I am doing Looptober again this year. Last year I used it as an opportunity to clean up my SuperCollider toolkit. This year I've been trying to use the modular synths as much as possible but I'm still at the stage where getting started takes fifteen minutes of faffing around - hopefully by the end of the month things will be more streamlined. Last year I was putting the tracks on SoundCloud but I maxed out my storage there and I don't fancy paying for a pro account - I'm thinking of setting up a FunkWhale instance for music but that won't happen this month. A slightly tidied-up version of last year's efforts is on my Bandcamp.
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How big tech is using academic and nonprofit research to launder their use of massive amounts of online content to train their weird image generators. As someone who spent a lot of 2015 and 2016 bothering my children and online friends with freaky pictures I'd made by abusing neural networks, it kind of feels like Silicon Valley is doing this to the entire world.
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Photos of distorted railway lines after the 2010 Canterbury earthquake
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An illustrated walkthrough of StableDiffusion. If you read someone who describes neural nets as impenetrable black boxes, it's a sign that they don't really understand either machine learning or what the metaphor of a "black box" is meant to represent, or both. We can see inside machine learning models; we just don't have a clear idea of exactly how they work, yet.
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Is the AI spellcasting metaphor harmful or helpful? "When you’re working with these, you’re not a programmer anymore. You’re a wizard, right?" This made me feel old: programmers used to think of themselves as wizards all the time, it's right there on the book cover. This also made me think that all metaphors used by nerds are harmful because we are way too inclined to think that because we came up with a clever metaphor for something, we understand it. (Incidentally: I broke a draft of this post because I had mucked up the links, and used a regexp search-and-replace to fix them, and my regexp broke on this entry because it had two links, which is the flip side of the wizard metaphor, that we're much more like the sorceror's apprentice than the actual sorceror.)