[nonostantement #254] - narcissists & conspiracy / being a chatbot / fake life
NOW with MORE season's greetings!
Welcome to nonostantement: a weekly newsletter with rare, resilient, and unpredictable stuff found all over the Internet.
Hope you guys are having a great Sunday, especially you new members! My name is Joele and I like to send mails to my friends highlighting the most interesting things I've come across, yes like this one. As someone who spends a lot of time online working on branding and content, I get the chance to see a lot of interesting things. So here's the best of what I've found this week.
Here are some tracks to listen to while you scroll through the links: Beck - Sing It Again, Kali Yuga - Georgia Anne Muldrow, Chin-don-ya - Monster Rally and Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington "It Don't Mean A Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)"
#PEOPLE
McDonalds McDonaldland Specification Manual (1975)
A specification manual indicating how the various McDonaldland characters should look, for the purpose of merchandising.James Lovelock remembered by John Gray
"Jim’s belief was that science should be used to achieve what he called a 'sustainable retreat' from the Earth. That technology had to be used to diminish the human imprint on the planet, to allow the biosphere to be partially restored and rewilded."[Video] - Doom Christmas Bauble - teaser
This is a small teaser of the Doom xmas tree bauble I made.Is Airbnb Ruining Mexico City for Locals?
Apartments in the capital are being rented by digital nomads from the U.S at prices that most locals can't afford.Why do narcissists find conspiracy theories so appealing? - ScienceDirect
”Recent developments in the study of narcissism suggest that it has three components: antagonism, agentic extraversion, and neuroticism. We argue that each of these components of narcissism might predispose people to endorse conspiracy theories due to different psychological processes. […] We consider the wider implications this research might have, especially for political leadership.”
Just a reminder that 👉 THE NONOSTANTEMENT ARCHIVES 👈 are now online, containing all the links I have sent in almost 5 years of this same newsletter. Created with lots of passion, love, and Python code for you all.
Let me know what you think!
#TECH
The internet is headed for a ‘point of no return’ where the disadvantages will become too great
Eventually, the disadvantages of sharing your opinion online will become so great that people will turn away from the internet. This is the argument made by Geert Lovink, Professor at the Amsterdam University of Applied Science (AUAS) and University of Amsterdam in his new essay Extinction Internet.How to wrench open the black box of algorithms that decide our fate - ABC News
As algorithms make decisions about more and more parts of our lives, there are creative ways to seize back some control.The state of AI in 2022--and a half decade in review
The 2022 McKinsey Global Survey on AI shows the expansion of the technology’s business adoption over the last five years and provides insights on tech talent.Becoming a chatbot: my life as a real estate AI’s human backup | Artificial intelligence (AI)
For one weird year, I was the human who stepped in to make sure a property chatbot didn’t blow its cover – I was a person pretending to be a computer pretending to be a personArtificial Intelligence vs. Artists | LinkedIn
A massive digital protest is consuming Epic Games' artist community this week.Blueprints for intelligence
A visual history of artificial neural networks from 1943 to 2020‘The metaverse will be our slow death!’ Is Facebook losing its $100bn gamble on virtual reality?
The company now known as Meta has spent staggering amounts on creating an immersive successor to the traditional 2D internet. But what has it got to show for it, apart from 11,000 job losses?
#SOCIALMEDIA
[Video] - "How I faked my life using AI" or "The life and death of Ryan Gosling person"
”I fooled my friends and family with photorealistic images I created using StableDiffusion and then posted to all my social media. I go into how I made these photoreal pictures and also my descent into madness.”
#PHOTOGRAPHY
Volunteers of America - Susan Meiselas
”[…] Then I discovered the ‘Volunteers of America.’ It was the organization behind the homeless men on Fifth Avenue who dressed as Santa Claus to collect money for the shelter in my neighborhood.“
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#THEDARKSIDE
Your Creativity Won't Save Your Job From AI - The Atlantic
Robots were once considered capable only of unimaginative, routine work. Today they write articles and create award-winning art.[Video] - NATO on Twitter:
❄️ Season's greetings from all of us at NATO 🎵China bans AI-generated media without watermarks
China regulates generative AI tech with rules that aim to spur growth and ban deception.
That's it for now.
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