Petervan's Delicacies - Issue #142

The very best

About the emergence of paid communities. Or what is to come after the completely outdated Web 2.0 (Web 2.what?)

Mind-blowing post about squads in emerging economic networks. The squad is the basic user class for the tools we need today as a society.

When so many are struggling for connection, inspiration and hope, Fantastic Fungi brings us together as interconnected creators of our world. Fantastic Fungi...

About Normalist and Weirdist responses to the Great Weirding > a lot to chew on here...

About the pandemic as an unprecedented opportunity – seeing human society as a complex system opens a better future for us all

About econospheres and metaverses. By the guy who runs Epic Game Studios and got in a clash with Apple.

This article is part of the Futures in Long-termism series. You can read all other related blogs by following the links at the bottom of the text. Throughout the past decades, we have been slicing…

physics and psychology and (3) harness compositionality and learning-to-learn to rapidly acquire and generalize knowledge to new tasks and situations. It is unclear if Lake has prescribed an order on which skill is a prerequisite of which other skill. I propose that we use the notion of self-models to prescribe an ordering for a roadmap for AGI. Here is the consequence of various selves and the skills that are learned

The Weird and Eerie Battlefields of Tomorrow: Where Horror Fiction Meets Military Planning This article intends to argue that techniques from the writing of horror fiction can improve militar

Editor’s note: This piece is a spiritual successor to “Survival of the Richest,” a report about how the wealthy plot to leave us behind after an apocalyptic event. Many of us don’t like who we have…

Data and Society

In this short, hyper-charged book, Cory Doctorow breaks down the real problem with surveillance capitalism — and how we can dismantle it.

Zeitgeist

Strelka Mag — Exploring new urban conditions. The online magazine of Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design.

As the economy contracts and many companies struggle to survive, the biggest tech companies are amassing wealth and influence in ways unseen in decades.

One America is living in a housing boom. The other needs support from the government or family for an affordable place to live.

Innovation

The 6G chip can transmit waves at more than three times the frequency of 5G: one terahertz, or a trillion cycles per second.

Future of work

Douglas Rushkoff writes eloquently about the rich moving out of the city to comfortable mansions in the country to avoid the pandemic. He talks about the rich building their “escape pods” and (with…

Internet Culture

If you want to see the future of technology and policy, look no further than digital gaming. Not only are they at the cutting edge in consumer behavior, gaming apps like Fortnite are now in the middle of a national debate about state-of-the-art tech regulation.

Check out this scene by scene comparison as we look at all the shots from Epic Games' new Free Fortnite short and see how it matches up to Apple's original 1...

FinTech

Disclaimer: You will find exploratory thoughts in this blog. This is not a place to look for governmental positions. The Blockchain Lab is an experimental outfit within Deutsche Gesellschaft für…

The expanded partnership will bolster TransferWise’s global reach to nearly all countries in the world.

The last decade has seen an explosion of digital currencies, and in recent years leading economists, central bankers, and policy makers have joined technologists and entrepreneurs in exploring this…

Between payments, lending, insurance and checking accounts, Amazon is attacking financial services from every angle without applying to be a conventional bank. Read more.

Today, the majority of SaaS company revenue comes from subscription fees. With fintech products and services, the future may look very different.

Covid-19 has caused some fintech investors to pull back, but some have continued cutting checks. We take a look at the top VCs that have remained active from Q2'19 to Q2'20.

Santander is spinning out its Innoventures fintech venture capital unit and doubling its commitment to the newly autonomous fund to $400 million.

AI, Robots, Algorythms

Demo video for SoundSpaces: the first audio-visual platform for embodied AI

The company’s new research aims to train AI using both visual and audio data, letting smart robots use sounds to understand a physical space.

Digital Ethics

Creative formats that chase ideas at the intersection of technology and philosophy & speculate about the future. This is my first experiment. If you found it...

Masks/Defence/Hiding

A luxury problem. With the Coronavirus pandemic ongoing, WIRED team gathered their favorite face coverings for running, walking, and going to work.

Post Capitalism

What equipment is necessary to render us sensitive to the New Climatic Regime? Bruno Latour in 2016.

Weird (Cyber)Space

During the global lockdown of 2020, The Avalanches teamed up with a team of intrepid scientists, astronauts and engineers from the SETI Institute and NASA fo...

Photography and Camera News, Reviews, and Inspiration

Online events and meetings done well

Under pressure to create groundbreaking content without leaving my apartment, I designed an experiment to see if I could automate my presence in video meetings. HILARIOUS!

Architectural Adventures in Mass Media. Fantastic article and equally fantastic video below

Art related

The Physarum Experiments: various studies 2009-2018 Artist, Heather Barnett, works with the slime mould, Physarum polycephalum, as material, model and metaph...

This is "Marlene Dumas - Double Takes" by Zeno X Gallery on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them. Still on expo at Zeno X Antwerp till 10 Oct 2020

The cult filmmaker chats with GARAGE in anticipation of her Metrograph retrospective.

Aesthetics

While surfing through the many AR implementation methods out there, I accidentally bumped into the 3d hand-cut paper urbanscapes by artist Katsumi Hayakawa via Tina Roth Eisenberg's Twitter feed. I was then fortunate to on LinkedIn from Julia Reed to learn about cryptovoxels.com ... woah.

3d hand-cut paper urbanscapes by artist Katsumi Hayakawa

After a harrowing ordeal as a teenager, Wafa Hourani devoted his life to art. With his scale models of refugee camps, he tries to shift perspectives

Qalandia 2067 by Artists Wafa Hourani

Constellations made up of dots of life when seen from space.

Cityscapes based on title pages of influential antique books

The Origin of Species - by Nicholas Rougeux

Highlights from SCI-Arc's 2020 B.Arch Thesis Weekend. The weekend’s events included two full days of project presentations and reviews.

Music/Sound

Reestablishing Connection A covers project by Sega Bodega & friends. Out now: https://segabodega.bandcamp.com/album/reestablishing-connection All profits wil...

The best version ever Enjoy

Kraftwerk clip taken from Part Troll DVD. Filmed at Hammersmith Apollo, London in 2004 > via @nekliolios

For real nerds

Other

Esher Dogs by @IndieTheIntrovert