Love this, another awesome blog site that has no tracking or analytics, like my own.
If yer wondering how I know Blogroll.org’s traffic levels, where folks are coming from, email open rates, etc.? I have no freakin’ idea and I’m okay with that.
It’s actually quite liberating. You should try it, too.
Besides way back in the beginning, websites had no clue either. Old school, baby!
I enjoyed this piece and appreciate that the Daily Grail is still going strong and putting out interesting quality content after all this time. Kudos to Greg!
‘Smart people’ are often the dumbest people you’ll ever meet, and in researching this article – watching numerous podcast and video interviews in which these ‘tech visionaries’ featured, or reading their writings – I discovered that many of these supposedly incredibly smart people are the dumbest motherfuckers you’d ever meet, with zero ability for introspection or emotional intelligence.
CoEvil is the 123rd installment of the AI Lore Books series. It depicts a near future/present where government devolves into an entirely privatized hyper-capitalist dystopia where society is divided into strict “subscription tiers.” Until, like in many of my books – especially the recent ones – things completely fall apart and reality starts disintegrating at the seams. The book is, er, inspired by “current events” and builds on storylines developed in previous books like The Continuity Codex, some others, and The Algorithm #5, which I think I may put up for sale as its own thing in the coming weeks as well.
This is the first book to use Recraft extensively for image generation, and the results are in general pretty good. I would call it a cut above maybe Ideogram. There are also a lot of janky Firefly images in here – a janky quality that I like, reminiscent in its way of early Stable Diffusion combined with the feelz of Adobe Stock images. There are also a handful of Dalle’s thrown in for good measure.
The text is a combination of my own writing with help from Mistral & Llama via Textsynth, like pretty much all the latest books I put out this year.
This is the first book to glancingly reference what I am calling “Natalitarianism,” which I plan to also make as the centerpiece of the next book or so, depending how things go. Enjoy!
I have a lot of horses in this particular race, but this quote from AP coverage just strikes me as wrong:
And what will happen when some of Jones’ casual fans who didn’t follow the news of the bankruptcy auction log on to Infowars in a few months only to find the Onion’s new creation? Probably not much, said Beran, who suggested it’s unlikely there’s much overlap between people attracted by conspiracy theories and those who want to mock them.
In my experience, there is actually a *great deal* of overlap between those two groups… But I think that’s not a drawback, that’s another thing in the plus column!
Mentioned that I have quit checking news recently (and in fact blocked the sites I used to check using a Firefox extension called Leechblock to remind me of this decision). But I still need “something” to check in on to keep a loose contact at least with the outside world. I’m not on social media anymore though, so that isn’t an option. Too toxic, too full of bullshit & algorithm chasing. So what have I filled the gap with?
Two things. First is my regular Fraidycat RSS headline feed. When I find interesting sites, I plug them in there to keep track of them over time. This used to be sort of an after-thought after checking the news. But now it is one of the main jams. Second is a site called ooh.directory and its recently updated page, which acts as a sort of aggregator of the latest posts by blogs which have submitted their URLs to the directory (there’s also a page for newly added blogs, and a page for a random set). It’s kind of like an old-school blog aggregator, and because included sites seem to be largely self-selected by contributors, its overall content quality is high, and also pretty random. Because of its format also, it seems to not have really any of the drama (that I can tell) which you might be inundated with on social media.
I do still occasionally look at random news articles that might come up incidentally as part of checking my regular RSS sources, but I no longer seek it out, and frankly don’t plan to go back to it any time soon. This new configuration seems a lot healthier.
I’m Not A Robot is the 122nd installment in the AI Lore Books series. It tells the story of a brain in a jar in a laboratory whose job is to endlessly watch YouTube videos at extremely high speeds, looking for patterns that are unknown to it on behalf of the insidious AI organization called Information Control.
The text was generated using a combination of human writing feeding iteratively into Mistral and Llama via TextSynth website, like the other recent ones. There are I think a handful of Dalle images in here, but the book leans heavily on Ideogram for images. And this is the first book I made extensive use of Adobe Firefly outputs – yes, just a few days after saying they are not that great, and that I would be (mostly) moving off Adobe. I still think the outputs from Firefly are not great, but in this case I was able to make that not great quality work for me, as it does produce some pretty messed up images. If I were looking for more “normal” images, I would probably be annoyed with it, but given how warped they came out, I actually ended up liking it better than I thought I would. And if you keep the quality on small/low, it generates lightning fast. And even though I hit plenty of filter-hiccups, it never rate limited me, so that’s pretty cool.
You can see some samples of included images below.
When I look at that first preview image top left, all I can think of is Elon Musk for some reason. Like that’s what he actually looks like with his mask off. Would not surprise me one bit. However, he doesn’t really feature as a character in this book – though he serves as inspiration for a sort of Palmer Eldritch character featured in a number of the other volumes for sure.
Anyway, I like how introspective this text is, and I end up feeling for the weird brain in a jar as it describes its twisted life experience doing what it is forced to do.
The title is a reference to how CAPTCHAs always want you to declare you’re not a robot. The last book, Smash That Like Button, actually has CAPTCHAs featured very prominently in the storyline, though this one does not and just continues that thematic echo in the background.
I thought I had more to say on this one, but I guess that’s all for now. Enjoy!
What started out as a one-off joke turned into a pretty good image set, centered around the theme of retro propaganda posters encouraging Americans to come live the “American Dream” – in Canada. More images at the link, and here are a few highlights below:
I actually am an American (and also a Canadian as of several years now) living in Canada, since summer of 2011, give or take. (Yes, Canada is everything you think it is).
I have a lot to say on this topic, but for now the images speak for themselves. I know a lot of people have a lot of anxiety about what happens next. One way I’m managing it is by willfully not checking the news anymore, because it’s all bad all the time… (and I feel way better for it).
But it doesn’t have to be this way, America. You could still come live the American Dream – in Canada. There’s still time to give us your tax dollars.
These images are mostly Ideogram, iirc, and a few scattered Dalle.
More to say on this topic another time. I’m just doing some house-cleaning here.
See, The Algorithm is doing more than shaping your feed. The Algorithm is shaping you, and everyone on the Social Network. The Algorithm rewards and punishes us at random, leaving us to guess what the secret factors are. The Algorithm encourages us to self-censor, or to create content we don’t care about. We just want to be heard. We just want to share and connect with friends. The Algorithm knows this and knows how far we’re willing to go to get what we desire.
Well, I refuse to be a slave to The Algorithm. I’m not going to try to guess what The Algorithm wants. I’m not going to play its games.
I realized I feel completely calm after the initial sadness. Why worry about the Apocalypse once its underway? Dystopia is my “wheelhouse” and something which I am oddly adapted to handle. This is what I’ve trained for all this time. I don’t have to wonder and worry anymore about which timeline I’m in (the hell one), just harden down for a very long winter. Gonna read Radio Free Albemuth again. Aramchek forever!
AI is a tool like the paintbrush, or the printing press, or Photoshop. It will be used for good things, and for terrible things. The same printing press that birthed Mein Kampf also gave birth to The Color Purple. It’s as good a tool for art as the artist using it. To those who are against it, I’d say to fight AI is to fight the sea. It’s a useless endeavour and achieves nothing. It’s better to be curious, than it is to raise the drawbridge.
I wouldn’t quite put it in those words, but that’s why I’m quoting what he said instead. I’ve quoted Toledano in the past and his work continues to interest me as many of the themes and tools parallel ones I’ve been exploring.
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