Chenoe Hart

this points to something Paul hints at toward the end of the piece: high-literacy/comprehension is increasingly and worryingly become upper or upper-middle-class coded, rather than being taught in public (US sense) schools. You can see the same happening in the US with phone bans for kids.

What kind of physical + technological space could be described as the opposite of an automated warehouse?

I feel like the reproductive crisis isn’t even a problem to the extent that it incentivizes us to look for those kinds of socially-beneficial solutions, where we otherwise might not be sufficiently motivated to do so.

I feel like SkyMall was more fun though. Many of the kinds of things you saw which seemed absurd in a SkyMall context would just seem tedious if you encountered them in an internet video today.

Seems like adding these kinds of map features onto more apps & platforms could be a relatively feasible way to make cycling infrastructure more usable.

Intriguing plan that goes well beyond symbolism. "Trucks from the First Nation could soon be transporting food, furniture and even critical minerals south of the border along ancestral pathways once used to move buffalo hides and pemmican across the plains—without paying taxes or tariffs."

if you were to teach a class on the pre/history of AI in terms of key concepts ideas, what would they be? the mind/body problem? abstraction vs materialism? history of the database? automation?

I’m not in a situation where people are giving me NDAs, and if I was I wouldn’t have made a post like that. I was only referring to work I’ve been creating on my own.

I’m starting to think I should start on a more incrementally legible self-directed project soon, almost just so I have something to talk about and share with people. But it’s a different kind of project, and I don’t know if it would translate into supporting larger/less shareable efforts or not.

It’s hard to be working on a project for which you don’t know how to document/share pieces of it online while it’s in-progress, so it appears invisible from an external perspective. I don’t know what else to say about that situation except that I’m in it right now.

i’d like to hear more about generative AI tools developed and deployed outside of the United States or China.

This is a fun graphic. I feel like this kind of bold/dynamic and unapologetically digital imagery is also already nostalgic, like a reminder of a more optimistic pre-2024 point in time.

(Particularly since travel involves putting in an extra input of effort/planning/energy that taking other kinds of breaks doesn’t necessarily require. There’s a kind of work involved with travel which doesn’t exist in the same way for some other activities.)

Cost is definitely an issue, but I wonder how much time is a factor as well. We live in such a competitive world these days that it can feel like taking the kind of break that’s needed to do significant travel would leave you behind in other ways.

The appetite for risk certainly varies by domain, but I get a general sense that some approaches to ambition & speculation changed following the rise in interest rates. Particularly in terms of work that leads to downstream cultural impact, like funding for publications.

Will we even remember it, or will it be a time period that we collectively forgot like we did with COVID? I suspect the simultaneous reduction in economic risk-taking + cultural production that’s happening right now (as also occurred during COVID) might make it a time that’s harder to remember.

"It has gone largely unnoticed that time spent on social media peaked in 2022 and has since gone into steady decline."

By @jburnmurdoch.ft.com

www.ft.com/content/a072...

Trying out april tags. Thinking about how it could complement hand tracking and vision models.

This is using github.com/arenaxr/apri... and I know what april tags are because of folk.computer.

Yeah, when I saw that news I immediately wondered about scaling. Since their launch in Atlanta has been limited (ie. via the Uber partnership) I wonder if activities like advance mapping or adapting to local signage could have been scaled back as well, & if that could be a factor in the incident.

an amusing fact is that slop is banned from most serious ai spaces, either actually or de facto. we all see it 24/7 and it is just mind-numbing rot that never ends, if we sent it to EACH OTHER we could never do anything else

Found some content for something I’m learning about that was written ~10yr ago on a blog, and it’s weird how it now seems slightly quaint and old-fashioned to read. There’s a sense of luxury to how it assumes you have a long attention span, and it’s sad that people don’t anymore.

The widespread glee in killing spotted lanternflies tells me that there is a need for widespread reflection on killing.

Congratulations!!!

when i noted this trend on the @designobserver.com podcast, a researcher reached out to note that the demographics and community bonds in this country were also altered and ma never be rebuilt.

losing 22k homes when CA only builds ~80k a year is significant

We need a word for physical objects designed by GenAI - slopjects?

I want this to be true so badly that I can’t trust myself: I have to refuse to believe it until I see a dotted line physically connecting the smoking gun to the body.

If it were true the consequences would be huge.

[Green tape] "Public management scholars over the past decade have shed significant light on ‘‘red tape.’’ This article takes a different approach by conceptualizing a theory of green tape or effective rules" selc.wordpress.ncsu.edu/files/2013/0...

I typically see digital twins discussed as detailed models of complicated systems, tracking the operations of an entire building or factory. What do you call a digital world model that’s less detailed & uses limited info, like if an AI knows that there’s someone with brown hair named Jeff?

I understand the sentiment behind this, but the bureaucratic implications would be pretty wild. There’s issues like tracking/documenting the age of a massive number of trees, and defining trees vs bushes. And lots of 10yo trees growing in sub-optimal conditions might not be very big.

According to standard accounts, which can be traced to Pasteur's collaborator Emile Duclaux, an attenuated strain of the chicken cholera microbe—in a word, a "vaccine" against the disease—emerged only because Pasteur's collaborators forgot or neglected his instructions to recultivate the microbe at short intervals during a summer vacation that he spent, as usual, at the familial home in Arbois As the cultures sat on the shelf unattended, they underwent attenuation and proved to induce immunity against chicken cholera when injected into experimental animals 42 By this account, a lack of diligence during a summer vacation was thus a major factor in the discovery of the first laboratory-produced vaccine, the only other vaccine at the time being the naturally occurring cowpox virus that Jenner had deployed against smallpox Unfortunately for advocates of serendipity, Antonio Cadeddu has recently destroyed this appealing legend by analyzing Pasteur's notebooks from the time Cadeddu shows that the chicken cholera vaccine did not emerge "by accident" at all, but rather was the product of a prolonged, complex, and quite deliberate program of research undertaken by Emile Roux without Pasteur's knowledge 43 Perhaps that is why Duclaux's version of the story does not appear in Pasteur's quasiautobiography of 1883, which elsewhere reveals his willingness to indulge such popular stories of the path to his discoveries 44

TIL the anecdote that Pasteur accidentally discovered an effective chicken cholera vaccine was probably made up, and the soured broth actually resulted from lots of work by his assistant Emile Roux.