Rename "Swedesboro," NJ to its original name, "Raccoon."

Oh Jesus, Ezra Klein is talking to crazy Michael Pollan again? His podcast is becoming no better than Dr. Oz.

The cozy web is dead

It's amazing the number of adults who have regressed into being children these days.

Morning Midjourney 8.1 with a minor blaspheming demon.

#notcaturday

Interesting subreddit. www.reddit.com/r/Lef...

Bauhaus - In The Flat Field Working from home alternative classics ➤ https://bit.ly/3aOLq7H Captured at their live pinnacle and recorded at The Old Vic Theatre, London 24 February 1982 by Chris Collins for Standard Pictures. Audio of this ferocious live version is available on Press The Eject And Give Me The Tape whilst the s

This will be shadowbanned.

Bauhaus's 'In the Flat Field' is about being trapped in a barren landscape that simulates life but offers nothing. But what about our own world of the dead Internet, shadowbanning, streaming, dead publics, and only AIs to chat to ?

yeah, it's kind of shocking it knows how it works and yes, i loved that building. so glad i could go inside in 2018. what a gift that was.

Will anybody remember Sora’s revolutionary potential?

You know like tech adjacent folks who talk about the stack or tcp/ip or whatever but don’t understand the infrastructure everything is built on.
3/3

And apparently, some people thought that Jensen was hard to follow or didn’t make sense. What are they talking about? Again, I wonder if this is because I am trained and infrastructure and they aren’t?
2/3

As an infrastructure scholar, listening to Dwarkesh’s interview with Jensen Huang felt off — usually Dwarkesh is so sharp and on top of things, but here he seemed totally flummoxed, even when Jensen was being ludicrously clear. No wonder Jensen got frustrated.
1/3

What a terrible use of AI. This nursery could easily find images of plants online or from their suppliers, but they are using AI to generate completely inaccurate images of their plants.

More experiments with @Midjourney 8.1.

Is there some reason why architects using AI image generators can't make evocative images? It is entirely possible.

Some experiments with Midjourney 8.1. Very nice. It has a bit of madness to it, like 5.1 did. What's up with the dinosaur sculptures in the fourth image?

Doordash Grandma is a paid crisis actor. Who would have imagined?

It’s time for Ireland, one of the wealthiest countries in the world, to cease its preposterous neutral stance and start contributing to the defense of democratic Europe. Enough hypocrisy.

Claude Opus 4.6 is nerfed so badly I have to upgrade my ChatGPT subscription again. And yet, Anthropic denies it. Insane.

Stanley Milgram and his shock machine, Yale, 1961

The Soviet space probe Venera 13 looks like something that should have come back to earth to exterminate humans until it was stopped by Dr. Who.

Richard Barnes is one of the best photographers of our time. Some recent work.

www.richardbarnes.ne...

The greatest mistake academics have made since 1980—me included—is to treat capitalism as deus ex machina. If your analysis depends on the word capitalism (and especially if you use the "late capitalism"), you need to dig much deeper, past the simplistic conclusion you reached.

Remember when AIs were so dangerous they couldn’t be released? www.nytimes.com/2023...

The Zakkyo Biru of Ginza - varnelis.net I spent a few days in Ginza recently. I always enjoy walking the backstreets and alleys crowded with narrow miscellaneous-occupancy buildings—zakkyo biru—dating from the 1960s through the 1980s, each with a backlit directory sign listing tenants floor by floor. It’s become cliché that Tokyo annihilates its past. It still hurts me to think about the ... <a title="The Zakkyo Biru of Ginza" class="read-more" href="https://varnelis.net/works_and_projects/the-zakkyo-biru-of-ginza/" aria-label="Read more about The Zakkyo Biru of Ginza">Read more</a>

varnelis.net/works_a...
and
varnelis.substack.co...

My latest. A walk through Ginza.

Link follows.

When architecture jumped the shark.

If you got hit by the @Nextendweb/@SmartSlider3 trojan, their cleanup script only covers half the backdoors. It misses self-healing mu-plugins, wp-includes backdoors, and config injections. You're not clean. Terrible company.

If we stop calling them “deer” and start calling them “ticksacks,” they won’t seem so precious anymore, will they?

Apple's TouchId is fantastic (well, since it inexplicably doesn't support faceid, like it's iPhone devices and many Windows machines do), but it's a shame it's the only biometric login for the Mac. I want a black keyboard but Apple's idea of a black keyboard is a design failure.