“Delicacies” is my incoherent, irregular, unpredictable collection of interesting sparks I came across online. Handpicked by a human, no robots, no AI. Whereas in the early days, Delicacies were more about listing links per category, more recent editions seem to evolve into some form of tripping, wandering, dérivé, with some loosely undefined theme holding them together. Delicacies have no fixed frequency: I hit the publish button when there is enough material. That can be after a week, or after 3 months. No pressure, literally.
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The very best
The Realities of the 4th Dimension: another enjoyable read by Rudi Rucker who goes pretty trippy. Was also a good reason to dive back into his earlier work on gnarly computation.
“My sense is that you’re more likely to find the truth if you look into your own mind. You don’t need any special equipment for that. Ultimate reality is right there in your head. But for some reason we tend not to pay attention.”
Moral Ecosystems: Tony Shorin’s big idea
“The limitation of these moral networks, I have said, is their inability to interface with the local, with life on the ground, with the IRL, and with the institutions and physical resources which make them possible. The “pop-up city” and “network state” are two attempts to answer how they might do this. But there will be many more answers, and more efforts to bring them to ground are needed. No further online ideation is needed: these efforts must rely on-the-ground experimentation, trial and error. The time for internet preaching and demagoguery has concluded. Your job, and mine, is to seize to the ground.”
How to become somebody else - Isle McElroy on body swapping, imitation, and why empathy may be overrated.
“While body swap movies suggest a fixed self can be transferred into another body, the body swap study shows that the self is always shaped by its surroundings, which include whatever body we find ourselves in.”
This magic post by Eryk Salvaggio on the myth of AGI
Data & Society
About the battle between EPIC Games and Apple > “Apple is testing the boundaries of the European Union’s tech competition law”
Employers are letting artificial intelligence conduct job interviews. Candidates are trying to beat the system. The job applicants shut out by AI: ‘The interviewer sounded like Siri’
Sleight of Mind: How Marshall McLuhan 'Read the Contemporary World.' - By Andrew McLuhan
Innovation
Shock of the old: 11 wild views of the future – from winged postmen to self-cleaning homes
AI, Robots, Algorithms
Another great talk (or should I say “conversation”?) with Paul Pangaro, this time on Cybernetics, AI, and Ethical Conversations. From December 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is also before ChatGPT. A very nuanced 50 minutes of solid insights and so relevant today. There is a link to the slides ànd the appendices in the YouTube video's description (all worthwhile checking them out). The AiTech YouTube channel of TU Delft is BTW a fantastic treasure trove. Enjoy!
“I decided to test the models on tasks I often perform day-to-day, including summarisation, providing a critique of an article and market sizing. These are very typical tasks for anyone in business. To ensure a fair and comparable evaluation, I refrained from any attempt at prompt engineering, keeping the prompts plain and simple, allowing each model’s inherent capabilities to shine through.”
The Other AI Revolutions: a series of conversations about the AI revolution and its impacts on thought, society, and culture.
Bruce Schneider’s recent essay on mistakes and risks of AI that we made with social media
Digital Ethics
Worldcoin hit with a temporary ban in Spain over privacy concerns
Post Capitalism
About governance in the planetary age - NOEMA article by Jonathan S. Blake and Nils Gilman
“The planetary represents an invitation to rethink our institutions, commitments and rules and to forge new forms of cooperation built upon participation, solidarity and justice beyond the state and indeed the human.”
Art related
Further discoveries as part of my cybernetics dérive.
Jasia Reichardt was the curator of the 1968 exhibition “Cybernetic Serendipity”: her question: “What would be a revelation today (2014)?”
Aesthetics
Dr. Seuss Taxidermy collection (discovered via Rudy Rucker - see above)
More masks: The Getty Makes Nearly 88,000 Art Images Free to Use However You Like. You can even find an HD version (25080 x 14302 px 182MB) of Ensor’s Christ's Entry into Brussels in a Mardi Gras parade. The version below is “only” 1,9MB)
Music/Sound/Dance
Petervan’s Music Ride March 2024. Play in shuffle mode to increase the surprise factor. Enjoy!
In one of the Discord channels I am following, some recently discussed how sound should sound in 3D VR. And then there was this great post by Avi Bar-zeev on Spatial Audio and why it is important for spatial computing
“Without such head-tracking, even the best pre-recorded spatial music may rapidly fall back to “internalized.” Turns out, moving our heads is an important unconscious cue to feeling the audio is truly external.”
Just for the fun of it, let’s add some 360° horror—the Apprehension Engine from 2017ish
Of course, one could connect a simpler version to Ableton Live or Logic Pro X, and play around with the spatial sound mix options…
A very nice add-on pack for Imaginando’s Visual Synthesizer
Books/Publication
In the previous issue of Delicacies, I mentioned the book “Private I” (as in “i” or “eye”). The “non-AI” agent worn by the main character is called Marlowe. And then I bumped into “Heavy Tripping With Raymond Chandler” by Rudy Rucker and discovered the private detective. You cannot plan for these serendipities. What is the universe trying to tell me?
For real nerds
About ChatGPT getting its Wolfram superpowers - Stephen Wolfram (2023), "ChatGPT Gets Its 'Wolfram Superpowers'!," Stephen Wolfram Writings.
Smile
Dali recipe book: Diners de Gala
“Les diners de Gala is uniquely devoted to the pleasures of taste … If you are a disciple of one of those calorie-counters who turn the joys of eating into a form of punishment, close this book at once; it is too lively, too aggressive, and far too impertinent for you.”—Salvador Dalí
With the associated Surreal Cutlery set