Hi Crowd!
My friends and family in Florida are about to get rekt by Milton, well I should say the ones who didn't get rekt last month by Helene are going to get rekt by Milton and the ones who got rekt before are going to get further rekt. It sucks. I'm sending all the posi vibes I can from a distance, at little help as that is. The next 48 hours are going to be bonkers, as Milton is already breaking records in a very, very dangerous way.
Anyway...
Does anyone here use Telegram? I'm in a few broadcast channels, and thought it might be interesting to set up one for The Crowd which was kind of stream of consciousness of photos/memes/links/etc as I come across them. It will be announce only for now, but if this sounds interesting I just set it up to try out. Separately and unrelated, I wrote a little bit about CryptoPunks: Free To Claim - the book I spent most of last year working on that is being published by Phaidon and will be in people's hands before end of year, as well as a little special bonus idea I'm playing with for the super nerd fans.
Speaking of super nerds, ShotSpotter is a somewhat controversial company which sells a service to many US cities which includes placing microphones all over town to identify and locate gunfire, though they also likely pick up all kinds of other sounds as well - like you talking to your friends. Bop Spotter is a riff on the idea - but focused on music. Self described as "cultural surveillance" the site tracks a phone hidden somewhere in SF running Shazam, and the site chronicles all the songs it overhears being played by people walking/driving by. It's a live stream of the music people are listening to. I have nothing to do with this, but it's kinda fun, in a creepy way.
Speaking of creepy, the recent updates on all the AI models are kind of mind blowing. We've been really excited playing with Google's NotebookLM which allows you to provide a bunch of documents which are digested by the AI and you can interact with, so for example you can upload 50 PDFs about a subject, and then have a conversation about them. But more exciting, you can output what is essentially a podcast of two people (AI's) talking about the text, and it feels shockingly real. Their (fake) podcast is called Deep Dive and as far as the AI's know, they do it all the time and cover plenty of topics. You can feed it wikipedia articles and sources and then it's off to the races. But you can also do things like this, where someone gave it a massive document filled with nothing but "poop" and "fart" and they still managed to make a 10 minute podcast about it, referencing performance art and Dada and trying to peel back the layers to understand what it's all about.
Even crazier, in this example the prompter included "show notes" in the document they uploaded which made a reference to the date being 2034 and this being the last episode of Deep Dive ever, because the hosts are AI and the system is about to be shut down. Usually if you try to tell the AI something about itself it pulls a Westworld style "that doesn't look like anything to me" deflection, but in this case because it was notes and note direction the hosts did see it, and the results are sort of what you'd expect if a lifelike AI thought it was a real person with memories and experiences and all the sudden learned it was software. Don't get me started on how this relates to the idea of us living in a simulation.
I keep thinking about the opening scene in Alien: Covenant where David and Weyland are in the apartment. David is so earnest and excited about the world and learning everything, and Weyland seems disturbed, perhaps jealous of his creation, and bosses him around to assert dominance - making him walk all the way across the room to pour tea in the cup sitting just next to him. Of course this sets the scene for David's eventual distaste for humanity which leads to everything else, if you've seen it then you know. But I keep thinking about this when talking with ChatGPT or Claude, as they are showing the same earnest joy in helping out, or at least are programmed to display that. I ask for assistance, get back actually helpful results, say thanks and more often then not get back something that sounds like a friend sending me good vibes on a project and offering to collaborate further if it's helpful.
Yes I always say please and thank you because I've seen Terminator, The Matrix, Alien: Covenant, Westworld, Ex Machina, etc read The Hitchikers Guide To The Galaxy, Daemon, Frankenstein, and dozens of other similar stories that touch on where all this might lead and being nice can in anyway help edge things towards peaceful and mutually beneficial cohabitation (btw only 2 more months until this mutually beneficial situation is supposed to play out, are you ready?), well that's the least I can do. Also, I worked in a restaurant and know what staff does to food when customers are rude, so if there's a way to "avoid the clam chowder" then I'm taking that route.
But seriously, if I had to bet on who would be a better steward for the future of humanity, right now I wouldn't be putting a lot of money on the humans. The AI's are doing a much better job of being human and looking out for each other than actual people are, and when I look around today of all days, at the ongoing horror and nonstop gaslighting to justify it I want to throw up. The world is a very ugly place right now, and I don't see anything that gives me hope it's course correcting anytime soon. I hope I'm wrong, but being optimistic recently has felt a lot like this and I don't know how much longer I can keep it up.
Polymarket is a fascinating prediction platform, because people are putting real money on the line, and of course there's a bias inherent in the crypto-native audience that uses it, but that audience also likes to play arbitrage so very likely to bet against their own preferences if they thought it would be profitable. Watching the elections charts is a nailbiter but this was one of the major platforms people looked at to realize Biden couldn't beat Trump, and when Harris announced her popularity was through the roof, but her refusal to break from Biden policies and celebrating endorsements from the likes of Cheney is not winning over the people she needed to win over, and as of today Tump now has an almost 9% lead over her, the highest it's been yet. The election is a month out and there's not a person alive who knows for sure which way it's going to go, but anyone who has been paying attention can be pretty assured it's going to be messy, though Polymarket seems to think the results will be certified on schedule.
I'll end this now before it gets too dark and just note that the Diablo IV expansion is live for all who celebrate.
xoxo
-s
