varanine

modernizing:

Recognition by Manuel Fernández.

Manuel Fernández has created Recognition, an ongoing gif series which uses the face recognition software as pretext to generate a series of animated gif images emulating the process, trying to recognize faces on common objects without getting it, moving the subject away from its conventional use and deviating the attention to other kind of images.

(via notational)

3 months ago -

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Up to 80 percent of certain anonymous underground forum users can be identified using linguistics, researchers say. The techniques compare user posts to track them across forums and could even unveil authors of thesis papers or blogs who had taken to underground networks.

Darren Pauli, Linguistics identifies anonymous users - Hackers, SC Magazine Australia

h/t m1k3y/Asher Wolf/worsethandetroit

(via worsethandetroit)

4 months ago -

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The idea is simple: You do all of William Gibson’s Blue Ant Trilogy as a 78-hour maxi-series. I think Cayce, Hollis, and Milgrim would all appreciate that, for different reasons. Here’s how you do it: 39 Episodes. 13 eps over 3 seasons, at 2 hours per ep. The first season is ‘Pattern Recognition,’ the second ‘Spook Country,’ the third ‘Zero History.’ Set the seasonal schedule up like ‘Sherlock,’ but get the showrunner from ‘Luther.’ Put it on Showtime. NOT HBO. Call the whole thing ‘Gabble Ratchets.’ You feel me?

I’m Not Really Here: Gabble Ratchets

4 months ago -

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Personally, I think the instinct to create a “them” (jews, bankers, reptilian overlords) says a lot about the desire to believe that somewhere out there someone understands and directs what goes on in the world. Because its less horrifying than the alternative—that NOBODY is in charge, the lunatics are running the asylum and the whole world is running off a cliff at a rapidly increasing pace. We all think we’re liberated enough to have moved past the desire to have a father figure directing world events in the form of an old man in the clouds complete with sandals and beard, but I think that same refusal to accept chaos that gave rise to deism is expressed in the need to create conspiracies and plots. A form of intellectual conceit that insists that there IS a pattern, because even a hostile pattern in the form of a conspiracy theory can be fought, because its a product of human will. But you cant fight entropy in the form of mass insanity/chaos/devolution. It becomes like the tar baby—the more you punch at it, the more absurd you look.

[via styricum]

Echoes Gibson:

“Conspiracy theories are popular and I suppose, for some people, absolutely necessary because they invariably posit a world structure that is immeasurably more simple than the actual structure of the world: It’s all bad, because the Jews are behind it. It’s all bad, because the Illuminati are behind it. It’s all bad, because the Americans are behind it. That sort of thought reduces anxiety in people and that’s why it’s popular. They accept this really intellectually infantile version of the complexity of the world. Conspiracy theory provides some of the comfort that religious doctrine provides, but it’s simpler.”

“[C]hange is both exponential and in some weird, either new or newly revealed way, out of control. You know, who’s running the show? Well, nobody. That’s why conspiracy theories are so popular. Conspiracy theories are big because they’re comforting. Any conspiracy is infinitely less multiplex than the real deal, which is sort of multiplex to the point of being unknowable.”

(via worsethandetroit)

7 months ago -

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jankenpo:

“We have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which ‘now’ was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient ‘now’ to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile. … We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment’s scenarios. Pattern recognition.”

- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

(via worsethandetroit)

9 months ago -

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Too much information can be very dangerous because it can lead to a situation of meaninglessness; that is, people not having any basis for knowing what is relevant, what is irrelevant, what is useful, what is not useful… they live in a culture that is simply committed through all of its media to generate tons and tons of information every hour.

…

Limit your data-input to creators who are diligently seeking the whole truth: they are the people who are addressing issues from multiple angles, interacting with a wide variance of view points, and willing to admit when they are wrong. When they speak their opinions, they speak from a posture of informed and critical analysis–not controversy for the sake of page hits. Those are the people you and I need to follow. Those are the creators that deserve our attention.

The Great Abbreviators, James Shelley

Takeaway:

Input Creed. A commitment to relevant and reverent data ingestion.

(via notational)

9 months ago -

298 -

prostheticknowledge:

Pareidoloop

CORRECTION: blech said: The author of the original code is Phil McCarthy, twitter.com/phl / GitHub.com/phl

Online coding experiment ~~by Adam Norwood~~ combines a random polygon generator constantly making shapes along with a facial recognition algorithm - from Adam’s Tumblr:

What happens if you write software that generates random polygons and the software then feeds the results through facial recognition software, looping thousands of times until the generated image more and more resembles a face? Pareidoloop. Above, my results from running it for a few hours. Spooky.

(More about the project on GitHub, and more about pareidolia in case the name doesn’t ring a bell)

Works better (and faster) in Chrome, you can try it out here

(PS - if you can’t see the animated GIFs at the top, click on them and they should appear …)

(via emergentdigitalpractices)

9 months ago -

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