In a nutshell. 😊

Christopher Penn wrote: Just remember that given the abundance of neurodivergent people in science, it's far more likely that autism causes vaccines.

A different perspective.
Always helpful.

AromaGen: Interactive Generation of Rich Olfactory Experiences with Multimodal Language Models ArXiv link for AromaGen: Interactive Generation of Rich Olfactory Experiences with Multimodal Language Models

AromaGen is an AI wearable that turns text and images into real-time aroma experiences, enhancing sensory interactions. Studies showed it surpassed human blends, achieving high similarity with real food aromas, enabling new uses in communication and immersive tech. https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01650

Yup… Same… Just like in coding, it often takes the easy, pat road, but if you rein it in and keep pushing it, the results can be quite something. The hard part: I feel in danger of getting high on my own supply: an intellectual bug in the text does not reveal itself in a crash or clear error.

A big factor in the AI consciousness debate is people are looking at the AI as a solo artifact and not AI+Human as a combined organism

Your use case must be quite different from mine. Coding has thus far proven to be the best use case. I would probably feel differently if I were writing code that needed to be hardened against cyber threats, but I am not. I have decades of coding experience and have never been so productive…

Huh… not my experience. You need to know what you are doing, and guide it away from errors and bad habits, and toward your goals. It spins out sometimes… just needs to be reined in. If you DON’T know your coding head from your coding ass, then yeah… might be hard to get satisfaction.

we appear to have four competing fascist movements jockeying for control: blood & soil nazism under miller and hegseth, darwinian ecofascism from rfk, technofascism under vance and musk, and one Big Wet Hitler who understands the true animating core of the american volk is a deep love for shopping

A U.S. president cannot be held accountable. Therefore, a U.S. president must never make a policy decision.

While I do agree that chatbots are not capable of thought or agency and should not be conceptualized that way, if you deputize them to speak for your company that output should be considered yours. If you don’t like it don’t make an LLM public facing. Hire a guy. There’s lots of guys.

uh holy SHIT?

another robot highlight for 2025: man wearing humanoid mocap suit kicks himself in the balls

We are re-deriving Ibn Khaldun from first principles. That's the stage we're at and it's not a great indication of where we're headed...

It would be a tragedy if AI slop destroyed wonder…

… and he SERVED ✨

Middle of the road pseudo realistic non art. I am not against AI art, but I am against lazy AI art.

(profoundly not proudly…) the camera unleashed artists from a duty to be realistic, and as a result, visual creativity exploded. A return to middle of the road fantasy realism feels like a backward step. Fun, amazing and disturbingly empty.

More amazing and less interesting. This seems to be the trajectory of AI generative imagery and video. I am truly not against AI art, and apologies far being harsh, but I find this combination of literalness, realism and quasi surrealism proudly empty. /1

In a sense the indistinct edge is a space of possibilities whereas the digital edge collapses the delicious superpositions and ambiguity of the wave function. I have always felt like a bit of a digital image outsider for this reason. But I did massively overuse find edges when playing with MacPaint

Most of these projects are not specifically addressing chiaroscuro but are part of an examination /rejection of the digital edge. In truth, part of my fascination with machine learning models is because in the inner layers everything is liminal. Nothing is clearly defined. /3

I began to obsess about blur and legibility and the way that digital edgy detail often obscures important information in objects of vision. Shrouded is an extreme example. I am allergic to over sharpening so I guess this is my way of going overboard in the other direction. /2

Lots to say… the giver of names helped me see the challenge. Edges of objects in the real world are not always very clear and fragile digital approaches to chiaroscuro result in very noisy boundaries. San Marco Flow and the Plot Against Time series required an honest approach to soft edges… /1

I spent a lot of time seeking the digital equivalent to chiaroscuro.

the wild part — this probably doesn’t have anything to do with AI or LLM architecture

e.g. the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke & John are all rephrasings of the same stories

Rabbinic teaching involved repetitive rephrasing

oral traditions in general are less about precise recitation

Musk is a parasite on the future; he preys upon the imagination of others, taking any vision of a better world and depreciating it by hawking options on a transparently fake facsimile.

He is capitalism's full-throated assault on the utopian imaginary.

What people seem to feel and not express:

1—AI continues to accelerate at doing well at the metrics.
2—The metrics are incredibly lossy with respect to many important parts of human creative endeavors.
3—We have no collective plan on how replacement of human work will retain what the metrics lose.

To me, the field of A.I. is a branch of Philosophy, not Science. I would even call it “Applied Philosophy”.

Intelligent, sure. Sentient/sapient, no, there's lots of those.

I had the thought a while back that part of what's so weird about LLMs is that they have some of the qualities that make humans different from other animals, but none of the ones we have in common with them

Ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee Bennie G. Thompson said in a statement “Mobile Fortify is a dangerous tool in the hands of ICE, and it puts American citizens at risk of detention and even deportation.” He also said “ICE officials have told us that an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify is a ‘definitive’ determination of a person’s status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien. ICE using a mobile biometrics app in ways its developers at CBP never intended or tested is a frightening, repugnant, and unconstitutional attack on Americans’ rights and freedoms.”

New incredible detail here: ICE says a match in its facial recognition app Mobile Fortify is a "definitive" determination of a person's status, and that this overrides birth certificates. This is an app ICE is using in the field to scan people

www.404media.co/ice-and-cbp-...

Yes, I posted in a post-conference organizing exhaustion haze and then noticed that you were probably fine tuning flux and not an llm. P.s I think you would have found the conference interesting. bmolab.artsci.utoronto.ca?page_id=4423. We will be posting recordings where possible.