A week of middle finishes
Things start
Things moved
The effort of
the doing
is always fleeting
A quick thank you to everyone who posted and shared last weeks post on NoAI LoFI! I’ve had some really interesting conversations from people reaching out! Thank you 🙏
After Reading The Draft
I sat down to write about the $450 billion that OpenAI are going to be spending on compute availability between now and 2030. An amount of money that’s thats roughly 3 ISS’s space stations, the cost of the entire US highway system from 1950-2000, or 22 Crossrail tube systems in London.
It’s just an absolutely enormous amount of money, a similar amount of burn as the war in Iraq cost cost over it’s first 5 years. Then I was going to say that if thats the next 5 years, here’s a graph showing the amount of compute available to labs over the last 3.
And lastly, I was going to talk about these screenshots from the ChatGPT o3 internal safety report that recently surfaced
But after reading the draft I wrote about OpenAI being ALL IN on AGI, I realised I sound like a crazy person. So the screenshots speak for themselves. You can draw your own conclusions.
Experience.Computer
Katherine Dee
Katherine Dee – Experience.Computer
IN THIS INTERVIEW
Jay Springett leads internet culture reporter and ethnographer Katherine Dee through a series of imaginative exercises.
Then they discuss:
Early Internet experiences
The weight of words in software programs
The feeling of being inside/outside online communities
The need for experiencing silence and boredom
Big thanks to Katherine for coming on the show! She actually came down with something right after we finished recording.
On The Blog
Nothing posted on the blog, but as you can see above I put out a new episode of experience.computer.
Posts continue to go up over on BYENNE:
Old stories don’t die.
They hang around.
Sometimes in the walls.
Sometimes in the naming
of a street.
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Photo 365
The Ministry Of My Own Labour
- Did all the marketing image selects from a huge figma for the game I’ve been working on.
- Wrote Little Guys post draft about the Sony AIBO, Furbys and Robotics
- Published an episode of Experience.Computer
- Booking October flights to Berlin tomorrow! I’ll be there late October.
- Sent slop machines draft to someone in the huge mess that it’s in :S
Terminal Access
I really reccomend this 2018 CBS article called: What lies at the bottom of one of the deepest holes ever dug by man !
An international team, led by Princeton geoscientist Tullis Onstott and Belgian biologist Gaetan Borgonie, are pioneers in the search for life buried in the rock where no one thought it could survive. Borgonie says his colleagues thought he was crazy when he took a sabbatical to try to prove there was life deep underground.
Dipping the Stacks
The Harry Potter Trap: how Hollywood got addicted to cultural backsliding
And so, the trap is also the safest bet. Keep the IP as similar as possible and just keep re-selling it. This worked for the opioids industry, so why not for entertainment?
How real is your world? How do you know? Maybe it’s the gentle sway of leaves in the wind. Or the sound of crickets chirping at dusk. Or the softness of the light in the summer. Take a step back, blink. Turn your head to the side. Are you sure?
“The whole media production effort and the campaign, more broadly, was like an antidote to doomscrolling,” DiMieri said. Despite being produced by a cohort familiar with the hellish trenches of Twitter, they understood that direct, hopeful messages played a lot better on modern video platforms like Instagram Reels.
How the World Fell in Love With a Summer of British Chaos | VICE
When you start to add up all the pieces of this equation—the tribalism, the humor, the hedonism, the rancor, and the jeopardy—it makes total sense that the Britain of 2025 has become so disturbingly proficient at gaming the online system. Because in an attention economy, what more compelling draw could there be than people with nothing to lose?
A Treatise on AI Chatbots Undermining the Enlightenment
All of these specialist areas will eventually get their own dedicated interfaces to AI, with tailored prompts channelled through fit-to-purpose tools.
Reading
I’ve now got 4 books on the go 0_o. Still reading The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America by David Whyte. And still reading The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For and Believe by Richard Rohr. I’m listening to An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence by Zeinab Badawi.
But on Monday I was gripped with the urge to re-read Gordon’s Ani.Mystic for the first time since it came out in 2022. It’s still excellent. Well done mate.
Music
XG – Gala
This K-pop single was posted in a discord i’m in this week. And the word that was used to describe it was Velocity. Can’t agree more.
Remember Kids:
“I put on my costume and I was Skewer Sue, for the con. And when we came back here, I took off the spikes and stuff, and I was Jenny again. And— and— then, you kissed me and I saw that Jenny is just another costume. We’re all cosplaying, all the time, and when you kissed me, you took off the ‘Jenny’ costume and there was nothing underneath.
Constellation Games by Leonard Richardson
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