The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band who Burned a Million Pounds
London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2012

John Higgs

I went into this book feeling a bit cocky, like, how much is it going to surprise me? But it did. Quite a lot. I don't want to say which bits surprised …

Hermes Trismegistus driving a schoolbus

Last week I saw someone describe GitHub Copilot—the code-completion tool which has been trained on all of the public source code on GitHub—as a form of license-laundering, and the same thing occurs to me about DALL-E.

Clearly, it's been trained on an enormous …

GLOSSATORY is a bot which posts spurious definitions from an RNN trained on a dictionary, and every morning I use its output as a prompt for little drawings, some of which I post at GLOSSATORY. Today I tried feeding some recent definitions to DALL-E to see what it came up …

"Graffiti art of Wittgenstein riding a skateboard"

Happy Friday.

No One is Talking About This, London: Bloomsbury, 2021

Patricia Lockwood

I finished this in a couple of days and it was funny and touching—people probably think of Lockwood as a Twitter phenomenon but she'd have been a good writer no matter what platform she'd made her own. Mostly …

A couple of months ago I got a bit obsessed with this recurring question on Metafilter from people who can't or won't learn to cook and are keen to know if a single food will supply all human dietary requirements. It's been asked so often that it gets its own …

Just when I think I'm fed up with multiverses, I discover this two-season show, a spy thriller set in two parallel versions of Berlin, with an amazing central couple of performances from J K Simmons and Olivia Williams. It's the most satisfying science fiction show I've watched since Orphan Black …

Home sick from work today: I've been going to the office three days a week, and this is the first time I've had a sick day when it doesn't feel like it's blended in to working-from-home.

I have had two negative rapid antigen tests so far this week and about …

Thinking about yesterday's post and whether it really went anywhere, and whether the same criticism I levelled at the waffly IT blog post might be levelled at my own writing here, which doesn't need to come up to any real standards of coherence or clarity. That's what editors are for …

Setting aside the question of whether LaMDA is sentient, or whether the Turing Test is valid, or whether general AI is possible or likely—there are a lot very strongly held opinions on the matter out there if you want to go looking for them—I've been thinking about what …