Bulletins

From the desk of Sherif Soliman

2024.09.25 11:29 PDT / 18:29 UTC

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.


2024.09.24 17:44 PDT / 00:44 UTC
A photo of the cover of the book Knife by Salman Rushdie

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.


2024.09.22 14:02 PDT / 21:02 UTC
CDs I picked up from a record store.

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”.


2024.09.09 18:30 PDT / 01:30 UTC

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.


2024.09.06 23:30 PDT / 06:30 UTC
Albums I bought on Bandcamp Friday

A good Bandcamp Friday.


2024.08.31 14:59 PDT / 21:59 UTC
Screenshot of multiple attempts to write the Arabic letter sheen.

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


2024.07.31 22:35 PDT / 05:35 UTC

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).


2024.07.28 22:24 PDT / 05:24 UTC
Fähre und Pflanzen

2024.07.07 16:08 PDT / 23:08 UTC
My computer, CDs, and music library tending

💿


2024.06.22 12:00 PDT / 19:00 UTC
2024 Solstice Campout

2024.05.29 21:04 PDT / 04:04 UTC

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”


2024.05.19 14:17 PDT / 21:17 UTC
Screenshot of the top of the blog post page

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.


2024.05.12 12:36 PDT / 19:36 UTC

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.


2024.05.08 20:32 PDT / 03:32 UTC

You know, it hasn’t been the breeziest of weeks, but thankfully I’ve received my monthly email reassuring me that I’m “on a roll on LinkedIn!”, and boy does it make it all worth it.