Black Truffle release their Hans Reichel collection this Friday. If you've never heard Reichel, do yourself a favour and listen to the pre-released tracks here. One of the greatest guitarists ever to radically reimagine the instrument.
This time last week I was in the pub talking about climate change as a weapon of war. I guess I'm naive to have projected that threat into the immediate future when seven days' difference may as well have been the present.
This is critical. We know GAI has enabled organised crime & political disinfo, because for these truth is less important than volume and velocity. If you are a regime that is willing to disregard international law for shock and awe, then you may also care more about volume/velocity more than truth.
It's also entirely explainable, and therefore can be trusted, and safer to operationalise. But it has a similar problem of being used irresponsibly to grant permission to act without human review of the output - so you need to train people to critically review the output.
For a lot of use cases, meat and potatoes data engineering and non-GAI automation works way better. It's rules-based and incorporates codified professional judgement into threat harm risk and inference. Old-fashioned approach, but it's not prone to unsubstantiated mirage, and it's more tweakable.
I do think there are legitimate, safe(r) uses of GAI in intelligence. For example, automated red teaming. You give it your intelligence assessment, and it reviews a) against your ground truth data and b) against academic or evidence-based best practice and picks holes in your thinking.
False positives and mirages are a known property of how a lot of AI works - e.g. if this is where Anthropic or OpenAI's solution was used, then it's the expected behaviour of those systems. The result is horrific, but it's an expected behaviour given the tool. Hence human culpability.
Loftiest trucks were made for wildest winds, and this brain-truck of mine now sails amid the cloud-scud.
While that's not the same thing as a single instance of human beings deliberately targeting children, if this was a target selected by AI, then we know from how AI works that granting permission to kill children is a feature, not a bug. It's an artefact of how this technology works/doesn't work.
If it emerges that the target was selected by AI, everyone working with that technology knows up front that it delivers to use cases that prioritise volume over truth, but because the output is superficially well-formed it feels plausible and effectively grants permission to act.
Read a little about this last night - the first draft of Star Wars, with Wookie World, that eventually got repurposed as Endor and the Ewoks. So if you take Lucas at face value, he seemed to think that it was too expensive to make a racist Vietnam movie so he opted to make Diet Dune en route.
Yes, this. If it was actually about Vietnam it would be a very different movie. No one should buy that from Lucas for a second.
Andor, however, is undeniably about something. But it is only connected to Star Wars via image, sound and a handful of characters. There is no thematic connecting tissue.
I take it as a sign that the whiplash has ceased being merely cognitive and is now structured into my body which is why I often feel as though I have been in a car crash.
If Azerbaijan joins the conflict (something that is looking increasingly likely) it’s going to become incredibly difficult to fly from Europe to Asia or Australia.
Fab day out in Hay-on-Wye yesterday. Great book shopping, great burgers, great company.
microdungeon fao @notsaved.bsky.social
www.instagram.com/reel/DVgdre0...
Holy shit. A "new" Fugazi album for my birthday. Did not see that coming!
fugazi.bandcamp.com/album/albini...
Lovely to feature on the new Haptic album, released today on my birthday!
ashinternational.bandcamp.com/album/ambiva...
Yotsuba & World Book Day
🚨 It looks like the UK government is gearing up to upend copyright law in favour of AI companies, legalising the theft of their work.
This is despite creatives' huge protests, and despite previous proposals being roundly rejected by the public.
Please spread the word.
🧵 1/4
Worried about these numbers. Percentages are one thing; distribution is what made the electoral difference between Corbyn and Starmer's GE performances.
The vent in this Leonardo hotel room sounds like a Tuvan throat singer getting attacked by bees during a football match. It's pretty terrific.
Picked an alright time to lease an EV. Could do with filling the crappy piss-coloured Yaris today though!
We mockingly call it the Lexus.
Tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has all but stopped since yesterday.
Read the @financialtimes.com Economics editor, Sam Fleming's analysis of what the impact the war in Iran will have on the global economy
www.ft.com/content/31bf...
There's often a narrow window where kids are obsessed with music, before they move onto other interests that are more accessible to them. If the restrictions are about licensing and insurance, change the laws and regulations. Create a broader variety of live music experiences and open the damn door.
An easy win is to create a greater variety of live music experiences. If you can ditch the age constraints, ditch them. And it shouldn't be sanitised kids music either - blow their fucking minds. DIY scenes are generally better at this. If the venue leaves kids at the door, use more venues.
So the finding is unsurprising. At an age when you're defining your social identity as separate from adults, and hopefully with some rebellion towards them, live music is a needlessly chaperoned activity. But most kids I know are into music from 8-10 and having their minds properly blown at 11 - 13.
The licensing for most shows prevents under 14s from seeing live music, with under 18s accompanied by an adult. Assuming an even distribution, 14.3% of these respondents would only be in their first year of adult-accompanied concert-going anyway.
www.mastercard.com/news/europe/...
