Nelson Lowhim's Blog, page 12

Video Games.

Here is mine. But this article is some top notch stuff. And also kind of eye opening as this is what I felt too about my writing and so forth:

“As a narrative designer, I spend a lot of time building worlds and thinking about our world. Right now, we live in a capitalist-colonialist dystopia, and I have nothing more to say about that. The real world is saying it all, to the point of satire, so I would much rather put things into the world that are counter to that and that have some humanity to them, because that’s what’s being destroyed in the world right now.”

Yeah, so I'm trying, Ringo, I'm trying real hard to be the Shepard here. 
So I suppose, in many ways, that tracks with what I'm thinking, that I need to be a little less dark. Enjoyed it? Share it via email, facebook, twitter, or one of the buttons below (or through some other method you prefer). Thank you! As always, here's the tip jar. paypal.me/nlowhim Throw some change in there & help cover the costs of running this thing. You can use paypal or a credit card.

Get Vaxxed Wear a Mask Don't Relax

Good study on how even if you get a bunch of COVID infections, you won't get stronger, or just get through it, instead you'll get weaker and be more likely to die. Crazy, right?
Yep, it's crazy af. And yet people just want to "get back to normal" like our POTUS (still a step better than the other party that saw a moral friend in COVID). 
It says even if vaxxed, getting infected causes health issues, but does not break it down as to levels of health effects for either group (could not find the needed graph on that one)
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New Yorker

Solid article on the New Yorker. 
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So Cool! Also, instant death if it were closer. GRBs.

Article on a large star collapsing. Impressive stuff. also, if it had been closer we would all be dead. Wiki here. As it stands, it only affected India's ionosphere.  picture from nasalink for pic. 


Smart person comment here: 

Astronomer here- I'm actually the one quoted in this article! :D

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are typically seen in galaxies billions and billions of light years away. This specific time is called a "long GRB" because it lasted for a few minutes, and we think they mark the death of a gigantic star 30-40x the mass of the sun as it collapses into a black hole. Most stars that go supernova even are not big enough to emit a GRB upon their death, and they are very directional (the GRBs are emitted along the axis of the dying star, in a jet just a few degrees wide), so a galaxy our size for example would only emit a GRB about once every million years. Plus then you'd have to be perfectly lined up to see it, hence why most of these guys are super far away.

Enter GRB 221009A, which was "only" 2 billion light years away! For context this is a once in a decade event to have one at this distance, and it's the most luminous and closest ones ever! It's also setting a lot of crazy records- the highest energy photon ever was detected, and it even disturbed the ionosphere in India. It was coincidentally in the galactic plane, so we even see rings in X-rays as the dust in our galaxy scatters light from the GRB behind it (today's APOD picture in fact!)!

Anyway, if you're an astronomer like me who does transients (ie things that change over time) it's been a really busy week, because we now get to study the "afterglow" from the GRB for a few weeks tops, and everyone with a small-ish telescope could see it. Personally I applied and got "emergency time" on the Submillimeter Array (SMA) on Mauna Kea- my first time using this telescope in fact!- and we got a detection! I am also on a proposal to request emergency JWST time for this source... but we haven't heard back yet, so I don't want to publicly share just what we plan to do with that info yet.

Anyway, really exciting to see all this happen and be a part of getting observations out to the world! Can't wait to read the first papers and see what else we learn from this one!

Edit: if you are really keen on specific observations, I highly recommend you go to the GCN alerts page, which is kind of the clearing house for info on rapid observations relating to GRBs everyone around the world needs. (ie, get some initial data out, save the detailed work and analysis for the paper- we can't wait for the paper for details, this will be faded by then) Lots of interesting stuff there if you poke around!

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F is For Fake

Probably one of the best movies of all time. It talked about forgeries and the artists who made those forgeries. The main one boasting that they could create something that even the artist would think was their own, and, that their works were the ones in the museums. Turns out it's true that many works in museums are forgeries. 
So to that end, reading about AI art sounds vaguely familiar whereby the AI itself is churning out tons of art. [1] IOW the Ai art creator is the forger and that's the worry here. Especially since it might take away from those who are currently earning their living. In fact, the hate against artists seems to be an odd part of this current wave (and I've seen similar discussions online, calling artists idiots, or similar to someone whining that their calculator took away their ability to make money from adding numbers) of forgeries that forgers of old didn't have (as in F for Fake, which made it seem like they were adding to the art world). 

"People are selling prints made by AI that have my name in the title," he said. "Something like — 'Rusty Robot in a field in the style of Simon Stålenhag' — which is a super aggressive way of using this technology."

He's seen people be hostile when they share an AI image in his style on social media. "People have tagged me and said that they're gonna make me lose my job or something like that, they're really harsh and aggressive," he said.

Certainly this is part of the iniquities of our society simply making it harsher, but that such views are prevalent is pretty sad, tbf [2]. That being said, it does visit the idea of what is copying, what is human imagination (many times it's copying and slightly diverging from what's out there) and what is art, then. Original art especially. Is the black box just mimicking humanity's creativity patterns? [3]

After all, how original is much of what AI Art comes up? Don't know and can't say, tbf. We're going to have to see more. I also think a large part of this is the "hard work" school of what is art. You can't say you rolled out of bed and made some art. Instead, you have to say something like I worked hard on this (that's why even ai art creators or word prompters say "I worked hard on this". 

Whatever that social signaling means (quite possibly an aspect of our meritocracy and hustle culture that we've been fed, as well as what the algo pushes), it's also a part of what art is considered good (note the lack of abstract art in much of AiArt creations). 

Meanwhile, if my AIArt collabs get big I'll let you know. 

[1] not actually going to get into the kinds of art that is both most popular in AI circles and on the internet in general. Tbf, I don't care for it, but it is art that someone is making a living off and, tbf yet again, that's all that matters. F for fake, was less in this vein, that is, the vein of robbing from people livelihoods and more in the vein off adding to their works (only so much a certain artist could produce and many of the artists were dead). 
[2] (a similar attitude was had by the winner of a small art prize, the person wanted their prompting to be equal to an artist's labor and there was this "they thought I was nothing" attitude that I do see in the tech world... what would one call it? some odd misanthropic or anti social view of life in general, tbf. 
[3] Again, much of what is popular both in the article and on the internet and on AiArt scenes doesn't strike me as wholly original, even if I see why it's popular. Mall art for the masses, I'd say, and yeah I'm not trying to be derisive, I do see AiArt simply flooding the internet with more algo perfected visual porn, rather than actual art. 
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Listicles.

Thought I already wrote about this. But this here list of movies is not good at all. Sure it has some that are great but no, just no. 
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Instapoets

Just read this article on instapoets. There are some good points, like how IG itself was always meant to be a stream of positivity and that is what advertisers really wanted and, all right, that's great, but the analysis of both the vapidity of some instapoets (matched with their success) is compared to all time greats of the past and not with the vapidity of the darlings of the current literary world. IOW there needs to be more of a discussion about both, just as the author here seems to mention the good instapoets without more than a passing glance. Shame. Would like to read much more than this on the subject. 
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Get Your COVID Booster

Get Your Omicron Booster please 



(jfc that last bit about. a comfy bed is part of the problem). Like right now. And wear your mask indoors, more likely an N95 and wear it well. Long Covid still a thing. This virus is damn violent and brutal. Doesn't care what you type on the internet, tbf. Also as far as vaxxes are concerned, mix and match as you can. Also hospitals are overworked. Still. A lot. Just nuts how people are unaware of that. Be safe. 
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SPace

Just like the Nordstream 2 could be an alien attack trying to play us off each other, so too are vids like this hubris:
https://www.reddit.com/r/space/commen...
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Older article, but worth it.

Since it tries to be even handed and does decently, I think.

In an ideal world, President Petro Poroshenko would purge the police and the interior ministry of far-right sympathizers, including Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, who has close ties to Azov leader Andriy Biletsky, as well as Sergei Korotkykh, an Azov veteranwho is now a high-ranking police official. But Poroshenko would risk major repercussions if he did so; Avakov is his chief political rival, and the ministry he runs controls the police, the National Guard and several former militias.

As one Ukrainian analyst noted in December, control of these forces make Avakov extremely powerful and Poroshenko’s presidency might not be strong enough to withstand the kind of direct confrontation with Avakov that an attempt to oust him or to strike at his power base could well produce. Poroshenko has endured frequent verbal threats, including calls for revolution, from ultranationalist groups, so he may believe that he needs Avakov to keep them in check.

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