Warning: this post makes extensive use of unprofessional anthropomorphization. Today I’m releasing a new project called Stream of Consciousness. It’s a website where you can read the thoughts of Livia Pacifica, an imaginary person powered by Large Language Models, vector databases, and plain old storytelling. Livia is a digital artist. She uses text-to-image models to …
It’s crunch time for my latest project. I always feel a mixture of love and hate for this phase of every project. It’s been gestating for many months and now there will be some pain in the delivery.
I’m the furthest thing from an Apple fan, and I’m barely capable of operating a Mac or an iPhone. But I find some aspects of its early company culture fascinating and Folklore.org is a fabulous resource for a glimpse into that. I’ve just finished turning the stories collected there into an eBook in Epub format. …
We are about to share the creative space with non-human entities. Will people genuinely find the creative product of a non-human interesting?
Keynotes by Brian Moriarty (Loom) are such treasure troves. The secret of Psalm 46 was a fabulous read. Totally worth the 1h musical reading, but even if you’re in a rush do yourself a favor and read the transcript.
My good friend Davis and I have been working together on creating a repository for our favorite documentaries. As of today, this receptacle takes the form of a website where anyone can go through our curated list of what we consider the finest documentaries ever made, and can stream the ones that are available free …
ZOOZVE is just begging to be pen-plotted.
Of Magic Mushrooms and their connection to the Chicxulub impactor
https://buttondown.email/carlzimmer/archive/fridays-elk-january-12-2024/
The maquech beetle, which some people wear as a living brooch, remains one of the weirdest things I’ve seen in Yucatan. Here’s a description of the tradition.
I remember a full dozen years ago the feeling of independence, tinged with some slight digital survivalism, of running a local version of Wikipedia from my Nexus One smartphone. It was cool, but I used that feature on maybe a couple of flights. I know better now that I feel a similar impulse about running powerful LLMs from my smartphone.