Substrate

I lreally like this artwork, generated by Richard Nadler, which I discovered via Are.na. So I went looking formore information t and discovered it's part of a series. More here.

Yamabushi are revered as mountain priests or ascetic hermits in Japan, devoutly following the ancient traditions of Shugendō. This spiritual practice intertwines elements of Buddhism, Shintoism, and the indigenous worship of mountains. The very name "yamabushi" itself translates to "those who find solace in the mountains."

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It's good to have a word to sum up the effect that capitalism can have on us, especially through pernicious advertising.

The lamp I want is playful. Confident. Carefree yet sophisticated. Qualities I want to embody… but buying the lamp won’t give me those qualities (though I would enjoy looking at it).

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I knew mitochondrial networks were interesting, but this is next level.

Using machine learning models, [scientists have] estimated that worldwide, the arbuscular mycorrhizal network stretches for 110 quadrillion kilometers, almost a billion times the distance from Earth to the sun. (Scoop up just a teaspoon of soil and you might find 10 meters of fungal strands.) Every year, these fungi shuttle around 4 billion metric tons of carbon, equal to 11 percent of humanity’s CO2 emissions.

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My experience of Fable 5 this week was limited, and I didn't really notice much difference between it and the Opus models. I've been following people's experiences on Reddit, however, and it's been game changing for them. Simon Willison, also gave a hint of how 'proactive' it can be.

Only 0.1% of Elon Musk's trillion-dollar wealth is in cash, with the rest depends on the value of shares in his company on the stock market. But I'm not here to quibble over whether he was richer than historical figures such as Mansa Musa. It's all gauche, unnecessary, and built on the back of industrial level theft.

I don't think I've seen this painting before, but I really like it.

From the Guggenheim website:

During the years preceding his suicide in 1890, Vincent van Gogh suffered increasingly frequent attacks of mental distress, the cause of which remains unclear. Mountains at Saint-Rémy was painted in July 1889, when Van Gogh was recovering from just such an episode at the hospital of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in the southern French town of Saint-Rémy. The painting represents the Alpilles, a low range of mountains visible from the hospital grounds. In it, Van Gogh activated the terrain and sky with the heavy impasto and bold, broad brushstrokes characteristic of his late work.

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This is absolutely incredible from Lance Robertson:

I made a short speculative film as my final project for a course on Deepfakes and Synthetic Media that I took this quarter at UC San Diego, as part of my Speculative Design major.

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Prof. Kenneth Payne (King's College London) has published a paper entitled AI Arms and Influence: Frontier models exhibit sophisticated reasoning in simulated nuclear crises and summarised it on his blog. It's game theory on steroids.

This is such great satire from McSweeney's on the state of AI company financing. We all know it's a bubble, it's just whether it's going to pop or slowly deflate...

Benjamin owns a farm. He employs 100 workers plowing his fields. His total payroll is $10 million/year. One day, he buys a mule, which provides the worker who uses it with a modest 10 percent productivity gain. Benjamin fires 99 of his workers and purchases 99 mules, expecting a 1,000 percent productivity gain. The driverless mules cause plow damage to his property in excess of $50 million. Benjamin loses another $5 million due to the loss of productivity from his one remaining employee, who no longer guides a plow but instead spends 100 percent of his time shoveling mule shit. Goldman Sachs builds an altar to Benjamin in their lobby and cuts out the heart of a junior analyst on it every Friday. They call it “Blood Sacrifice Friday.” The name isn’t catchy, but the event becomes a management favorite nonetheless.

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