Tim Boucher – Page 32 – Questionable content, possibly linked

As I near some publication milestones, I went back through and created an “official” (as official as anything here, that is) numerical ordering for all the Lost Books & AI Lore books series (the two bleed together).

Under this revised numbering, Relaxatopia actually becomes #118, and not #121 as I had mistakenly written in the past. Why the discrepancy? There’s one early book I took off the market, which was still impacting numbering, but now is excluded. And I was accidentally counting the two free books, Postcards from Quatria, and Postcards from Dystopia, which are not themselves original volumes, but compilations from the first chapters of other volumes. Those two are now also excluded.

Official numbering starts with #1 – Mysterious Stonehenge, which was the very first of the AI Lore books series and proceeds from there now in a chronological publish order, excluding the items remarked upon above.

Since none of them were AI-assisted, and they were all written before, and yet they all strongly impact the rest of the series, I have listed here the full-length novel (Lost Direction), the novella (Conspiratopia), and the free-wheeling pseudo-conspiracy theory diatribe (Quatria Conspiracy) as kinds of prequels to the rest of the series.

Without further ado:

000	The Lost Direction
00	Conspiratopia
0	The Quatria Conspiracy
1	Mysterious Stonehenge
2	Mysterious Antarctica
3	Beyond Tartaria
4	Mysterious Mars
5	Mysterious Chemtrails
6	Beyond the Mandela Effect
7	Inside the Sisterhood
8	Mysterious Giants
9	Worlds Fair Deception
10	Beyond the Simulation
11	The Abomination Crisis
12	The Prophecy of the Corporations
13	The Big Scrub
14	Mysterious Tob Gobble
15	Inside Princeps
16	Mysterious Time Crystals
17	The Disruption of Service
18	Mysterious Dragons
19	The First Days of Panic
20	The Four Providers
21	The A.I. Virus
22	Inside the A.I. Takeover
23	Inside the Hypogeum
24	Mysterious Dalton Trask
25	Beyond Atlantis
26	The Gamarcagon
27	The Gestalt Minds
28	The Shape Wars
29	The Tomb Under Manhattan
30	Wild Imagination
31	Beyond the Technate
32	The Tyrant & The Visionary
33	The Erdlings
34	Inside the Hollow Earth
35	The Dream Projector
36	The Death Machines
37	Beyond Nibiru
38	Mysterious Thunderbird
39	The Order of Chronos
40	The Survivors
41	The Island of Deception
42	The Great A.I. Theft
43	The Endless Knot
44	Mysterious Bigfoot
45	Beyond Blue Beam
46	Mysterious Orbs
47	Mysterious Timehunters
48	The Multiverse Scheme
49	Mysterious Hum
50	The Yellow City
51	The World Vine
52	The Turgoshi Megasphere
53	Mysterious UFOs
54	Mysterious Antennas
55	The Jealous Human
56	Inside the Council
57	The Cant of the Everwhen Gods
58	Beyond the Second Sun
59	Inside the Corporate Psychics
60	Inside the Enclaves
61	Mysterious Dinosaurs
62	The Sensitives
63	Das Machina
64	Mysterious Balloons
65	Tales of Irid & Acho
66	Inside Information Control
67	The Fire Behind The Sky
68	Beyond Mysterious Satellites
69	Mysterious Mushroom Computers
70	The Exempt
71	The Zalachete Fairy
72	Tales of the Hexagods
73	Tales of the Mechanical Forest
74	Tales of Shelvin Parz
75	Drone Flu
76	The Sea Bull, Kominthu
77	The Imagination Ladder
78	The Tree & Leaf Law
79	Beyond the Service Area
80	Inside the Dark Pyramid
81	The Circle of Sages
82	The Autonomous Cities
83	Daughters of the Hegemon
84	Tales of the Victoriana Intelligences
85	The Hyperion Collective
86	Impossible Geometries
87	Repermanent
88	Shadows of Evil
89	Celestial Cephalopods
90	Occupy AI
91	The Outliers
92	The Return of the Magicians
93	The Dwellers in Sandcastles
94	Subnivium
95	The Plastic Prison
96	The Banned Prompt
97	Tales from the House of Life
98	The Octave of Time
99	The Second Octave
100	The Jellyfish War
101	I Didn’t Read This Book Before Publishing It
102	Nominated for a Hugo
103	The Strike Against Suffering
104	Tales of the Hippo Knights
105	The Song Drive
106	The Politeness Protocols
107	Mirror City
108	The Garbage People
109	The Dissolving Factory
110	The Multibeast
111	Paradise Point
112	The Artilect
113	Hortus Conclusus
114	Deliriant
115	The Continuity Codex
116	Anxietopia
117	The Spirit Computer
118	Relaxatopia
119	Uncel
120	Namaste, My Dude
121	Smash That Like Button
122	I’m Not A Robot

Browsing the Web with no Images is Boring & That’s Good

By Tim B.

On 30 January 2024

In Other

I do still use images a bit for shopping or ideation purposes especially, but for much of the rest of the web I’m happy to say good riddance to images. I can safely say that I am not missing much for the most part.

Not only that, but it is happening again and again lately that when I go image-less, I check my few RSS sources or websites I still like (vanishingly few and far between these days), click around a couple things… and then somehow the interest in continuing with that kind of pointless browsing just sort of dries up and goes away pretty quickly. Dissipates. Instead of that like ceaseless chasing of your eyes gobbling up images and your brain and emotions getting pushed around by them.

Browsing the web like this (in a trickle or ‘garden hose’ mode – instead of firehose) is… boring? And that is exactly what I want. A web that forces me out of it, that leaves little place for my projections. Where my activity is not constrained by artificial screen time measures, but simply by the fact that it just doesn’t look that good visually. It’s not “sticky” and I can just then go do other things offline.

It definitely has taken a few days for my brain to get used to browsing without images. Something in me rebelled at first, and was always reaching for the toggle. Now its easy to see that your stock photo image of the sky isn’t adding anything to my life, and I don’t need to allow all those intrusions into my personal thoughts and emotions like that anymore. Unless there’s some good reason.

The upshot of all this is now, when the web work of the day is done, I’m more and more having this feeling of like, okay, just close the computer. Go read a book. Because the web without images is revealed as a sort of emperor with no clothes: a really badly edited and disorganized book. It makes you realize, fuck, it’s better to go read a book. Fuck all this noise.

Reducing the web to a trickle

By Tim B.

On 29 January 2024

In Other

I’ve blocked ads in Firefox for ages. Paywalls. I redirect Twitter links out to Nitter. I go grayscale on desktop. I use Reader View often. I have an external e-ink monitor (Boox Mira 13.3″) on order that I am fantasizing about using, though it doesn’t arrive for two or three more whole weeks because it ships from Mars, apparently.

What I want I think basically is to turn the internet, web pages, articles, etc. into something that could squeeze through a display like a Mailbug. Reduce the firehose of the web to a tiny thin trickle. A Do One Thing internet: read text. (Maybe publish text, cause I still like blogging.)

At each step of the way, as I get closer to a “tiny internet” for myself, I feel another set of triggers for pointless distractions fall away. The latest is installing an extension called Image Video Block. It’s UX is a bit imperfect, but it basically allows me to do exactly what it says in the title: block images and videos. Everywhere. Cause fuck it all.

Interesting thing is not only do I not miss them for the most part, it has been a good way to understand more clearly and less subconsciously how much images drive you emotionally. How much a part of the web is being forced to hunt around for them constantly? Even just looking at them for a second, never mind sifting through them relentlessly all day long every day in a stream as this little screen shines a cone of light into your eyes.

Speaking of the “cone of light” that I think fascinates/obsesses, I finally made some visual representations of the thing I’ve been feeling intuitively, courtesy of Dalle3. Full set. Archived. Highlights below:

Van Gogh’s Copies

By Tim B.

On 28 January 2024

In Other

Never seen these before, master copies made by Van Gogh based on other artists’ works. Recommend skimming them in gallery view by clicking on the images.

SYNONYM: The Greatest 80s/90s Canadian Hair Band You’ve Never Heard of

By Tim B.

On 27 January 2024

In Other

I haven’t had time to develop the backstory for this properly, so will do a half-assed release here instead, even if it lacks the verisimilitude this way that a more elaborate staging might give.

So yeah, I had the idea to make up a synthetic “hyperreality” hair band from the 80s/90s out of fully generative AI content. After discussing the matter a great deal with ChatGPT, we ended up landing on the band name SYNONYM, loosely inspired by the real Canadian hair band you’ve never heard of, Alias.

Alias, a “real” band IRL (ex-Sheriff & Heart members – btw this song by Sheriff kinda rules), had a confusingly-similarly titled song to Extreme’s classic “More Than Words,” but Alias’ hit was called “More Than Words Can Say.” Which is yeah, hella similar. Here is Alias below. :

The song is “fine.” I didn’t grow up in Canada, so I only heard it for the first time recently. I don’t have any particular nostalgic attachment to it like I do some of the others mentioned here that I grew up with. But it got me wondering about markets like Canada, that are adjacent to, but largely parellel to US pop culture or modern music history. There are a few intersections here and there from the Canadian side crossing the border, but mostly things just chug along apart it seems… Anyway the whole thing got me thinking: what if there were entire huge untapped worlds of good popular music that had existed for decades, but we just never heard it?

Hence, SYNONYM was born, which I rather like as a name for an AI band here. I imagine that all of their songs were extremely similar to other popular hair bands and power ballads. Because that’s pretty much what AI excels at.

I ended up doing a decent set of images in Midjourney for their “very well-known” hit single music video, called “Louder Than Love.” (Archived here as backup.) These images are inspired in part by Extreme, in part by LA Guns, in part by GnR’s “Patience“, among I’m sure many others in this category that I’m forgetting.

Sadly, the music generation side of AI tech is not yet as good as the visual side. I experimented quite a bit with Suno.ai to see if I could get any passable prototype results to use as audio samples of SYNONYM, but they were so far off the mark that they’re not worth sharing here.

In any event, here is the full final set of SYNONYM pics, and below are some special highlights. Enjoy! Maybe I’ll find a way to incorporate the full untold story of SYNONYM into the AI Lore books in the not too distant (alternate) future (or past).

For whatever it’s worth, I believe these were some of my first tries with Midjourney v6 Alpha. Pretty impressive overall.

Quoting Gemini Protocol FAQ

By Tim B.

On 26 January 2024

In Other

Speaking of DOT:

Reading that starts as soon as the page loads, without you first having to carefully click past a pop-up window which actively tries to mislead you into “consenting” to something nobody actually wants or needs, and which continues right to the end of the page without being interrupted by another pop-up begging you to subscribe to a newsletter. Gemini pages are downloaded once and rendered once, and then they stay that way for as long as you care to look at them. Nothing changes in response to you scrolling around or time passing.
Source: Gemini FAQ

Agree the modern web is an endless sea of pushy trash.

Power Reader Diamond (Visual Concept)

By Tim B.

On 26 January 2024

In Other

When I started smoking a couple decades ago now, I had this experience for a while where visual text on screen would sometimes appear almost textured, where like shapes within the columns of text would sort of jump out at me visually. I would I guess ascribe it to the substance, but the impression has stuck with me so long now that I need to exteriorize it in order to let it grow into something else.

This was always the root of the concept:

That there would be some kind of app, or tool, or way of reading or… something… which would be composed in its essential form as a diamond, through which words of a text would rapidly scroll for reading, and that somehow, this technique would be much faster than regular conventional reading, and it would enable the user to scan through far greater volumes of textual material (and other compatible multi-modal inputs & sources). I’m imagining something you could just as easily use to read a book as scan through in a meaningful way a large dataset.

Thinking through questions around intertextuality also seems to yield applicability of whatever this kernel of an idea is here, a feeling, a fleeting stoned impression…

Whatever replaces our current old stodgy way of browsing the web will have to be able to visualize for us all the wexes, all the intertextual references and borrowings, connections to and from other sources, other voices, other texts, other interpreters and commentators. Enter the Power Reader.

In the interest of getting these ideas out of my head, so they stop swirling endlessly, I worked with Dalle3 to draft some concepts for this visually, but it got stuck and constrained in its own limited beliefs about the usefulness and desirability of “apps” and “cellphones” both of which I think I eschew (No Apps No Masters – a topic for another blog post). Still, the visual explorations have some additional nuggets of truth in them I think. There’s definitely something her worth expanding further.

Here’s the full set, an archive, and highlights below, hotlinked out of Imgur (and therefore likely broken by the time you see them) for your viewing pleasure:

Refusal of the Image

By Tim B.

On 25 January 2024

In Other

As part of my quest towards DOT technology, I’ve been trying to find an easy to install text-based web browser. But it is a challenge to find one on Mac that isn’t terminal based or require a lot of tinkering and 3 hours spent installing Python dependencies or whatever.

While I continue searching for one that “just works when you install it” (like any normal standalone Mac app), I have been enjoying a Firefox extension for the time being called Image Video Block.

I’ve been wondering if this is a form of iconoclasm, the breaking of the icons or images (with long historical precedent). The refusal to be governed and held sway by images being fired at high velocities and high brightnesses into your brain constantly, and the subtle continuous violence that tends to do to your thinking, without you being always constantly aware of it.

I disabled in that extension images, video, “media” (whatever that means), Flash, SVG’s and canvas (I think that’s a reference to HTML5). It’s weird to get used to a little at first, but interestingly also…. it’s NOT that weird to get used to. Some little buttons might be missing on certain sights, but browsing the web without all the junky image garbage seems liberating, refreshing. And, of course, you can allow-list certain domains, like I did for Wikipedia (where it now is slightly shocking to see images show up, after browsing around mostly without any elsewhere).

There’s a rant I want to go on about computers, cell phones, screens greedily gobbling up one’s “visual cone” (leading to obsessive and repetitive behaviors) but I’m still working out my thoughts on that. But breaking the images, dulling down all the shiny surfaces, turn off the colors, radically reducing functionality and intentionally adopting limits with technology seems to me right now like a Narrow Road to Happiness™. Probably won’t work for everyone not willing to let go of a lot of the things technology promises as “good” (but which are actually bad – like always-on notifications), but it works for me, right here, right now.

Quoting Phillip Toledano on AI Art

By Tim B.

On 24 January 2024

In Other

By way of Washington Post, reporting by Yan Wu:

As these examples show, creative professionals might still have an advantage in the world of AI art. Aesthetic taste, culture and skills honed over years can substantially influence the quality of AI-generated images. “If AI is not for you, that’s fine. But shouting about it is like shouting at the sea,” Toledano said. “It’s here. Be curious.”

Reply to the Verge: Fair Use is not copyright violation

By Tim B.

On 23 January 2024

In Other

Wanted to post a brief reply to this piece on the Verge by journalist Emilia David about a new organization called Fairly Trained, which aims to be sort of a “Fair Trade for AI” if I understand it correctly, offering certifications for AI models trained entirely on licensed data.

The Verge’s headline is, I think, technically inaccurate. It states: “AI models that don’t violate copyright are getting a new certification label.”

They also say this about Fairly Trained, the would-be certifying body:

Fairly Trained claims it will not issue the certification to developers that rely on the fair use argument to train models.

I think this journalist maybe took too much at face value Fairly Trained’s claims about what Fair Use actually is. Their blog post goes a bit further than what’s stated in the Verge. Quoting from that:

[…] this certification will not be awarded to models that rely on a ‘fair use’ copyright exception or similar, which is an indicator that rights-holders haven’t given consent for their work to be used in training.

[Quoting an exec at Universal Music Group] ‘We welcome the launch of the Fairly Trained certification to help companies and creators identify responsible generative AI tools that were trained on lawfully and ethically obtained materials.’

If you have a generative AI model that doesn’t rely on scraping and fair use arguments for its training data, we’d love to hear from you…

My contention with all of this is as simple as it is currently unpopular: anything that qualifies as Fair Use does not constitute a violation of copyright.

Stanford has a decent page on Fair Use here. Excerpt:

Such uses can be done without permission from the copyright owner. In other words, fair use is a defense against a claim of copyright infringement. If your use qualifies as a fair use, then it would not be considered an infringement.

So I think we can separate this announcement by Fairly Trained and the Verge’s coverage of it out into two things:

The claim that Fair Use is a violation of copyright – my understanding is that it is not, and this claim probably doesn’t hold water under scrutiny.
The recognition that creators have a legitimate desire to have greater control than they do under current Fair Use laws, which seem to plainly permit these kinds of uses in AI training.

While taking issue with the first one, I support the second one fully, and agree that we need new radical ways for artists (I hate the word “creators” because it reeks of ‘creating content’ instead of – can’t we all just be artists creating more than just endless ‘content’?) to be able to contribute high quality material to fully licensed data sets where everybody knows what they are getting into, and there are clear mechanisms set up that make sure that artists themselves get directly paid, and not intermediaries like collecting societies in France seeking to change the law in their favor at the likely expense of contributing artists.

I do think there is a place for these kinds of certifications and other allied efforts, but I don’t find it very useful for their purveyors to push seemingly inaccurate legal conceptions. I don’t see who that benefits. We can say we want to change how the law is, or how it ought to be interpreted, but we should also recognize what it actually today says and how it actually has been interpreted in the past. From there, we can point ourselves towards more informed aspiration, and build the realities we want to see one Jira issue at a time…