Resistance
The ‘bullshit’ continues with power grabs and lies with Harvard being told they can’t enroll international students. Harvard isn’t bending over and have received a temporary restraining order.
Heather Cox Richardson highlights much of the bullshit in the current bill being passed by the house, including stratospheric budget increases to ICE, tax cuts for the rich, and medicare reduction.
Re-re-remix
Lux Mala just now released a remix album of Toxicidad, its got 21 tracks and name your price?! Awesome. Also check out her great Lebanon Hanover cover, so talented!!
Rhys Fulber, Zoe Zanias, and Qual (aka William Maybelline from Lebanan Hanover) have been working together on some cool tracks. Zanias remixed Qual, produced by Rhys Fulber. Rhys Fulber made the Abyss with Qual on vocals.
Go Ride A Bike
Its possible to live car-free, shocking I know. Here’s a cool article about growing up car-free in Chicago.
Last link dump I begrudgingly mentioned that maybe Uber’s new ‘fixed-routes shuttles’ wasn’t completely terrible. What I guess I didn’t really think about is that this is a ‘gadgetbahn‘. But the r/fuckcars community helped remind me that yes, tech bros gonna tech bro.
This could go in the next section, but apparently there is an astroturfing campaign using fake AI people to combat a bus lane being added which would remove parking. Forgive me for my naivete, but of all things to make an astroturfing campaign, these people did this to save…parking spots?
AI All The Things
This week I turned off my windows machine I haven’t used in months. If I ever turn it on again, apparently it will have AI in Notepad and MS Paint.
Considering how fast AI is moving, I wonder if, when James Earl Jones sold his voice rights for Vader to be used to train an AI, that it would be used to by streamers (could we call these two screamers? geez) to make him say naughty words.
Are facebook ‘friends’ actually your friend? Are AI facebook ‘friends’ actually your friend?
Actually Useful AI
The current LLM models owe a lot to translation, specifically Attention Is All You Need was an academic paper created by Google’s AI translation team that really opened the doors to current LLM tech. Google now has live translation tools that look amazing. I could see a world where LLMs are used to translate to different languages, and the actor’s mouths could also change to match.🎭
Free Range, Artisanal Coding
Since AI Coding is all the rage, perhaps ‘artisinal coding’ is a good phrase for those of us still hand crafting our for loops?
Here’s some simple code on how to write a search engine.
Cysharp is an extremely talented game dev, who has contributed many amazing libraries such as UniTask and MessagePack for C#. If you are a game dev in Unity, you might run into problems with Linq and performance. Linq can allocate a bit haphazardly and this is a problem if it does it every frame, increasing heap fragmentation. Cysharp has been making ZLinq for a while, and it has hit 1.0!
John Carmack…made a power point to look more professional to academics. I always thought power points make academics look less professional…but that may be due to their graphic design skills. I’m not sure if his contribution raised the bar any. 😂