Buffer overflow

An Arduino microcontroller and a breadboard with an even smaller chip, a bunch of sockets and a rotary pot, all connected with colourful jumper leads

Late last year I started looking at a microtonal pitch quantiser for my modular synth setup, and then I remembered that I had an Arduino Nano and an Adafruit MCP4728 Quad DAC sitting in a drawer, waiting for me to overcome my fear of soldering, and thought that fiddling with …

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The 120-cell

About a month ago I had to rest up at home following a medical emergency, and I was looking for a way to distract myself which wasn't getting stuck on the harder levels of Baba Is You or reading Boswell's Life of Johnson (which was good, but sometimes too gloomy …

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Don't grok

It's only taken me two decades but I've worked out why I've never liked people using the term "grok", despite being a big nerd who's the right age to have read that Heinlein novel.

Using it is a way of reinforcing your sense of being part of a special group …

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ChatGPT

Stories about AI have an impoverished visual grammar: bots that look like something from a 90s music video, all porcelain surfaces and dark hydraulic sinews, against corporate vaporwave neon swirls, or junk from DALL-E. I suppose there's a need to embody the disembodied, the same impulse that puts a CGI-rendered …

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Chat-GPT

Like every other nerd, I spent way too much time earlier last week playing with and worrying about Chat-GPT, but you can relax, I've stumped it:

Screenshot of Chat-GPT conversation

Screenshot of Chat-GPT conversation

I never thought that my addiction to lipograms would lead to any useful conclusions, but these exchanges seem to capture exactly what Chat-GPT is …

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Colonnades

AI generated photo of a bearded emperor carved from jade
AI generated photo of an ornate floral carving in red wood
AI generated photo of some spooky black pyramids

I didn't have as much time as I usually do for National Novel Generating Month, but I think the less time I spend on it, the better the results. I started out with a plan to do a complex, procedurally-generated parody of Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili but only got as far …

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DALL-E and you

An AI-generated cartoon of a sinister robed figure driving a yellow American school bus. A black shape resembling a crow is perched on top of the bus, entwined with the letters "HESSSS". The bus has the word "HEBSUSS" written along its side in black letters.

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 …

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DALL-E v GLOSSATORY

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 …

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