✱ Bulletins

He said, “How did we get here? We started as skaters
Then you got your license and then graduation
Then I changed medications and everything after went sideways including tonight”

You had a Screamer with trackers and OJs
And I had a Steadham with Bones and a dome tail
And if failure’s a trick then we learned pretty quick
It just took a few times to get right

Man, we used to glide
We used to hang like the smoke
We’d show off for my sister
We didn’t mind being broke

Now every conversation I have’s about money
And I leave home in the morning but then I just keep driving
Kill off the day until you guys stop working
Then pitchers at Skippers now Carlos is crying

If you work on generative models that create hyperrealistic photos or videos of people, and you are not scared shitless of what you’re working on, I do not understand you. My humanity can’t connect to your humanity. In fact, the nihilism of your eagerness shakes me to my core.

Salman Rushdie never wanted any of this, but here he is and here we are.

A book note on Knife: Meditations after an Attempted Murder.

It’s been One of Those Days®. Sometimes if you’re lucky, you catch the One of Those Days not too far from a record store therapy provider/Level 1 trauma center “capable of providing total care for every aspect of injury”.

The fate to which you are condemned as the one who brings a nice camera and takes nice photos of gatherings is to be the one person missing from all the photos of all the gatherings.

A good Bandcamp Friday.

Experiments in the letter شين (sheen) from a few years ago.

The fine folks over at deeplearning.ai openly saying they prefer AI companies just ignore robots.txt files and hope the courts back them in this.

The Batch Issue 260

What’s new: Researchers at MIT analyzed websites whose contents appear in widely used training datasets. Between 2023 and 2024, many of these websites changed their terms of service to ban web crawlers, restricted the pages they permit web crawlers to access, or both.
…
Yes, but: The instructions in robots.txt files are not considered mandatory, and web crawlers can disregard them. Moreover, most websites have little ability to enforce their terms of use, which opens loopholes. For instance, if a site disallows one company’s crawler, the company may hire an intermediary to scrape the site.
…
We’re thinking: We would prefer that AI developers be allowed to train on data that’s available on the open web. We hope that future court decisions and legislation will affirm this.

(Highlight mine).

💿

…

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand —
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep — while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Edgar Allan Poe, “A Dream Within a Dream”

Remember Ello.co?

Andy Baio’s blog post The Quiet Death of Ello’s Big Dreams is a good, sad, predictable telling of what happened to the site. Predictable, although I think Paul Budnitz (initial founder and CEO) ends up looking way worse than I expected. Not surprising given his later NFT/metaverse ventures.

We know that the universe is infinite, expanding and strangely complete, that it lacks nothing we need, but in spite of that knowledge, the tragic paradigm of human life is lack, loss, finality, a primitive doomsaying that has not been repealed by technology or medical science. The arts stand in the way of this doomsaying. Art objects. The nouns become an active force not a collector’s item. Art objects.

Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery by Jeanette Winterson, 1996, p. 19.