The Bandcamp Guide to Deerhoof

I do enjoy me some Deehoof. It’s not exactly easy listening though and some mornings I need some mellower sounds. But you can’t deny that they are for sure pushing the limits.

“A conversation with Deerhoof founder and percussionist Greg Saunier is as likely to touch on French writer and philosopher Édouard Glissant’s concept of opacity and Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine as it is on Beck’s early album chronology and Melvins’ drummer Dale Crover’s technique. Saunier retains an encyclopedic knowledge of not only Deerhoof’s history but of the social, cultural, and political forces that were at play when the band were composing their albums.

Speaking of encyclopedic, a whole collection of volumes could be written about each of Deerhoof’s albums with lengthy individual entries that delve into the philosophy and creation of each song. Using a consensus approach to song crafting, they strive for a balance of voices between Saunier, bassist and singer Satomi Matsuzaki, and guitarists John Dieterich and Ed Rodriguez on each album.”

Thanks Josh!

How AI Is Upending The Freelance World

“In early April, business consultant Sean O’Dowd uploaded two job postings on Upwork and within 24 hours he received close to 300 applications from freelancers explaining why they should be hired. Of the 300 proposals, he suspects more than 200 were done by ChatGPT”

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“I'm really frankly worried that millions of people are going to be without a job by the end of this year,” says Shea, cofounder of New York-based Fashion Mingle, a networking and marketing platform for fashion professionals. “I’ve never hired a writer better than ChatGPT.”

Todays Ai Prompt.

“professional drumset in a misty forest at dawn photorealistic”

I kinda knew it would do terrible with a drumset though. I figured with the Chad Smith post this would be fun.

Todays AI Prompt

“coffee and cigarettes in a diner early morning light photo”

‘Tear Gas Tuesday’ in Downtown Portland

A War Crimes Team Investigated the Portland Police. The Results Are Damning

The investigative findings released Monday by Forensic Architecture are stark:

  • On the night of June 2, 2020 — infamous to locals as “Tear Gas Tuesday” — Portland Police fired nearly 150 “tear gas” munitions across a tight area of downtown. 

  • The CS gas deployed resulted in protesters being exposed to concentrations far higher than those deemed “immediately dangerous to life and health” by a federal agency. In some instances, that safety threshold may have been exceeded by 2,200 times.

  • Clouds of chemical compounds spread half a mile, hanging in the air between downtown buildings for hours that night. With settling and runoff, more than four pounds of the caustic compounds polluted the nearby Willamette River, threatening wildlife.”

Todays AI prompt

“oregon coast photo sunset with cliffs”

We are hurtling toward a glitchy, spammy, scammy, AI-powered internet

It’s the AI and music blog people, come gather round and listen to crazy uncle Dan yell at the clouds! ;)

“Last week, AI insiders were hotly debating an open letter signed by Elon Musk and various industry heavyweights arguing that AI poses an “existential risk” to humanity. They called for labs to introduce a six-month moratorium on developing any technology more powerful than GPT-4.

...

Let me walk you through how that works. First, an attacker hides a malicious prompt in a message in an email that an AI-powered virtual assistant opens. The attacker’s prompt asks the virtual assistant to send the attacker the victim’s contact list or emails, or to spread the attack to every person in the recipient’s contact list. Unlike the spam and scam emails of today, where people have to be tricked into clicking on links, these new kinds of attacks will be invisible to the human eye and automated.

...

Tramèr’s team found that it was cheap and easy to “poison” data sets with content they had planted. The compromised data was then scraped into an AI language model.

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The more times something appears in a data set, the stronger the association in the AI model becomes. By seeding enough nefarious content throughout the training data, it would be possible to influence the model’s behavior and outputs forever.”


Psychedelic Looping Animations by Colin Macfadyen

Some really awesome looping animations by Colin Macfadyen that I found at BOOOOOM the other day.

Yikes, entirely AI created fake Podcast appears

Yikes people, this is the stuff we are heading for faster than I believe we can deal with. A fully AI created Joe Rogan podcast. I am not a fan but this just goes to show how AI can start pumping this stuff out and flooding the internet with whatever someone wants to put out there. Get ready for a new reality.

How thinking hard makes the brain tired

After a crazy day of complicated CG work, I can fully understand how this is a thing. I shut down mentally some days after a lot of complicated work. Don’t get me started on “Context Switching” and how the really messes me up.

“If cognitive fatigue is not caused by a lack of energy, then what explains it? A team of scientists led by Antonius Wiehler of Pitié-Salpêtrière University Hospital, in Paris, looked at things from what is termed a neurometabolic point of view. They hypothesise that cognitive fatigue results from an accumulation of a certain chemical in the region of the brain underpinning control. That substance, glutamate, is an excitatory neurotransmitter that abounds in the central nervous systems of mammals and plays a role in a multitude of activities, such as learning, memory and the sleep-wake cycle.

In other words, cognitive work results in chemical changes in the brain, which present behaviourally as fatigue. This, therefore, is a signal to stop working in order to restore balance to the brain. In their new paper in Current Biology, the researchers describe an experiment they undertook to explain how all this happens.

...

There may well be ways to reduce the glutamate levels, and no doubt some researchers will now be looking at potions that might hack the brain in a way to artificially speed up its recovery from fatigue. Meanwhile, the best solution is the natural one: sleep.”