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I’ve spent a lot of time editing Wikipedia. I do it for many reasons, but one of the sillier ones floating around the margins of my consciousness is that I like to think that, by expanding Wikipedia, I am in some small way helping the advance of AI and speeding along the arrival of the singularity. After all, Wikipedia has historically been an important training corpus for AI models. But …

As we await the next generation of engineered writing, of tools like ChatGPT that are based on large language models (LLMs), it is worth pondering whether they will ever create truly great and unique prose, rather than the plausible-sounding mimicry they are currently known for. By preprocessing countless words and the statistical relationships between them from million of texts, an LLM creates a multidimensional topology, a complex array of hills …

One of the most interesting aspects of SwiftUI, at least from an architectural perspective, is how it essentially treats views as data. After all, a SwiftUI view isn’t a direct representation of the pixels that are being rendered on the screen, but rather a description of how a given piece of UI should work, look, and behave.That very data-driven approach gives us a ton of flexibility when it comes to …

I was a sceptic about the impact of the new tranche of generative AI tools until this week when two of my friends demonstrated how they could be used in genuinely transformative ways that go far beyond faking essays or acting as a search interface with poor boundaries and a tendency to invent things that look plausible. Last week in his regular Exponential View newsletter Azeem Azhar described in detail …

Preached at St Nicholas’, Leicester on Sunday 19th of February 2023READINGSExodus 24.12-end & Matthew 17.1-9SERMONAt face value, the Gospels are quite gritty affairs. Jesus in the dirt and the mud. Jesus in the dust. Jesus walking for miles. Jesus with no home to lay his head. Jesus in massed crowds, with the poor, the sick, the outcast.God has come to Earth to dwell with us - and the Gospels understandably …

Dear Reader, I hope you have enjoyed the writings and recipes featured here, whether you’ve just stumbled across them or followed for years! It means so much to me to know that my posts have left some kind of positive impact on the world, since that’s why I write in the first place. I have been feeling for a while now that it’s time to begin a NEW chapter in …

There’s a trailer for an American version of Re-Animator The Musical that features a large cast, impressive songs and a heavy dose of blood and gore that makes it look like it’s a delight, at least if you’re fond of musical parodies of daft comedy horror films. As it goes they’re one of my favourite genres, so it was incredibly frustrating to find out that this was a different adaptation, …

Perhaps if we lived on a crest, things would be different. We could at least see.A pleb filter is a piece of art which, by virtue of its impenetrability, "filters out" people with bad taste. What makes the pleb filter such an entertaining addition to online Discourse is that it's a ready-made kafkatrap, a perfect concept for trolls and shitposters to weaponize: once an artwork has been declared a "pleb …

ALTView on TwitterTwitter is removing the free API access, which will have the inevitable consequence of driving most twitter bots into extinction. I’ve written a fair bit about art bots over the years, since they’re one of the more accessible generative art forms (and therefore one of the most creative and prolific).Here’s a talk by Kate Compton on the poetics of bots, which will have to stand in as an …

Happy end of wretched 2022, everyone! I’ve become too superstitious at this point to claim that 2023 will be better. But I so sincerely hope that it is for you! For me, personally, it’s actually been awful – starting on … Continue reading → The post January 2023 Update appeared first on Kafkaesque.

I was listening to a favorite symphony this morning, Mendelssohn’s Fourth, the Italian Symphony. The first movement is as sunny as I’ve ever known it to be in Italy, even in Tuscany. I started wondering about all the little details that make it sound that way, and I decided to have a look.Recently I have rediscovered a free music notation software called MuseScore. Version 4 was released late last year, …

The Agrarianism and Revolution Reading Group met weekly for the duration of the Delfina Foundation’s 2022 Politics of Food Programme. Organised by myself and fellow resident Åsa Sonjasdotter, the impetus for the group came from a shared interest in discussing radical movements, ideas and materials concerning land and food. ARRG (as it is affectionately known) met 10 times over the course of the season, and will continue online on a …

I am spending Christmas and New Year in Miami, so as a change of venue, here are some pictures that I took on a walk around Little Haiti in Miami. I finish with a frozen iguana that fell from a tree in our garden, it has been there the last three days. Apparently this is normal when the temperature goes below 8C, and it will defrost and walk away when …