Author: dave-o

Yes, I’m asking for your financial support, but I’m also trying to figure out of I set up this Patreon x Mailchimp integration properly

This is a short ask. In addition to these meaningful distractions, I also write disturbing fiction. If you want to support that, you can do so on Patreon:

https://www.patreon.com/DavidErikNelson

Patrons get both the satisfaction of knowing that they, in some small way, are implicated in the things I do, and also fun bonuses (e.g., stories not available elsewhere, a short film, music, interactive fiction experiments, etc.)

I’m also trying to figure out of my Patreon x Mailchimp integration thingy is working properly (ideally it will automagically add new patrons to an existing email group so I can reliably send them stuff). So, if you become a patron at any level, you’ll get the additional satisfaction of knowing you’ve either confirmed that I’m at least as smart as an 8th grader, or sending me into fits of fury aimed squarely at every major platform that seems to think that UX “just happens.”

Clarkesworld Draft Statement on AI/LLMs (“Artificial Intelligence” and “large-language models”; i.e., ChatGPT, etc.)

This is a good start. Of potential interest to many.

I’m tired of waiting for industry organizations to respond to AI issues. Working draft of my own is here: http://neil-clarke.com/ai-statement/

Neil Clarke, editor-in-chief at Clarkesworld Magazine.

For those not following the inside-baseball of small-stakes, high-prestige sci-fi/fantasy short fiction publishing, Clarkesworld is both an extremely good and prestigious publisher, and has been getting absolutely hammered by asshats bulk spamming their online submissions with hundreds of AI-generated “stories” on a daily basis. The stuff is unpublishable drek, but eats up the time and patience of volunteers and the few paid folks working in these very shoestring operations. Every publisher/editor I’ve talked to in the last few months is having similar issues. It’s a fucking nightmare, because like any invasive, it threatens to choke and kill off the ecosystem where it is running rampant. And that ecosystem is the bottom of the food chain whose peak is the most durable source of our global clout as Americans: Our Storytelling Industries.

 

Michael Jackson on Fire Diorama

Combines the hypnotic analgesia of an “oddly satisfying”-style process video with a weird hallucinogenic tribal jaunt through the semiotic-drift of memory and Europe’s long palimpsestic history of animism and Patriarchal monothiem. 

Also, the pleasure of an Irishman doing his best loving tribute to MJ and sort of almost a brief folk-horror film crammed in the middle.

★★★★★ Recommended; would watch again.

EBOOK SALE! 99-cents!

Wanna check out Detroit’s most extra-dimensionally cosmically cursed house? For a limited time it’ll only cost you a buck.

There Was a Crooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House (a short horror novel by David Erik Nelson)

Stop! Don’t unlock the door, don’t go inside, and whatever you do, don’t look at anything in the library — because this house keeps itself occupied. Fans of the Twilight Zone, cosmic horror, and Detroit will love this “absorbing horror” (Rich Horton, Locus magazine, Recommended Story). “A Real Page Turner” (5-star review and recommended read, Rocket Stack Rank)

Who’s holding the camera?

Jack Teixeira, dressed in camouflage fatigues, his finger wrapped around the trigger of a semiautomatic rifle, faced the camera and spoke as though reciting an oath.

“Jews scam, n—-rs rape, and I mag dump”

from the Washington Post: “Alleged leaker fixated on guns and envisioned ‘race war’”

First and foremost a video like this gets me thinking “Who’s coming to hurt us?”

(Answer: This guy #duh Me and my kids, we scam. He shoots. You get to score points tallied in our blood. End of story.)

But after that, videos like this get me thinking of how the camera fundamentally misdirects: we get so fixated on what’s in the frame, we forget about what’s outside the frame, who is holding the camera, pointing it, choosing what it shows and what it hides.

So I wonder: who was holding this camera? What have they left out? What choice did they make, and why?

Incidentally, if you want to watch a better man than me really stunningly dive into this issue, you can do worse than Errol Morris’s documentary about the American war crimes at Abu Ghraib, Standard Operating Procedure:

The Wiggler: An Expressive Synth Using Daisy Seed and Flexure

First things first, this is a fun little synth and I love the voice. But I’m mostly sharing this video because I really like how the creator guides us through their discovery process, and how the concrete realities of these materials and methods guided their design process. Well worth ten minutes of your time.

“re: Thesis defense issue…”

I loved this story, “RE: Thesis defense issue – kalirush 🐍” —and only later learned that it was a riff on an old McSweeney’s piece that, yeah, is fun but suffers from the baked-in McSweeney’s problem (i.e., that it “approaches humor with a lab coat and tweezers.”)

Anyway, this amateur fan-fic riff is better, because it is actually funny, not just theoretically funny and basically funny shaped.

[the image above is an XKCD comic]

The Groundbreaking “Computer Speech” Record from Bell Labs (1963)

Hear the groundbreaking “Computer Speech” record from Bell Telephone Laboratories, which features synthesized speech created by one of the earliest computer speech synthesis systems. Directed by D.H. VanLenten, this record represents a significant milestone in the development of speech synthesis technology. … You’ll also discover how punched cards were used to provide the computer with detailed instructions on how to manipulate the various formants to produce different sounds [and] explore the fascinating technique called formant synthesis, which involves simulating the resonances of the human vocal tract, and the IBM 704 computer used to generate the speech sounds. 

Incidentally, this record predates Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey by four years, and came out at least a year  before he began considering the project in earnest. We know that his work in 2001 was influenced by educational materials from the time; hard to believe this wasn’t one of them. 

Anyway, just for the record: this “talking computer” was exactly as intelligent as ChatGPT or any current AI, and considerably less so than a parrot—and inspired the same blue-sky certainty in the media. Hell, here’s an article about computers talking and reliably taking natural-language instruction within the next decade!!! (It was written in 1959.):

Screenshot of article from December 2, 1959 titled "Talking Computers Foreseen in Decade." The first paragraph reads: "Ten years from now it will be possible literally to speak to an electronic computer and have it answer right back.…" Observers will note that was a somewhat optimistic estimate (the first commercial product that approximated this functionality was released in the 2010s) .

Does Russia Have Any Functional Nukes?

Thunderf00t—who I don’t always agree with or necessarily like—makes an excellent point around the 18 minute mark in this video. The jist of it is this: nuclear weapons are fragile as hell and expensive to maintain (to the tune of ~$1 million per year). If not properly cared for, they don’t kaBOOOOM!🤯 and Chernobyl us all to Mad Max land. Instead, they look perfectly fine and useful, but when you go to launch them, they fizzle like damp firecrackers (albeit damp firecrackers that can spread radiation; but still, while awful, a dirty bomb is not a nuclear bomb).

Russia is a first-order corrupt kleptocracy, as demonstrated by their current Ukrainian misadventure. If they haven’t been maintaining the cheap and easy stuff (like tanks), then they sure as hell aren’t maintaining the expensive stuff that’s hard to spot check for compliance (like nukes).

(Honestly, the whole video makes a series of inter-nesting excellent points, and is worth watching. The major thrust is that there are a lot of dogwhistles blowing out there, signaling who is and is not an actual nuclear superpower.)