TEXT-IMAGE COLLAPSE: The AI service that I’ve been using to summarise and query PDFs just added OCR support, making it possible to upload an image of a book or article and instantaneously interact with it as a textual object. This technical (but accessible) piece on OCR reveals how language is parsed inbetween pictorial and textual states, and elaborates some of the sociological implications of these processes. “If you are reading this online, it’s likely you can select this phrase from your browser, and copy-paste it into some other application. Moving text around digital spaces is engineered to appear seamless to us. However, the information captured by your computer when you make a keystroke has a very different structure from the pixel grid of light and dark your computer renders on the screen.”

via Folklore
Published on August 27, 2024 at 09:25PM

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ARTISTIC SELF-EXPRESSION IS CONFORMITY! Adam Curtis, in conversation with Yancey Strickler in 2017: “Computers can see us as large groups, but they’re glum and only aggregate us to sell us stuff. In reality, the computers give great insight into the power of common identity between groups. No one’s using that. What’s sitting with the computers is a way of seeing new groups, new common identities between people.”

via Folklore
Published on September 03, 2024 at 07:00AM

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UBIQUITOUS, ENDLESS: The meander, or self-avoiding line, winds its way through time. It traverses Ancient Greek pottery, Zapotec architecture, Imperial Chinese woodwork, and Navajo weaving. It animates surfaces, defines boundaries, fills space. Known variously as a Greek or Chinese key, fret, running dog, or Xicalcoliuhqui, it shows up today on tilework, coffee cups, and clothing — and in art. More than a decorative motif, the meander is metaphor and method, an unstudied artistic generator.

via Folklore
Published on August 30, 2024 at 03:47PM

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I define consumer crypto as the adoption of blockchain-powered applications that serve billions of people in their everyday lives for personal use.

https://abs.xyz/blog/articles/what-is-consumer-crypto

this is kind of cool:

https://getdecode.dev/

DIGITAL PIRACY AS CONSERVATION: This decade-old piece on ‘shadow libraries’ and the relative lack of profitability of text as an object of copyright enforcement (compared to music and video) has a new resonance in the age of the LLM. “On the one side, an argument is made for unrestricted access to information as a prerequisite to properly deliberative democracy. … The other side offers pragmatic reasoning related to the long-term sustainability of the cultural sphere, which, in order to prosper, must provide proper economic incentives to content creators.”

via Folklore
Published on September 06, 2024 at 09:33AM

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“In this article, we introduce the term “conjuration of algorithms” to describe how the tech industry uses the language of magic to shape people’s perceptions of algorithms”

https://t.co/dBT13Zqx5a

Today websites are not just used to provide information to people, but they are also used to provide information to large language models. For instance, language models are often used to enhance development environments used by coders, with many systems including an option to ingest information about programming libraries and APIs from website documentation.

https://llmstxt.org/

WHO ARE THEY FOR, AND HOW WILL THEY FIT INTO OUR LIVES? Computerised companions. Will they be ‘designed’ to fulfil emotional needs of human users, or will they exist beyond the scope of design? “They’re being designed by AI startups run by 20-somethings, backed by billions in investment. As we discussed, the key design and ethical concern is connection—should you actively design to pull people into a care loop, creating emotional bonds, or is it more ethical to let that happen organically as a byproduct of the system?”

via Folklore
Published on September 18, 2024 at 04:37PM

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LARGE LORE MODELS: there is a very sticky analogy for the fostering of lore in this piece, by part of the team behind this year’s Serpentine Galleries Future Art Ecosystems report. “Here we take the core features of an autonomous knowledge commons to be noncentralized yet formalized access to both the means of narrative creation, linked to a permanent record of events, alongside the right to redeploy, or reseed, the results elsewhere.”

via Folklore
Published on September 16, 2024 at 10:17AM

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DIGITAL BELONGING, LOCALLY: Alice Yuan Zhang’s brief primer on bioregional computing. “What if data didn’t have to travel so far, especially when communicating with others around you? What if search algorithms prioritized results that were closer-to-home? What if devices could be locally sourced and re-assembled? What if the traversals of the World Wide Web can also strengthen the affinity of the local web?”

via Folklore
Published on September 12, 2024 at 10:39PM

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PARASOCIAL WORLDS: On who has been absorbed by who. “In historical critiques, reading was condemned not just as a form of insubordination but as an addictive process that threatened the reader’s ability to come back from fantasy and into reality again.”

via Folklore
Published on September 22, 2024 at 06:07PM

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SHADOW LIBRARIES: "We can do things that other institutions are not allowed to do. Now, it’s not (often) that we can archive materials that are illegal to preserve elsewhere. No, it’s legal in many places to build an archive with any books, papers, magazines, and so on. But what legal archives often lack is redundancy and longevity. There exist books of which only one copy exists in some physical library somewhere. There exist metadata records guarded by a single corporation. There exist newspapers only preserved on microfilm in a single archive. Libraries can get funding cuts, corporations can go bankrupt, archives can be bombed and burned to the ground."

via Folklore
Published on September 25, 2024 at 04:11PM

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THE NEET SHALL INHERIT THE EARTH: A scan of ‘Let's All Love Remilia: Notes on Network Spirituality' by Bonkle K., from the first Remilia Quarterly. “This love of accelerating digitization (‘the Wired overtaking the Real') stands in contrast to those who would deem the Online inherently ugly, base, or sinful. Here a political divide within acceleration is cast down, do you stand opposed to what the network is doing to you or do you love it?”

via Folklore
Published on September 26, 2024 at 08:49AM

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Got lost this weekend with Friedman, Goedel, and Attention and ended up chatting with GPT-4o about it.

https://mirror.xyz/0x51665825742d7BDdDe2c24e4E48dF23662c24Ed5/ZDq7XmkH_zBXQwFBEZ_2mXBYGnrrg57CxlaqmmKYH1U

Perhaps the real lesson for philosophy of AI is that reality has outpaced the available language to parse what is already at hand.

https://www.noemamag.com/the-model-is-the-message/

As designers, entrepreneurs and architects of digital culture we feel the urge to refocus how we deal with our digital futures. Designing Friction is a proposal to change the way we think when producing or interacting with digital technology.

https://designingfriction.com/

What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691249131/ai-snake-oil#preview

Was thinking today a lot about worldbuilding when collaborate with protocols through our work.

https://mirror.xyz/0x51665825742d7BDdDe2c24e4E48dF23662c24Ed5/S_a3OtfyhXfULQ7kE6eXvlXJyK1K9HIsbN23T0-mc4E