If, then

LLMs will always fail:

The researchers demonstrated that hallucinations stemmed from statistical properties of language model training rather than implementation flaws. The study established that "the generative error rate is at least twice the IIV misclassification rate," where IIV referred to "Is-It-Valid" and demonstrated mathematical lower bounds that prove AI systems will always make a certain percentage of mistakes, no matter how much the technology improves.

Where little cable cars climb halfway to the stars

Ariana Bindman remembers the San Francisco that was:

In the mid-2010s, long before ominous phrases like "generative AI" and "the singularity" became part of public lexicon, San Francisco's burgeoning startup scene could be considered quaint. In 2015, some of the most exciting fledgling companies were flower delivery services, T-shirt design websites, and secondhand furniture marketplaces. The CEO of one workplace social media app, cheekily called Slack, even wore a bow tie like a 1930s marionette. While Facebook was already well on its way to becoming a national political scandal — and Uber was slowly muscling its way toward a multibillion-dollar valuation — the tech scene still had at least some quirkiness and diversity amid its relentless expansion.

Reflection of a wave in a closed basin

Maria Bustillos on what happens when distributors turn off the tap:

US libraries, universities, and bookstores rely for the delivery of books on a small number of very big profit-driven companies, many of them privately held, whose commitment to freedom of expression is at best uncertain. The list includes the Follett Corporation ($2.8 billion in annual revenues), Clarivate ($2.6 billion), EBSCO Industries ($3.1 billion), KKR ($22.7 billion), and Ingram Industries ($2.7 billion). Each of these companies represents a potential chokepoint for books and periodicals. They all exercise near-monopolistic control over a piece of the distribution chain, with the capacity to render whole catalogues of e-books inaccessible to library patrons, or to university students, or online book buyers, at the flick of a switch.

Jules Way on the future of knowledge in Electric by Chad Taylor:

'Of course they'll complain,' he said. 'They complain all the time. It doesn't matter. People used to be inspired to think, to change things, but not any more. Universities are outmoded. The thinking taught in these places is redundant. Academics won't admit that their time has passed, but it has. Corporations do the thinking now, and the military. That's where the real research is done. Everything else is navel-gazing. 

'People don't realise how they're being left behind and they don't care. They won't fight for it. And because of that, the universities will be gone. They'll wither and die. We'll import knowledge from other countries and corporations. Like lumber.'

Now playing: Why why should I pretend

1. Swing Out Sister - 'Almost Persuaded'
2. M83 - 'Water Deep / Oceans Niagara'
3. Sly Stone - 'Organize'
4. David Bowie - 'Lady Grinning Soul'
5. Shara Nelson - 'Rough With the Smooth'

Always returning [u]

The film photographs from the Gemini and Mercury missions have been remastered:

Mercury was more basic cameras. So on the very first missions, NASA didn't want the astronaut to take a camera on board. The capsules were tiny. They were very busy. They're very short missions, obviously very groundbreaking missions. So, the first couple of missions, there was a camera out of the porthole window, just taking photographs automatically. But it was John Glenn on his mission (Mercury-Atlas 6) who said, "No, I want to take a camera. People want to know what it's going to be like to be an astronaut. They're going to want to look at Earth through the window. I'm seeing things no humans ever seen before." So he literally saw a $40 camera in a drugstore on his way after a haircut at Cocoa Beach. He thought, "That's perfect." And he bought it himself, and then NASA adapted it. They put a pistol grip on to help him to use it. And with it, he took the first still photographs of Earth from space.

Update: Glenn's "$40 camera" was an Ansco Autoset (basically a rebranded Minolta): a 35mm, non-reflex camera with scale focusing.

Killing it

While content proliferates, engagement is evaporating. Average interaction rates across major platforms are declining fast: Facebook and X posts now scrape an average 0.15% engagement, while Instagram has dropped 24% year-on-year. Even TikTok has begun to plateau. People aren't connecting or conversing on social media like they used to; they're just wading through slop, that is, low-effort, low-quality content produced at scale, often with AI, for engagement.

Full article here. 

This week at the end of the world

According to a May report by Enders and the Professional Publishers Association, media groups were “losing visibility and value as their content is used but not rewarded”, with about half reporting a search traffic decline over the past year.

Publishers race to counter ‘Google Zero’ threat as AI changes search engines

The publisher of Rolling Stone and The Hollywood Reporter has sued Google, alleging that the AI summaries that appear atop search results are illegally using its reporting and depressing online traffic...

Rolling Stone Publisher Sues Google Over AI Summaries (WSJ)

The scaling benefits of pre-training — that initial process of teaching AI models using massive datasets, which is the sole domain of foundation models — has slowed down... the early benefits of hyperscaled foundational models have hit diminishing returns, and attention has turned to post-training and reinforcement learning as sources of future progress. If you want to make a better AI coding tool, you’re better off working on fine-tuning and interface design rather than spending another few billion dollars worth in server time on pre-training. As the success of Anthropic’s Claude Code shows, foundation model companies are quite good at these other fields too — but it’s not as durable an advantage as it used to be. 

In short, the competitive landscape of AI is changing in ways that undermine the advantages of the biggest AI labs. Instead of a race for an all-powerful AGI that could match or exceed human abilities across all cognitive tasks, the immediate future looks like a flurry of discrete businesses: software development, enterprise data management, image generation and so on.

TechCrunch: How the AI boom could leave AI’s biggest companies behind

In June, Cloudflare... announced a set of tools for tracking AI scraping and plans to build a “marketplace” that would allow sites to set prices for “accessing and taking their content to ingest into these systems.” This week, a group of online organizations and websites — including Reddit, Medium, Quora, and Cloudflare competitor Fastly — announced the RSL standard, short for Really Simply Licensing... 

The idea is simple... anyone who hosts content will be able to indicate not just whether the content can be scraped but how it should be attributed and, crucially, how much they want to charge for its use, either individually or as part of a coordinated group. ... Combined with the ability to use services like Cloudflare and Fastly to more effectively block AI firms, though, it does mark the beginning of a potentially major change. For most websites, AI crawling has so far been a net negative, and there isn’t much to lose by shutting it down (with the exception of Google, which crawls for its Search and AI products using the same tools).

The AI-Scraping Free-for-All Is Coming to an End (NYMag.com)

Now playing: Starting to

1. Monstera Black - 'shot the bass'
2. Steve Hauschildt - 'Ketracel'
3. Amaarae - 'Dream Scenario (Charlie Wilson)'
4. MXC -'Swarm'
5. Chicago Underground Duo - 'Hyperglyph'

Screentime

How Netflix programmes shows – and viewers: 

Like most Silicon Valley outfits, Netflix likes to move fast. Within five seconds, to be precise – this, according to the pitch workshop document they hand out to potential collaborators, is the length of time within which the "audience subconsciously decides whether they will watch your show".

I can improve on this number.

Wendy's

Alien: Earth reads well if you tell yourself it's a live action Ghost In The Shell. From the rotorless choppers to the equatorial backgrounds to Timothy Olyphant's Batou bleach job, the story (if not the production) is the latest example of the West looking East in the hope that the older culture has figured it out. The discomforting subtext of dropping face-huggers into Space Thailand-Bangkok-Singapore or wherever it is, is that the hardworking locals can deal with this shit. Aliens are simply another challenging infestation for the Future Third World along with mosquitoes and Colonial traders and Hollywood.

I can't decide if that makes Alien: Earth comfort viewing or street food. It's heaped with pleasures disguised as unpleasantness and vice-versa. The camerawork is reassuringly smooth (none of your claustro-Scott handhelds), the dialogue jejune-or-is-it, the tech Cowboy Bebop retro just as Ron Cobb intended. What AE does bring over from Covenant and Prometheus is the eloquence of their CGI-enabled alien biology. From blobs and plants to the fast-moving berserker xenomorph that head-butts its way through safety glass like an hysteric, the things are the things that are most alive.

No escape

Philip Reeve on Halt and Catch Fire:

 

It may not sound like a promising dramatic situation, especially to those of us who don't know the first thing about technology, but as it develops, Halt... becomes astonishingly compulsive viewing, and grows from a story about the small lives of a few characters to a portrait of a whole industry and the way it transformed our world. As season follows season and the location shifts from Texas to San Francisco, our heroes move on from their laptop computer to creating online communities, games, trading sites, search engines. The internet is taking shape around them. They never become zillionaires - this isn't a story about the people who create Google or Yahoo or Amazon. It's about people who do all right for themselves creating things that compete with those companies in their early days before getting bought out by them, or rendered obsolete when someone else comes up with a better idea.

I missed Halt and Catch Fire on its first run precisely because I do know the first thing about technology. Years later on a friend's recommendation I watched it and was hooked. By the (rushed) final season I was into the series so much that I was ekeing out the final episodes 15 minutes at a time. It was like watching my freelance life unroll.

Am I evil?

Angry Metal Guy on Spotify:

Even if you think AI weapons systems are the way of the future and hey, why shouldn't Daniel Ek be trying to break up the collective bargaining system in Sweden, there's a pretty solid case to be made that if you are using Spotify these days, you're making a choice that isn't to the benefit of the artists that you love. 

Something happened

GQ's Evan McGarvey on David Mamet's crash-turn:

Writers who make it as big as Mamet often bend to the right. If you believe that your talent and work ethic are the only reasons you have a nice spot near the Pacific Ocean, everyone else who doesn't have that is a failure. If your work falls out of favor or you notice the culture moving on, it's not you, it's the pictures (made by dumb feckless liberal executives) that got small. History is filled with artists who end up mesmerized by raw strength. If this disqualifies Mamet for you, then I recommend that you avoid the fascist sympathizing geniuses of Modernism who wrote some of the best poems in English. Old-rich-guy cringe and occasionally gross as the worst of Mamet's commentary can be, his infelicities are small potatoes next to what even greater writers have said.

Starbuck

Katee Sackhoff on going from animation to live action:

"I lost all of my confidence after Mandalorian — all of it... My style of acting has always just been [that] your first instinct is the right instinct. Do that. Play the reality of the situation. And I've never really played a character... It just broke me, where I started doubting everything about myself. I'm not a strong auditioner on tape, and I was having to put myself on tape. I wasn't booking anything. And for three years, I basically didn't work. And it just destroyed my confidence. I broke down and was like crying … I'm not OK, man, I'm so broken, I have no confidence left. I'm lost."

She said she clashed with her former manager over the issue, after the manager told her, "'This is easy for you. You don't have to try. Stop trying so hard.' And I lost it at him one day and started screaming: 'You've told me my entire life this is easy for me and it's not fucking easy and now I'm falling apart.'"

The Limey

Matt Zoller Seitz remembers Terence Stamp:

[The Limey] is built around close-ups of Wilson (played by [Terence] Stamp) thinking. He could communicate emotions and information in silent close-ups that other actors would have needed pages of dialogue to express.

As it happens, Soderbergh had originally planned to shoot writer Lem Dobbs's script in a more traditional way but realized during editing that it didn't have the every energy and impact he wanted. So he and his editor, Sarah Flack, took the entire thing apart and reassembled it nonlinearly, using the many silent close-ups he'd collected of Stamp and other actors to hold everything together. Soderbergh and Flack had taken close-ups of Stamp around Los Angeles and arranged them nonchronologically to mimic the wanderings of a mind caught between past and present.

The right thing

Vulture's Alison Willmore on the new Spike Lee:

Highest 2 Lowest reminds us, however clumsily, of how much the entertainment industry has shifted, with mentions of the attention economy and the internet. Then it turns around and makes a vivid argument on behalf of going out and doing what you love, whether anyone else agrees with you or not.

Viewing habits

Jimmy Kimmel crunches the numbers for late-night:

Network television is declining. There's no question about that. But more people are watching late-night television than ever before — and I include Johnny Carson in that. People may find that shocking. When Carson was at his peak, he was getting around 9 million viewers a night. That's huge. Of course, the lead-in shows were getting 30 and 40 million, which was a big part of it. But people are still watching late-night — just in different places. Our monologues get between 2 and 5 million views, sometimes more, every night. Seth Meyers gets 2 million on YouTube alone. We're not even talking about Instagram or the other platforms. "The Daily Show" — Jon Stewart on a Monday night will get 5 million views.

Critical mass

Molly Templeton misses paperbacks:

So many books that I love first appeared as mass markets—like all those Jo Clayton novels I keep buying new-to-me copies of. I don't think I'm alone in that, as a reader, I grew up almost entirely on mass markets. If the books I was reading had ever come in other formats, I never saw them—with rare exceptions like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (the giant omnibus edition in faux leather) or The Mists of Avalon (which I always assumed was just too big to fit in the smaller size). Hardcovers? Presumably they existed, but not to me. Those books were invisible until they arrived in the small, portable, affordable format.

Now playing: Shout-out to the Perplexity crawlers

1. Stan Getz and Gerry Mulligan - 'That Old Feeling'
2. Cat Power - 'Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues'
3. Captain Beefheart - 'My Head Is My Only House Unless It Rains'
4. Haruomi Hosono - 'Slack Key Rumba'
5. Bill Evans Trio - 'Gloria's Step (Take 2)'

Why are you not following them? (Much of them is based on a true story. Set in 1953, Them follows a family who move from North Carolina to New Mexico East Compton during the earliest atomic tests in New Mexico which cause common ants to mutate into giant man-eating monsters that threaten civilization.)

Now playing: Share, if it makes you sleep

1. Headless Chickens - 'Cruise Control' (Eskimos n' Egypt Mix)
2. Electric Youth - 'Tomorrow'
3. Super Super Blues Band - 'Who Do You Love'
4. MNDR – 'Faster Horses'
5. Soundgarden - 'My Wave'
6. Ensure your chatbot is trained on diverse datasets that cover various phrases and contexts.