Summer chill creeps in
cupboards emptied,
bags in bags.
Orbiting,
warmer worlds
soon.
Bank Holiday Sorting
I hope everyone has had a great summer and late August bank holiday weekend. And a warm welcome to new readers following my weeknotes via Warren’s very kind mention in this weeks Orbital Operations.
The weekend here at JMO Synaptic Industries has been one full of friends, family and food. It’s been really nice.
There’s also been a lot of bank-holiday-house-admin; today we pulled everything out ‘the cupboard of doom‘ and sorted though it all. A great deal of recycling was generated and things set aside for a charity shop run etc I even sorted out the ‘bags of bags’ hahaha. Summers over more or less I think, it’s been grey and rainy, and getting quite chilly over nights here now.
I originally intended to write about METR’s HuggingFace incident report for this weeks newsletter, but the word count on that got a little out of hand and I spent most of today trying to rein it in, and figuring out what exactly is the though line thats most valuable.
There is A LOT happening in the coming weeks and months looking forward to sharing.
Photo 365
Start Select Reset 📑
Subscribing to SSRZ supports my online work and creative projects.
As a thank you, I send you my zine four times a year, just like it’s 1994.
Terminal Access
The local zinospehere continues to grow. This week I received issue #001 Field Notes on Productive Friction of cognitivewallpaper. A new zine from Doug Belshaw.
I haven’t had chance to read it yet, but I did flick though it over a cup of tea this morning and the vibe, presentation and world building is fantastic! Pre-orders for the next issue are up soon I think.
Dipping the Stacks
In 5 years, nobody will give a damn about AI-detectors.
Five years from now, asking ‘Is this AI?’ will feel about as urgent and meaningful as asking whether a photo was taken on film or digital. A few specialists, myself included, will care intensely. Everyone else will have moved on.
Make the Cheapest Game You Can
Before you write the game, before you fill your head with ideas and plans, find a collection of illustrations by a single artist. It can be stock art. It can be public domain art. What matters is that you have permission to use it, the reproduction quality is good enough for print, and there is enough material to build around.
The End Of Elsewhere: The Endangered Species of the Global Citizen
Three hundred year Western search for elsewhere is ending. The yearning it expressed remains; the yearning was always real. But the cure it proposed, the cure Rousseau articulated and the Romantics aestheticized and the modernists abstracted and the hippies spiritualized and the backpackers commodified and the volunteer tourists moralized and Bourdain humanized, is no longer believed in by the people who were supposed to inherit it.
How AI drove Shopify back to clean code
It turns out that agents want the same things as humans: code that is easy to read, explicit contracts, and constructive feedback. So the company has reorganized its theme architecture using these qualities as first principles (while maintaining existing Liquid themes in a ‘forever API’). While these changes better support our new AI overlords, the underlying code also became more readable to humans as well.
Europeans Are About to Find Out How Entrenched AI Is in Their Daily Lives
“Excessive labeling can cause ‘banner blindness’ with endless notifications,” Boniface de Champris, AI policy lead at the Computer Communications Industry Association, warned in December. “If we have to label everything, from simple spell-checked emails to photos with a filter, the labeling of AI content will lose all meaning.”
Description
Reading
I’m STILL reading the same books that I mentioned last week but all of them are nearly finished now. Made the most progress with The Experience of God : Being, Consciousness, Bliss by David Bentley Hart. I can see why it’s been a consistent bestseller in the Amazon Charts.
Music
Hartebeest – Keath Ósk (Single)
I’ve written 1000’s of words about Ósk’s Yaelokre worldbuilding project. Maturing as an artist, they are now releasing many of the yaelokre projects songs re-imagined under their own name on a forthcoming LP called Forward.
From the singles so far the indie-folk from Yaelokre has been swapped for cool kind of alt/art-pop, and a more naturalistic voice in the vocals. There’s now a brass section, and some jazz and bit hip-hop.
It’s really exciting watch an artist you admire grow into themselves.
Remember Kids:
You must disconnect all shackles, weights, obligations, all duties. You can write as badly as you want to. You can write anything you want to,—a six-act blank verse, symbolic tragedy or a vulgar short, short story.
If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland
Leave a Reply