Celebreedy breeds new celebrities from other celebrities, using a generative adversarial network. It's the work of Eric Drass, who has a website.
Eric holds a degree in Philosophy and Psychology (Oxford) and an unfinished PhD in Cognitive Psycholinguistics (also Oxford). He is co-author on a number of patents dealing with PRISM-type surveillance technologies (long before PRISM became public), and a number of academic papers relating to neural network models of language acquisition and heritability.
He also used to be a singer in an experimental hardcore band, an unsuccessful male model, and once took at dotcom 1.0 company from a bedroom project to 14 countries and back, spending $50m on the way. Twenty years ago he was a TV star in America, but he doesn’t like to talk about it.
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Sports reporter Timothy Burke writes that "Something went wrong with my archival encode of the Utah State-LSU game, and all the audio is pitch-shifted down 100%. Which resulted in this." Read the rest
SinGAN is a generative AI that can, among other things, create random variations of an image (or animate it) without knowing what it is an image of. The official implementation is on Github and shows pretty landscapes:
It can also accomplish useful design tasks such as harmonizing color gradients and adding illusory resolution to blurred images.
But I feel that a humorous yet disquieting portrait of the President of the United States of America is in order, courtesy of Jonathan Fly.
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Mark Lisseman asks: "Is that diagram… accurate??"
I looked into it and it turns out that the book is called The Story of Life and is by chris (simpsons artist). I've just ordered a copy.
Clear intent is but a small mercy. Read the rest
Last night I saw HBO's The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley about the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes and her company/cult, Theranos. It's very good and surprisingly unsettling.
UPDATE: I've looped her intensely unpleasant stare for 10 minutes and set it against a nice slow performance of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. Enjoy the embedded video above.
Here's an infinitely looping GIF of it, sans music.
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I have looped a GIF of Trump's viral "hiss" from a higher-definition angle. Pray I do not loop it further. Read the rest
A startling and quite wonderful ... article? ... at the Washington Post today, wherein Alexandra Petri lenses EPA chief Scott Pruit's corruption through a mockingly science-fictional eye and perfectly distills the surreal horror of his administration.
Have you seen what happens when you leave an earthworm in the sun on hot asphalt? Have you seen what happens to the things that live in a wetland when that swamp dries up? Have you seen a salamander who has been too long in a hot car? Have you seen a lobster without its shell?
Unrelatedly, we must find Scott Pruitt his lotion.
Scott Pruitt must be seated at the front of the plane, behind the little curtain. Perhaps a private jet would be better, all things considered. It would be safer. None must see what happens when he reaches 30,000 feet.
What will happen?
Nothing, nothing! Naturally.
I hope you like my GIF; they gave me my Wacom back on the express condition I not make any more of these but, well, here we are, in 2018, and all.
Update: he resigned. Read the rest
As posted on the (verified) Twitter account of Warwickshire Police on April 2, this gentleman is on the run.
We can confirm that this is real ... it's serious as a woman was victim of a horrible crime. Hopefully the attention will mean we identify the offender/bring him to justice quicker
If you see him, be sure to inform the authorities and/or the SCP Foundation.
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ParadiseOS depicts an alternative computing world from the turn of the millenium: a desktop obscenely slathered in compulsory and broken services, ads and applications, an experience designed by dotcom era advertising boyars but hopelessly unrealistic before the wide availability of broadband internet and hardware video decoding. It's part Black Mirror, part vaporwave, part ironically brilliant web development by Stephen Kistner.
Paradise OS imagines an alternate version of 1999 where the personal computer is a gateway to a commercialized global network. Palm Industries, a former mall developer turned technology giant effectively controls all online experiences.
Acting as a time capsule, the desktop captures the moments of December 30, 1999 — just days before a catastrophic Y2K event leads to the computer emerging in our dimension. Participants explore this frozen moment from time, using the content to discover more about the world from which it came.
The project references the visual vernacular of the 20th century American shopping mall. It establishes a connection between the mall and the Internet as escapist experiences and hubs of social activity.
The desktop's content deals with Internet phenomena including fake news, instant gratification and information overload. By engaging with contemporary topics from the perspective of an alternate reality, the project encourages participants to think more critically about the state of our own digital spaces.
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CORDELL! CORDELL! WHERE'S MY RUBBER CEMENT?
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Spewing like massive tentacular light sabers, steel mill cobbles are unpredictable workplace mishaps that represent "extreme manufacturing danger."
The temperature of molten steel is in excess of 1300°C (2500°F) and it goes without saying that those in the vicinity of strips of molten metal need to be extremely careful. This steel is heated to such temperatures to make it more manageable and allow strips to be gradually reduced in diameter to the required size ... There are images aplenty of steel cobbles because while they are extremely dangerous they happen on a daily basis in many steel plants. Indeed when producing steel via this process you will regularly hear people quote the cobble rate which is in effect the rate of waste.
Some of these videos are weirdly beautiful; all of these are absolutely terrifying.
Here, a stern British man explains what's happening:
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When you lie in the dark of night, a faint neural echo of human connection urging you to reach for your phone, do you fight it? The Aumum Mini, a compact nightlight that lets you know when someone retweets you, etc, will help you fail even better!
It's a USB-powered nightlight that connects to your Wi-Fi, and includes IFTTT support for getting into all sorts of automated shenanigans. The exact sort internet events you'd like a nightlight to inform you of is, of course, entirely up to you. A few examples offered by Aumi include weather alerts, Wi-Fi-is-down notifications, and and smart home integration. Personally I'd like to use one to keep track of my unread emails.
No. Go to sleep! Read the rest
Britain and America are, as William Gibson has written, a subtle mirror-world reflection of one another. There is a complex language of similarity between these half-separated, half-remerged cultures, and it provides a shared appreciation of difference for all to enjoy. When I emigrated from Britain to America, then, I experienced the many charming embraces and disarming rejections offered by this history.
But two questions stood out from the very beginning.
First: given that America is so riven by racism that it invites an annihilating bloodbath of justice, why do white people cling mindlessly to the doomed bonds of privilege? Second, what the hell is the deal with Chuck E Cheese?
Dahlke says that destroying Chuck E. is usually done “out of sight.” In the case of Oak Park, Chuck E.’s head was slated to return to a warehouse in Kansas where games and robots are typically shipped following a store’s closure. “But those employees went rogue and took that outside … they should not have been doing that,” Dahlke says. He is quick to add that most Chuck E. Cheese’s locations don’t keep sledgehammers around, and they appeared in Oak Lawn to break down old furniture. Usually, he says, Chuck E.’s head isn’t bashed in. Instead, stores will slice it in half or otherwise “find a way to make sure that it’s not recognizable.”
Previously:
For sale: (1) Chuck E. Cheese's animatronic band;
Millennials blamed for death of Chuck E. Cheese's animatronic band
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The Joyfay Giant Teddy ($109, Amazon) is described as "6½feet" and appears in pictures as an adorably chubby furry friend for young and old alike: "offers more huggability than your average bear!" declares the product description.
But upon receipt, buyers report, the toy is not quite what they expected. It is, as promised, "6½ feet". As spotted by Twitter user cooltonedcutie, it's mostly limbs.
"I was expecting a the bear to be huge because it's 6.5 ft right?" writes "Amazon Customer". "No, all of its height is from its legs and the legs are longer than its upper body."
But others say the freakish furry is just adorable — a position its creators at Joyfay are quick to concur with.
"We first began selling giant teddy bears because we noticed a large spike in demand around Valentine’s Day for these items on Google Trends," writes Nikola Matic, who cofounded the company while completing a PhD program at Case Western Reserve University. "At this time, this was a present almost exclusively given to girlfriends and wives. It was often given from boyfriends or husbands that traveled frequently or were deployed overseas as a sort of surrogate boyfriend. As such, the proportions of the teddy bear were closer to an adult humans than to tiny teddy bears."
Adds Matic:
In the years since, a demand has grown for these giant teddy bears as a gift for children, for birthdays, and even at Christmas. With that change in demand, there was a desire for the bears to have the proportions of a smaller teddy bear.
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Exhibit A: (above) Joel Carroll (@joelcarroll) hypothesizes a many-legged parasite that replaces the internal mechanics in the manner of Cymothia Exigua, the tongue-replacing fish louse. Buy the T-shirt.
Exhibit B: (below) Yui Abe hypothesizes a giant man literally confined within the chassis of the engine (via); the tees are sold out; presumably a collector's item.
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Just when you thought it was safe to deep dream, along comes Bob Ross and his happy little glitchoggoths. Read the rest
Today in Onionesque quotes, that's one from presenter Marc Raibert, founder of Boston Dynamics. [via MeFi]
Here's another:
"It's still a little slower than a human. but we're working on getting it to go faster and faster. And better."
Work at a warehouse or dock? Not for much longer. Read the rest
