Feileacan McCormick

www.apricitas.io/p/ai-and-the...

apricitas.ioAI and the Fall? of the Creative ClassAmerica is Losing Hundreds of Thousands of Jobs in Media, Film & the Arts. How Much is AI to Blame?

(I quite appreciate that this article doesn't take the sensationalist route, and instead considered more balanced the underlying systemic issues of the creative industries: i.e. it sucks, and there's never been much/any money)

(also as a further note: one of the core "issues" with democratisation of [potentially] high volume output tools is that the consumptive capacity is the same, or less. Even if we can produce more bespoke content, the bandwidth for human consumption remains arguably the same)

Misha@mkrl.xyz

while you port and emulate games, I ported Jira to my PSP

oh heck yes.

Nero's Day At Disneyland@laurenbousfield.bsky.social

The Grand Reopening EP is now out everywhere The first new Nero's Day At Disneyland music in 17 years Art - @aletiune.bsky.social Cd and Vinyl via @deathbombarc.bsky.social Thank you for riding with me for so long and welcome back to the Grand Reopening

another day in the infohazard mines (my feeds)

new pet peeve: email emoji reactions. we are not amused.

I cannot help but consider myself lucky at times.

It's a very weird timeline in which I'm basically saying 'amen' to the pope, but eh, fine. That said, using tech as part of an artistic practice is not (necessarily) the same thing as what the pope is bashing here. A paintbrush is a technology, and as with all mediums, it comes down to the wielder.

Using algorithms akin to brushes, rather than attempting an optimised automisation of the artistic process, does not mean a (human) artist is optional in any way. (also, and arguably imho) it's the only way of a true site-specific practice to engage with the entirety of our contemporary condition.

Fundamentally, in the context of art, we cannot easily generalise around "tech = good/bad" as there ought to be sufficient wiggle room for artists to interrogate, make sense of, and critically engage with any given occuring contemprary subject: that said, the resulting work is their responsibility.

bleary-eyed, staring at deep sea footage, wondering I’m not seeing.

Humanity needs to do more potlucks.

There's always been a disconnect between the now and the idea of now we embody (McLuhan posited a 50 year lag), arguing that our world has compressed that, there's still the claim to be made that we generally suffer from "tech-lag" on the whole (jetlag-like disorientation at perception vs. reality)

This is not to argue that one “gets with the program”, rather it begs the question what state of affairs are we actually in, and what do we wish to do about it?

The more I sit with it, the more 'sensemaking' as both a practice (and as a means of describing why much of my work involves instrumentation) seems ever more resonant.

samkriss.substack.comReading is magicWhat will happen in our second peasanthood

"There’s nothing in the world that isn’t already known, that can’t be made instantly legible by assimilating it to some stereotype. Post-literate culture is deeply incurious." samkriss.substack.com/p/reading-is...

awake, caffeinated, thinking about when exactly does information transition into memetic form. Is it upon its initial "publication", or upon dissemination? Must it be replicated by others (hosts) before it qualifies?

Is practicing gardening* the only way through? * a prolonged process & practice of maintenance, preparation and nurture (i.e. slow, delayed rewards and anticipatory long-term thinking)

process snap from one of this summer's many explorations into artificial life.

The downside of a new Peter Watts book right now is I'm frightfully busy, but also heck yes, and I shall carve time for 'Fold Catastrophes' asap.

It's easy to be negative in the face of what seems like a turbulent, uncertain future. That said I think we should fight to nurture wonder and a sense of openness about what our futures could embody, from there it might not be easier, but it sure is more motivating.d

medium.comThe Entire History of Italian BrainrotDocumenting the historical AI slop meme that changed the internet

22 Sept

this is fantastic.

Eryk Salvaggio@eryk.bsky.social

Canonical reference on Italian Brainrot just dropped, if you’re not citing this in your Slop Studies papers you are doing them wrong medium.com/@fabianmosel...

22 Sept

this also might be the fall of Rome as documented by Roman scholars all over again, which, if heralded by Italian Brainrot ... well, you couldn't make it up if you tried.

nathan.rsCan gzip be a language model?A while back I wrote about language modeling without neural networks, where I generated Shakespeare with an unbounded n-gram model: no weights, no training, …

22 Sept

The last couple of years I've been obsessing over exploring (especially ML) algorithms at their most minimal, where compression bleeds into noise. nathan.rs/posts/gzip-lm/ underlines in a very tangible way just how fascinating the edge between compression and information can be.

maxleiter.com/blog/weights

21 Sept

maxleiter.comThey're Made Out of Weights | Max Leiterwith apologies to Terry Bisson

20 Sept

Is it a truly a Sunday if you haven't made something so cursed god would weep?

17 Sept

Impressed beyond measure, and a little slack-jawed over the most recent chapter.

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17 Sept

We need to bring friction back to our computational substrates.

16 Sept

Now, more than ever, nurturing community (especially physically) is more important than ever in order to have a foundation resistant to whatever fresh virtual shoggoth emerges with curious gifts and experiences.

16 Sept

Being in the countryside is a continuous reminder of just how eldritch reality used to be.

15 Sept

There’s a lovely kind of full circle moment today when I realised that for the first time in 15 years I’m collaborating with a dear, old friend … once again on video (me) and sound (him) in a former, converted grain silo

15 Sept

One of the (many) things I'm immensely grateful as an artist is those moments that offer the opportunity to imagine something slightly different, and then bring that into being. It's akin to adding a line of verse to an epic poem: the story of the space/site as a common weave we might add to.

bcantrill.dtrace.orgThe contagion of fear | The Observation Deck

14 Sept

bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/09/13/t... by @bcantrill.bsky.social highlights the crisis we are in: "the claims (...) are the most extraordinary a technologist can make, and we must demand evidence commensurate with the claims". Tech almost always ends up problematic, this is a human issue.

14 Sept

trying to make a (pet) shoggoth only nibble lightly, send grimoires

14 Sept

Finally understanding why I've been obsessing over certain themes/topics the last year, thank goodness it's actually making sense.

12 Sept

Struggling with how to better format (and present) research that springs from artistic processes. Not everything is "under" the resulting work itself, yet, nor can it entirely be disentangled from it. Does on capitulate and just do something akin to blogpost braindumps?

11 Sept

awake, caffeinated, and thinking about feedback loops in creative process: most of my work involves in some way building a process/system, this in turn needs to act as a an externalisation, as well as a feeedback loop that provides both a contact surface for intuition, as well as useful frictions.

One issue I have with content generators ("AI") is them being attempts, within the dominant interface paradigms, at optimising the process of production. This neglects the emotional nature of creative work, and the importance of connection with the process and the outcome in interaction with others.

11 Sept

even if I work natively in a digital mediums, a lot of time goes to make it a process enriched by frictions and contact surfaces for serendipity, this is part craft, part necessity if the resulting works are to have a hope of achieving resonance.

this is akin to making marks on paper, something internal made external so as to allow for (re)consideration. The medium is irrelevant so long as it pushes a new response forth, which in turn generates a sense of connection with the outcome.

11 Sept

getting up early and enjoying a good cup of coffee, just to realise you brewed decaf.

This summer has left me reeling like a man mugged in a meadow, which if nothing else, is at least seasonally on brand.

shower thought: is democratisation (of tools/lowered bar to speciously "HQ" content production) a simultaneous expansion of the contact surface for memetic contagion? This whole fly business wouldn't nearly be the meme bit it is if it weren't so much easier as we can just point an LLM at the data.

as always with memetic properties, my hunch is we can't see the forest for the case studies, but we must persevere somehow in trying to understand what our tools are doing to us.

come for the rambling, semi-lucid takes, stay for the promise it'll never turn into a ted talk.