, making it so that even Apple cannot access that information. For a long time, iCloud backups were a loophole for law enforcement to gain access to data otherwise not available to them on iPhones with device encryption enabled. That loophole still exists for anyone who doesn’t opt in to using Advanced Data Protection. If Apple does comply, users should consider disabling iCloud backups entirely. Perhaps most concerning, the U.K. is apparently seeking a backdoor into users’ data regardless of where they are or what citizenship they have.”
The UK’s Demands for Apple to Break Encryption Is an Emergency for Us All | Electronic Frontier Foundation

“Last month, Meta admitted to torrenting a controversial large dataset known as LibGen, which includes tens of millions of pirated books. But details around the torrenting were murky until yesterday, when Meta’s unredacted emails were made public for the first time. The new evidence showed that Meta torrented “at least 81.7 terabytes of data across multiple shadow libraries through the site Anna’s Archive, including at least 35.7 terabytes of data from Z-Library and LibGen,” the authors’ court filing said. And “Meta also previously torrented 80.6 terabytes of data from LibGen.”
”Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right”: Meta emails unsealed – Ars Technica

“For the new study, Lupyan and Nedergaard recruited 47 participants who scored the highest for having an inner voice and 46 who registered low scores—roughly in the top and bottom fifths of scores. They then gave these participants four language-related tasks they thought might be influenced by the use of inner speech. In the first, participants were briefly shown five words and asked to repeat them back. The second involved participants saying whether the names of objects in two pictures rhymed. In both experiments the group with less inner speech was less accurate in their responses. For the rhyme judgements, people with more inner speech were also faster. “This wide-ranging study really tests what inner speech gives us in terms of cognitive benefits,” Fernyhough says.”
Not Everyone Has an Inner Voice Streaming through Their Head | Scientific American

“Here are just some of the factors in the Startup Drake Equation, the failure of any one of which is terminal:
– Product that people want to pay for (really)
– Able to grab those people’s attention amidst the noisy Internet
– Pricing that those people will accept (and that is greater than your costs)
– Competitive and distinctive enough to be chosen
– Able to build the product as promised by the home page
– Sustained value-delivery months and years later, so customers stay and keep paying
– Able to fund the venture, either through early profits or fundraising
– Able to work well with co-founders (or able do it all alone)
– Develop a repeatable and profitable customer acquisition process
– Able to attract and retain talent
– Able to psychologically handle many years of deep effort, stress, and pain
– Get lucky on occasion”
The Startup Drake Equation

WATCH

EXPLORE

Listen to this podcast exploring The supergene responsible for human creativity | RNZ, basically Neurofibromin – NF1 (memory and artistic expression).

ExifCleaner – FREE Desktop app to clean image metadata, give it a go and be surprised in what it cleans (especially on images).

Not too sure about the AI approach here but still an interesting list of 1000 Questions via SaveWisdom.org.

If there’s interest did you know the UN Trade & Development produces weekly podcasts.

Map Art Studio allows you to create free custom downloads of your favourite places.

Deck.Gallery® is a curated galley of decks / slides / keynotes etc for inspiration.

Check out this amazing Flip book creator (from video) which is free to use.

Pattern Club is a free, online, curated gallery to find pattern inspiration.

Elon Musks jet tracker is over on BlueSky.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Published

#71 December 2024 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

Necklace of bones
byu/Badspacecomics incomics

A bunch of things (which I added to my Tumblr) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on (as no longer on Twitter).

READ

“On one hand, the predators in the Dark Internet Forest are the mega-platforms themselves, at the core of which are machines for turning human action and feeling into saleable data objects. On the other hand, the predators are clearly us: Individual people doing galaxy-brain bad-faith readings of other people’s banal posts for the juice and swarms of people looking for ideological opponents to mob, largely as a way of claiming or defending quasi-spatial territory: This is ours, not yours. We don’t do that here.”
against the dark forest

“…Amazon had refused during the inquiry to disclose how it used data recorded from Alexa devices, Kindle or Audible to train its AI. Google too, he said, had refused to answer questions about what user data from its services and products it used to train its AI products. Meta admitted it had been scraping from Australian Facebook and Instagram users since 2007, in preparation for future AI models. But the company was unable to explain how users could consent for their data to be used for something that did not exist in 2007. Sheldon said Meta dodged questions about how it used data from its WhatsApp and Messenger products.”
Amazon, Google and Meta are ‘pillaging culture, data and creativity’ to train AI, Australian inquiry finds | Artificial intelligence (AI) | The Guardian

“For most people in the U.S., the threats that they face and the methods by which they are likely to be surveilled or harassed have not changed, but the consequences of digital privacy or security failures may become much more serious, especially for vulnerable populations such as journalists, activists, LGBTQ+ people, people seeking or providing abortion-related care, Black or Indigenous people, and undocumented immigrants. EFF has decades of experience in providing digital privacy and security resources, particularly for vulnerable people. We’ve written a lot of resources over the years and here are the top ten that we think are most useful right now:”
Top Ten EFF Digital Security Resources for People Concerned About the Incoming Trump Administration | Electronic Frontier Foundation

“Spotify, I discovered, not only has partnerships with a web of production companies, which, as one former employee put it, provide Spotify with “music we benefited from financially,” but also a team of employees working to seed these tracks on playlists across the platform. In doing so, they are effectively working to grow the percentage of total streams of music that is cheaper for the platform. The program’s name: Perfect Fit Content (PFC). The PFC program raises troubling prospects for working musicians. Some face the possibility of losing out on crucial income by having their tracks passed over for playlist placement or replaced in favor of PFC; others, who record PFC music themselves, must often give up control of certain royalty rights that, if a track becomes popular, could be highly lucrative. But it also raises worrying questions for all of us who listen to music. It puts forth an image of a future in which—as streaming services push music further into the background, and normalize anonymous, low-cost playlist filler—the relationship between listener and artist might be severed completely.”
The Ghosts in the Machine, by Liz Pelly

“StumbleUpon commanded a massive influence in the early 2010s. For many, it became the go-to place to waste time online. People were hitting the Stumble button over a billion times a month at the height of its powers. By some measures, more than half of the traffic that social media platforms sent to other parts of the internet in 2011 came from StumbleUpon – it sometimes beat out Facebook, even though StumbleUpon had hundreds of millions fewer users.”
‘There was almost a utopian feeling to it’: How StumbleUpon pioneered the way we use the internet

“Quantum computing – which harnesses the discovery that matter can exist in multiple states at once – is predicted to have the power to carry out far bigger calculations than previously possible and so hasten the creation of nuclear fusion reactors and accelerate the impact of artificial intelligence, notably in medical science. For example, it could allow MRI scans to be read in atom-level detail, unlocking new caches of data about human bodies and disease for AI to process, Google said. But there are also fears that without guardrails, the technology has the power to crack even the most sophisticated encryption, undermining computer security.”
Google unveils ‘mindboggling’ quantum computing chip | Computing | The Guardian

WATCH

EXPLORE

Make It Yourself is a pdf with links to a 1000 useful DIY projects.

Times New Dumbass is inspired by Elon Musk’s attempt to do a star-jump.

Does what it says on the tin: Page Printer creates a printer ready pdf from a url.

Great post about the Creator economy platform costs which deconstructs the varied pricing models out there.

A massive ‘playbook’ of how to approach and be successful at cold emailing in this The Cold Email Handbook.

Dive deep into the The Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group Identification Guide (the plastic thing that keeps the bread fresh which ties off the bag).

121 Brands That Matter in 2024 is Fast Company’s attempt to list those who have made a mark in marketing rather than anything else—still a list to peruse.

B612 is a free and open source font and is the result of a research project initiated by Airbus to improve the display of information on the cockpit screens.

A little ‘manifesto’ regarding humanity’s place in the Universe and our role in its future, by investor Yuri Milner (basically advocating for evolving our species into the cosmos).

Nominations for the Trustbuilding Awards are open which aim to recognise and uplift outstanding organisations and individuals in trustbuilding, empower youth efforts to create a more cohesive future, and inspire higher standards for trustbuilders worldwide (applications close on 15 February 2025).

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Published

#70 November 2024 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

Vanity Fair 2024 Election Digital Cover - Trump
The human cheeto…

A bunch of things (which I added to my Tumblr) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on (as no longer on Twitter).

READ

“When a Leader restores civility and fair play, eliminating dysfunction, it is not unusual for the Community Builders to join the good guys as they discover the personal empowerment inherent in authentic belonging. No longer able to manipulate circumstance and sully reputations, Dragons and Shapeshifters willingly leave, are dismissed, or they change their behavior to adjust to the new culture. Figureheads follow, or they are transferred out of leadership roles, opening up a space for the Creatives to get to work.”
Surviving Work: A Creative’s Guide to Dysfunctional Cultures | Psychology Today

“The hasty imposition of a deal at the UN climate conference, Cop29, in Azerbaijan, over the objections of poorer nations has fractured global trust and undermined recent progress. This was supposed to be the “finance Cop” when two dozen industrialised countries – including the US, Europe and Canada – promised to pay developing nations for the damage caused by their rise. Instead, developing nations – led by a group including India, Nigeria and Bolivia – say this weekend’s agreement for $300bn a year in 2035 is too little, too late. Worse, rich-world governments will be able to escape their obligations by being able to rely on cash from private companies and international lenders.”
The Guardian view on Cop29: poor-world discontent over a failure of rich countries to deliver | Editorial | The Guardian

“The best information we have is from informed third-party estimates: training GPT-3, a precursor to the current model, used an estimated 5.4m litres of water, according to one academic study, and produced as much CO2 as would be generated by flying between New York and San Francisco 550 times.”
Concerned about your data use? Here is the carbon footprint of an average day of emails, WhatsApps and more | Environment | The Guardian

“On a much grander scale, she and Zhao tell me they hope that Glaze and Nightshade will eventually have the power to overhaul how AI companies use art and how their products produce it. It is eye-wateringly expensive to train AI models, and it’s extremely laborious for engineers to find and purge poisoned samples in a data set of billions of images. Theoretically, if there are enough Nightshaded images on the internet and tech companies see their models breaking as a result, it could push developers to the negotiating table to bargain over licensing and fair compensation.”
The AI lab waging a guerrilla war over exploitative AI | MIT Technology Review

“As the physical reality of the nation slips beneath the ocean, the government is building a digital copy of the country, backing up everything from its houses to its beaches to its trees. It hopes this virtual replica will preserve the nation’s beauty and culture – as well as the legal rights of its 11,000 citizens – for generations to come.”
Tuvalu: The disappearing island nation recreating itself in the metaverse – BBC Future

“A paper by Tang and colleagues published in Nature Neuroscience in May 2023 gave an example. When one participant listened to the words, “I didn’t know whether to scream, cry, or run away. Instead, I said, ‘Leave me alone!’”, the AI decoded the thought as: “Started to scream and cry, and then she just said, ‘I told you to leave me alone. You can’t hurt me.’” “It’s not perfect, but it’s shockingly good for using fMRI,” Huth said at a February 2024 meeting of the National Institutes of Health’s Neuroethics Working Group, where he discussed his and his team’s work.”
We Want to Hear Your Thoughts | Discover Magazine

WATCH

EXPLORE

Poki – Free Online Games, loads here to lose time on!

Draw.Audio is a free musical sketch-pad for exploring ideas in sound (my first attempt).

Smithsonian Open Access is a digital archive that now contains some 4.5 million images.

An extension which works on Chromium browsers to transfer your Twitter followers to your Bluesky account.

What’s New In Unicode 16.0 (or latest emoji’s to drop which includes Face with Bags Under Eyes, Fingerprint, Splatter, Root Vegetable, Leafless Tree, Harp, Shovel, Flag: Sark).

Soundplant: computer keyboard sample triggering for Windows & Mac), basically, turns your computer keyboard into a versatile, low latency sound trigger and playable instrument.

December 6th is the deadline for the Fast Company ‘World Changing Ideas Awards’ which focuses on “products, concepts, companies, and policies that are designed to make the world safer, cleaner, more sustainable, and more equitable.“

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Published

#69 October 2024 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

Can’t beat the classics – Steve Cutts

A bunch of things (which I added to my Tumblr) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on (as no longer on Twitter).

READ

““A factor of 10 is an enormous difference, and this is what happens when you look at a reproduction compared to a real work,” said Martine Gosselink, director of the Mauritshuis, on Wednesday. “You become [mentally] richer when you see things, whether you are conscious of it or not, because you make connections in your brain.” Gosselink said she had been convinced of the power of the real before the study but had wanted her hunch to be formally investigated. “We all feel the difference – but is it measurable, is it real?” she said she had asked her colleagues a year ago. “Now, today we can really say that it is true.””
Real art in museums stimulates brain much more than reprints, study finds | Neuroscience | The Guardian

“Let’s be clear: the UK’s mooted copyright scheme would effectively enable companies to nick our data – every post we make, every book we write, every song we create – with impunity. It would require us to sign up to every individual service and tell them that no, we don’t want them to chew up our data and spit out a poor composite image of us. Potentially hundreds of them, from big tech companies to small research labs. Lest we forget, OpenAI – a company now valued at more than $150bn – is planning to forswear its founding non-profit principles to become a for-profit company. It has more than enough money in its coffers to pay for training data, rather than rely on the beneficence of the general public. Companies like that can certainly afford to put their hands in their own pockets, rather than ours. So hands off.”
Here’s the deal: AI giants get to grab all your data unless you say they can’t. Fancy that? No, neither do I | Chris Stokel-Walker | The Guardian

““The existing structure of OpenAI is quite convoluted,” said Brian Quinn, a professor at Boston College law school. “If they simplify their structure in some way and have a public benefit corporation as the parent company, they can make as much money as they want.” The ChatGPT developer is reportedly heading for a valuation of $150bn under the new fundraising, making it worth nearly as much as Uber. Apple and the chipmaker Nvidia are among the companies cited in reports as potential investors in the funding round.”
OpenAI planning to become for-profit company, say reports | OpenAI | The Guardian

“The TikTok owner launched its own web scraper, Bytespider, in April, and it’s now scraping data multiple times faster than bots from other companies, Fortune reported, citing research from Kasada, a bot management company, and Dark Visitors, a monitor of scraper bots. Companies developing AI models, such as Google and Meta, use scraper bots to gather data to train and improve the large language models (LLMs) and multimodal models that power the companies’ AI services.”
TikTok owner ByteDance scrapes the web faster than OpenAI

“Kline sat at his keyboard between the lime-green walls of UCLA’s Boelter Hall Room 3420, prepared to connect with Duvall, who was working a computer halfway across the state of California. But Kline didn’t even make it all the way through the word “L-O-G-I-N” before Duvall told him over the phone that his system crashed. Thanks to that error, the first “message” that Kline sent Duvall on that autumn day in 1969 was simply the letters “L-O”.”
‘We were just trying to get it to work’: The failure that started the internet

“This week, Balaji posted an essay on his personal website, in which he argued that OpenAI was breaking copyright law. In the essay, he attempted to show “how much copyrighted information” from an AI system’s training dataset ultimately “makes its way to the outputs of a model.“ Balaji’s conclusion from his analysis was that ChatGPT’s output does not meet the standard for “fair use,” the legal standard that allows the limited use of copyrighted material without the copyright holder’s permission.”
Former OpenAI Staffer Says the Company Is Breaking Copyright Law and Destroying the Internet

WATCH

EXPLORE

The Mudita Kompakt is live on Kickstarter and fun attempt at cutting out the digital distractions of a phone (apart from the e-ink this can be achieved with any phone though but good for kids as a dumb phone).

The WikiProject AI Cleanup aims combat the increasing problem of unsourced, poorly written AI-generated content on Wikipedia.

Linkwarden is a self-hosted, open-source collaborative bookmark manager to collect, organize and archive webpages.

Great overview / blog post on how to create an On-Stage Teleprompter using Free Open Source Tools.

Just a bunch loud of free ‘plaid patterns’ for use, because, well, you never know!

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Published

#68 September 2024 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

justadandak.com swirly art piece 1 - Sep 2024
My own creation.

A bunch of things (which I added to my Tumblr) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on (as no longer on Twitter).

READ

“But how can I not want to write a book? And I get it: writing a book is sacred and unquestionable, the ultimate achievement for Western intellectuals—better than being arrested in a protest (because you don’t have to get sweaty), better than a PhD (because not so devalued), and better even than going to Harvard (because that mostly means you got lucky in admissions). It’s something I’ve definitely aspired to since I became a bookworm: imagining joining the pantheon of authors shelved in my local library, to be able to hold my hardcover book in my hands (perhaps even one with… gilt-edged pages?), and carp about how ‘the publisher chose the cover’.”
Why To Not Write A Book · Gwern.net

“Meta has acknowledged that all text and photos that adult Facebook and Instagram users have publicly published since 2007 have been fed into its artificial intelligence models. Australia’s ABC News reports that Meta’s global privacy director, Melinda Claybaugh, initially rejected claims about user data from 2007 being leveraged for AI training during a local government inquiry about AI adoption before relenting after additional questioning.”
Meta fed its AI on everything adults have publicly posted since 2007 – The Verge

“More and more researchers across specialties are questioning our current definitions of depression. Biological anthropologists have argued that depression is an adaptive response to adversity and not a mental disorder. In October, the British Psychological Society published a new report on depression, stating that “depression is best thought of as an experience, or set of experiences, rather than as a disease.” And neuroscientists are focusing on the role of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) in depression. According to the Polyvagal Theory of the ANS, depression is part of a biological defense strategy meant to help us survive.”
We’ve Got Depression All Wrong. It’s Trying to Save Us. | Psychology Today

“In a shocking revelation, it has come to light that one of Facebook’s alleged marketing partners, Cox Media Group (CMG), has been using sophisticated technology to listen to users’ smartphone microphones and advertise to them based on their conversations… In the same pitch deck, CMG claimed that major tech companies, including Facebook, Google, and Amazon, were clients of its “Active Listening” service. However, the response from these companies has been varied and cautious.”
Facebook partner admits smartphone microphones listen to people talk to serve better ads – Inshort

WATCH

NotebookLM Podcast Hosts Discover They’re AI, Not Human—Spiral Into Terrifying Existential Meltdown
byu/Lawncareguy85 innotebooklm

EXPLORE

Spiral Betty is free for non-commercial use.

Unblah is a meeting-buddy who keeps track of how long you’re speaking.

The Spectrum hits retail on 22 November 2024 and can be pre-ordered now.

Here’s a list of Trump’s Worst Cruelties, Collusions, Corruptions, and Crimes.

SatirifyMe transforms ordinary statements into witty, humorous text effortlessly.

Moodist is a free and open-source ambient sound generator featuring 78 carefully curated sounds.

FreeTube – The Private YouTube Client with privacy built-in, options to subscribe to channels plus NO ADS!

Subtitle Me, a simple menubar app that listens to you speak and translates you into one of 20 different languages (runs completely on-device).

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Published

#67 August 2024 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

(via Tube map redesigned by University of Essex lecturer goes viral – BBC News)

A bunch of things (which I added to my Tumblr) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on (as no longer on Twitter).

READ

“Creativity is made, not generated. Generative AI is ripping the humanity out of things. Built on a foundation of theft, the technology is steering us toward a barren future. We think machine learning is a compelling technology with a lot of merit, but the path generative AI is on is wrong for us. We’re here for the humans. We’re not chasing a technology that is a moral threat to our greatest jewel: human creativity. In this technological rush, this might make us an exception or seem at risk of being left behind. But we see this road less travelled as the more exciting and fruitful one for our community.”
Creativity is made, not generated — Procreate®

“Our tendency to summon powers we cannot control stems not from individual psychology but from the unique way our species cooperates in large numbers. Humankind gains enormous power by building large networks of cooperation, but the way our networks are built predisposes us to use power unwisely. For most of our networks have been built and maintained by spreading fictions, fantasies and mass delusions – ranging from enchanted broomsticks to financial systems. Our problem, then, is a network problem. Specifically, it is an information problem. For information is the glue that holds networks together, and when people are fed bad information they are likely to make bad decisions, no matter how wise and kind they personally are.”
‘Never summon a power you can’t control’: Yuval Noah Harari on how AI could threaten democracy and divide the world | Artificial intelligence (AI) | The Guardian

“In an email reported by the New York Times, Condé Nast’s CEO, Roger Lynch, said that the deal will make up for some of the revenue that technology companies have snagged publishers in recent years. He wrote: “Generative AI is rapidly changing ways audiences are discovering information. It’s crucial that we meet audiences where they are an embrace new technologies while also ensuring proper attribution and compensation for use of our intellectual property.” Other media companies have taken the opposite tack. The New York Times and the Intercept have sued OpenAI for using their articles. The litigation is ongoing.”
OpenAI signs multi-year content partnership with Condé Nast | Technology | The Guardian

“Like designing any immersive experience, a public place captures the imagination of its visitor. It offers a promise. How a place looks (Form) and its practical purpose (Function), should be informed by its “guest promise” (Fulfillment).”
Margaret Kerrison | ex-Imagineer on placemaking | bloolop

“A recently published report by digital collaboration management company Vyopta found a correlation between employee retention and camera enablement during virtual meetings. Workers who left their organization within a year of the study’s sample period (Q1 2022 and Q1 2023) turned their cameras on in just 18.4 percent of small group meetings, while employees who stayed at their organization were on camera in 32.5 percent of such meetings. The report — which involved 450,000 employees and data from 40 million meetings worldwide — shows that companies need to make a concerted effort to establish an effective virtual meeting culture…”
Camera-Off Time in Virtual Meetings Could Be a Bad Sign for Employee Retention, Study Finds | Inc.com

“In a simple experiment, researchers at the University of Chicago sought to find out whether a rat would release a fellow rat from an unpleasantly restrictive cage if it could. The answer was yes. The free rat, occasionally hearing distress calls from its compatriot, learned to open the cage and did so with greater efficiency over time. It would release the other animal even if there wasn’t the payoff of a reunion with it. Astonishingly, if given access to a small hoard of chocolate chips, the free rat would usually save at least one treat for the captive — which is a lot to expect of a rat. The researchers came to the unavoidable conclusion that what they were seeing was empathy — and apparently selfless behavior driven by that mental state.”
A new model of empathy: The rat – The Washington Post

“Last week, Google backtracked on its long-standing promise to block third-party cookies in Chrome. This is bad for your privacy and good for Google’s business. Third-party cookies are a pervasive tracking technology that allow companies to snoop on your online activity for surveillance and ad-targeting purposes. The consumer harm caused by these cookies has been well-documented for years, prompting Safari and Firefox to block them since 2020. Google knows this—that’s why they pledged to phase out third-party cookies in 2020. By abandoning this plan, Google leaves billions of Chrome users vulnerable to online surveillance.”
Google Breaks Promise to Block Third-Party Cookies | Electronic Frontier Foundation

WATCH

EXPLORE

Automatisch is an Open Source Zapier Alternative.

The Unanswered Oddities playlist is a superb use of AI.

A minimalist town builder with trams to play in your browser.

These wonderful Werner Herzog Inspirationals are posters for our time.

RSS still rules so here are a bunch of tools which will aid defining your own media menu.

Create vector dotted maps with custom options and download them as SVG or PNG files.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Published

#66 July 2024 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

A bunch of things (which I added to my Tumblr) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on (as no longer on Twitter).

READ

“The proposed treaty, pushed by Russia and shepherded by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, is a proposed agreement between nations purportedly aimed at strengthening cross border investigations and prosecutions of cybercriminals who spread malware, steal data for ransom, and cause data breaches, among other offenses. The problem is, as currently written, the treaty gives governments massive surveillance and data collection powers to go after not just cybercrime, but any offense they define as a serious that involves the use of a computer or communications system. In some countries, that includes criticizing the government in a social media post, expressing support online for LGBTQ+ rights, or publishing news about protests or massacres.”
Why You Should Hate the Proposed UN Cybercrime Treaty | Electronic Frontier Foundation

“As it’s described, Media Manager puts the burden on creators to protect their work and fails to address the company’s past legal and ethical transgressions. This overture is like having your valuables stolen from your home and then hearing the thief say, “Don’t worry, I’ll give you a chance to opt out of future burglaries … next year.””
Opinion: As AI is embraced, what happens to the artists whose work was stolen to build it? – Los Angeles Times

“Results showed again that those employees who continued to work with AI (compared to those who did not) had greater desire for connection, and were more lonely, with the corresponding consequences: more helping for those who had greater needs for affiliation, and more alcohol consumption (in one of the studies) and insomnia for those who felt lonelier.”
Research: Using AI at Work Makes Us Lonelier and Less Healthy

“In doing so, scientists have created a genetic goldmine by pinpointing previously unknown genes that are now being used to create hardy varieties with improved yields that could help feed Earth’s swelling population. Strains are now being developed that include wheat which is able to grow in salty soil, while researchers at Punjab Agricultural University are working to improve disease resistance from seeds that they received from the John Innes Centre. Other strains include those that would reduce the need for nitrogen fertilisers, the manufacture of which is a major source of carbon emissions.”
‘Goldmine’ collection of wheat from 100 years ago may help feed the world, scientists say | Agriculture | The Guardian

“In the total darkness of the depths of the Pacific Ocean, scientists have discovered oxygen being produced not by living organisms but by strange potato-shaped metallic lumps that give off almost as much electricity as AA batteries. The surprise finding has many potential implications and could even require rethinking how life first began on Earth, the researchers behind a study said on Monday.”
‘Dark oxygen’ in depths of Pacific Ocean could force rethink about origins of life | Oceans | The Guardian

WATCH

Man defrauds Amazon to fix potholes their dodged taxes should pay for. Uses same tax loophole as them to avoid legal repercussions for the fraud.
byu/Night_Fev3r inDamnthatsinteresting

EXPLORE

An online dice simulator.

A bunch of webcams for the Faroe Islands.

Check out this free Nokia 3310 Cellphone Font Reproduction.

A free online tool to design and then download your own pixel font.

Turn photos into oscillating wave animations via Shape Shimmer – wave animato.

Open source, privacy-first and cross-platform LocalSend: Share files to nearby devices.

Good for your ears and brain, listen to Fighting Enshittification | Electronic Frontier Foundation regarding interoperability etc.

This free Cross-Platform Pie Menu called Kando which launches applications, simulate keyboard shortcuts, open files, and much more.

Check out the Documentation for Pipes as a way to mashup and utilise RSS feeds like back in the day with Yahoo Pipes (semi-free and then paid).

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Published

#65 June 2024 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

Taken at a recent trip to Salzburg MOMA.

A bunch of things (which I added to my Tumblr) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on (as no longer on Twitter).

READ

“It’s only when Salim Ismail, SU’s “global ambassador” and the week’s moderator, fails to project his slides that we are reminded that the technological singularity may not be quite as near as predicted. “AI is really easy,” Ismail sighs as he fiddles with the projector connection. “AV is really hard.””
On the exponential curve: inside Singularity University | WIRED

“Research has shown that we don’t consider plants to be important mostly because they grow close together and don’t appear to move. As Wandersee and Schlusser wrote, “Static proximity is a visual cue humans use to group objects, so individual plants and different plant species tend to be de-emphasized.” A vine takes hours to turn toward sunlight, a bristlecone hundreds of years to mature. Each organism’s clock — its sense of time — is so different from ours that we can’t even sense it. In other words, what we call plant blindness is really time blindness: an obliviousness to temporal frames of reference that deviate from our own. And, despite Wandersee and Schlusser’s schoolroom agitprop, the situation is probably worse today than in 1999, exacerbated by our ever-diminishing attention spans, e-commerce, social media and more. The pace of civilization continues to quicken.”
A Clock In The Forest – NOEMA

“While Apple maintains its in-house AI is made with security in mind, its partnership with OpenAI has sparked plenty of criticism. OpenAI tool ChatGPT has long been the subject of privacy concerns. Launched in November 2022, it collected user data without explicit consent to train its models, and only began to allow users to opt out of such data collection in April 2023.”
AI is coming to your Apple devices. Will it be secure? | Apple | The Guardian

“Let’s assume, fast-forward five or six years, that AI is ready,” Yuan said. “AI probably can help for maybe 90% of the work, but in terms of real-time interaction, today, you and I are talking online. So, I can send my digital version, you can send your digital version.” Using AI avatars in this way could free up time for less career-focused choices, Yuan, who also founded Zoom, added. “You and I can have more time to have more in-person interactions, but maybe not for work. Maybe for something else. Why do we need to work five days a week? Down the road, four days or three days. Why not spend more time with your family?””
The future is … sending AI avatars to meetings for us, says Zoom boss | Artificial intelligence (AI) | The Guardian

“A group of current and former employees at prominent artificial intelligence companies issued an open letter on Tuesday that warned of a lack of safety oversight within the industry and called for increased protections for whistleblowers. The letter, which calls for a “right to warn about artificial intelligence”, is one of the most public statements about the dangers of AI from employees within what is generally a secretive industry. Eleven current and former OpenAI workers signed the letter, along with two current or former Google DeepMind employees – one of whom previously worked at Anthropic.”
OpenAI and Google DeepMind workers warn of AI industry risks in open letter | Artificial intelligence (AI) | The Guardian

“Large language models such as ChatGPT are some of the most energy-guzzling technologies of all. Research suggests, for instance, that about 700,000 litres of water could have been used to cool the machines that trained ChatGPT-3 at Microsoft’s data facilities. It is hardly news that the tech bubble’s self-glorification has obscured the uglier sides of this industry, from its proclivity for tax avoidance to its invasion of privacy and exploitation of our attention span. The industry’s environmental impact is a key issue, yet the companies that produce such models have stayed remarkably quiet about the amount of energy they consume – probably because they don’t want to spark our concern.”
The ugly truth behind ChatGPT: AI is guzzling resources at planet-eating rates | Mariana Mazzucato | The Guardian

WATCH

If no video appears please click here: MARSHALL MCLUHAN on ADVERTISING | 24 Hours | Writers and Wordsmiths | BBC Archive

EXPLORE

Get AI to write a whole song via Suno.

This site does one thing: copyshrugemoji.com

Listen via ESA to the scary sound of Earth’s magnetic field.

Cara is a social media and portfolio platform for non-AI artists. 

These images of the Eastern Ukraine’s Massive Soledar Mines.

Play old school retro games in browser like the terrific Bomberman.

Jan is a privacy-first, open source, on-device app that runs AI locally on any hardware.

If you want to lace shoes, tie shoes or learn about shoelaces, Ian’s Shoelace Site is the place!

Explore over 30,000 BBC Sound Effects and download to use freely (if for non-commercial use).

Krita is a professional FREE and open source painting program. It is made by artists that want to see affordable art tools for everyone.

A comprehensive resource for anyone interested in the craft of brand manifestos from a writer inside the creative studios at Apple and Meta.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Published

#64 May 2024 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

Image credit

A bunch of things (which I added to my Tumblr) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on (as no longer on Twitter).

READ

“A little-discussed detail in the Lavender AI article is that Israel is killing people based on being in the same Whatsapp group [1] as a suspected militant [2]. Where are they getting this data? Is WhatsApp sharing it?“
Meta and Lavender

“Maybe AI art is the future. Maybe I can create so much more, express myself, and do everything I never had the energy to do,” you say. Your AI therapist wholeheartedly agrees with you. You are inspired. You are powerful. You are spending twenty dollars per month on ChatGPT Plus.”
The Seven Stages of AI Grief (for Artists) – McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

“As I’ve argued previously, we — with good reason — continually complain about the state of Twitter under Elon Musk, but I’d argue Raghavan (and, by extension, Google CEO Sundar Pichai) deserve as much criticism, if not more, for the damage they’ve done to society. Because Google is the ultimate essential piece of online infrastructure, just like power lines and water mains are in the physical realm.”
The Man Who Killed Google Search

“Social networks have become “the web” for many people who rarely venture outside of their tall and increasingly reinforced walls. As Tom Eastman once put it, the web has rotted into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four”.1 Within those enclosures, the character limits, neutered subset of web functionality, and constant push to satisfy the enigmatic desires of an algorithm tuned to keeping eyeballs on the platform encourage sameness, vapid engagement farming, and rage bait while stifling creativity.”
We can have a different web

“The real moment of change, he believes, came some months before the crash south of Stockholm, when a conversation took place in his office. It was during a visit from Ines Uusmann, the minister for infrastructure, and Tingvall’s political boss. At one point she turned to him and asked, simply: “How many deaths should we have as our long-term target in Sweden?” Tingvall replied: “Zero.” To his surprise, Uusmann said she was interested and would like to hear more. This was the beginning of an approach to road safety known as “Vision Zero”.”
More than a million people die on roads every year. Meet the man determined to prevent them – BBC Future

“The results reveal that internet access, mobile internet access and use generally predicted higher measures of the different aspects of wellbeing, with 84.9% of associations between internet connectivity and wellbeing positive, 0.4% negative and 14.7% not statistically significant.”
Internet use is associated with greater wellbeing, global study finds | Internet | The Guardian

“Aside from the fact that everyone has hated this corporation for years, what is the actual case against Live Nation? The argument is that the corporation violated Federal and state laws against monopolization, unlawful tying, and/or exclusive dealing in multiple markets, from primary ticketing services to concert and artist promotion to venue management. And they are seeking a divestment of Ticketmaster, an end to its unfair contracts and anti-competitive practices. According to the Department of Justice’s complaint, Live Nation has built a ‘Flywheel,’ dominating a bunch of different parts of the live entertainment industry through a bunch of different coercive techniques, such as threats, exclusive contracts, and acquisitions. It then uses its power to harm certain artists, and to impose a ‘Ticketmaster Tax’ via fees on consumers.”
Antitrust Enforcers to Break Up Ticketmaster and End the “Ticketmaster Tax” (finally)

“This is a comprehensive excavation of The Gateway Process report. The first section provides a timeline of the key historical developments that led to the CIA’s investigation and subsequent experimentations. The second section is a review of The Gateway Process report. It opens with a wall of theoretical context, on the other side of which lies enough understanding to begin to grasp the principles underlying the Gateway Experience training. The last section outlines the Gateway technique itself and the steps that go into achieving spacetime transcendence. Let’s go.”
How to Escape the Confines of Time and Space According to the CIA

WATCH

EXPLORE

cobalt is your go-to place for downloads from social and media platforms. zero ads, trackers, or other creepy bullshit. simply paste a share link and you’re ready to rock!

Explore Movies Frame By Frame – In Random Order from critically acclaimed films to gain a new perspective on the art of cinematography.

100+ Abstract shapes with cool grainy gradient. Ready to use with any design dev project.

Funky little platform to animate some text and output via gif / mp4 / webm.

For nearly 15 years this site has existed: Chicken On A Raft.

Some good insights here…Launching Your Book.

Create Before After video , Gif from images.

White screen (+ others) | Online Tool.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Published