Jason Dorrier in Singularity Hub:

AI continues to generate plenty of light and heat. The best models in text and images—now commanding subscriptions and being woven into consumer products—are competing for inches. OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic are all, more or less, neck and neck. It’s no surprise then that AI researchers are looking to push generative models into new territory. As AI requires prodigious amounts of data, one way to forecast where things are going next is to look at what data is widely available online, but still largely untapped. Video, of which there is plenty, is an obvious next step. Indeed, last month, OpenAI previewed a new text-to-video AI called Sora that stunned onlookers. But what about video…games?

It turns out there are quite a few gamer videos online. Google DeepMind says it trained a new AI, Genie, on 30,000 hours of curated video footage showing gamers playing simple platformers—think early Nintendo games—and now it can create examples of its own.

Genie turns a simple image, photo, or sketch into an interactive video game. Given a prompt, say a drawing of a character and its surroundings, the AI can then take input from a player to move the character through its world. In a blog post, DeepMind showed Genie’s creations navigating 2D landscapes, walking around or jumping between platforms. Like a snake eating its tail, some of these worlds were even sourced from AI-generated images. In contrast to traditional video games, Genie generates these interactive worlds frame by frame. Given a prompt and command to move, it predicts the most likely next frames and creates them on the fly. It even learned to include a sense of parallax, a common feature in platformers where the foreground moves faster than the background.

More here.

Arrivals

When I throw up the candied coconut
mixed in salt water, I feel empty. Jujú
holds my hand, and I tell her next year
we’ll return to the ocean. Truth feels
different in the skin of a child. I think
that if I say it enough, the waves will
pull me back to the thunderous
music of the tide. Ocean waves
feel like body armor, like I can charge
into battle with them. Years later, this last
birthday off the coast would become memories
of tortillerías, sugared tamarindo on
the side of the highway near the beach,
and the musty smell of wet earth before
the rain comes. I remember every detail of the day.
How I stubbed my toe in the morning
and was bitten by a crab in the afternoon. People
on the beach that day have become living,
breathing photographs in my mind. Windblown
hair flying in people’s eyes, my name etched
on the dunes, cousins became mermaids
on the sand, my dad—full beard just barely
graying—smiles with a Dos Equis in his hand
and gestures wildly with the other, mid-joke.

by Anais Deal-Márquez
from: Poetry, March 2024

Brian Ng at Art In America:

Lacan collected works by the likes of Duchamp and Picasso, which he displayed proudly in his country home. But to be sure, the most iconic work of his collection, also on view, was Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde (1866); today, it is owned by the Musée d’Orsay. Famously, Lacan hid this detailed rendering of a vulva behind a sliding wooden door, onto which his friend (and eventual brother-in-law) André Masson painted his own Surrealist rendition. Masson added clouds that drift above an outline of L’Origine’s body, whose curves he recast as hills, her pubic hair resembling a bunch of flowers. L’Origine du Monde almost never leaves d’Orsay. But at the Pompidou-Metz, it no longer hangs alongside other 19th-century works, which often feel prudish in L’Origine’s presence. Instead, the curators have hung it beside more recent representations of vulvas—some of them direct retorts to the famous L’Origine—by the likes of Art & Language, Mircea Cantor, VALIE EXPORT, Victor Man, Betty Tompkins, and Agnès Thurnauer. Deborah de Robertis’s photograph hangs near L’Origine, showing a 2014 performance in which the artist, wearing a gold dress referring to the painting’s gilded frame, squatted in front of the work, spreading her legs wider than Courbet’s model topart her vagina, revealing what she calls “infinity,” or “the origin of the origin,” the depth that Courbet concealed.

more here.

Ted Nordhaus at the New Atlantis:

In these cases, climate science theory and observations are well aligned. Climate change has increased the frequency of extreme heat events and decreased the frequency of extreme cold events. It has led to global sea level rise and glacial melting. At the regional level, some areas have also seen increases in phenomena like extreme precipitation events that are very directly linked to warming global temperatures.

But for most climate and weather phenomena, the effects are much more complicated and don’t always run in the same direction. Warmer surface and ocean temperatures, for instance, produce more rain from hurricanes, because warmer air can hold more water vapor. But climate change can also create countervailing factors, such as increases in wind shear, which may make it harder for hurricanes to develop and persist, and decrease their frequency.

Media accounts have been quick to tie hurricanes and other complex phenomena to climate change. But there is little data to suggest, thus far, that these events have actually gotten worse.

more here.

Michael Greenberg at the NYT:

What is most jarring is that the story has all the hallmarks of García Márquez; despite its deficiencies, the writing is unmistakably his. At its center is Ana Magdalena Bach, who is a virgin when she marries and remains contentedly faithful to her husband until, at 46, she embarks on a series of explosive one-night stands, a new one each year. She meets the men, all of them strangers, during solo visits to the Caribbean island where her mother is buried. Without fail, every Aug. 16 she lays a bouquet of fresh gladioli on her mother’s grave, clears the weeds that have sprung up around the stone and quickly fills her mother in on the latest family news. Then she gets down to the serious business of finding a partner until morning, when a ferry will take her back to the mainland.

Her first tryst is with a silver-haired “Hispanic gringo” she picks up at her hotel bar. The sex is impersonal and, for Ana, immensely exciting: She “devoured him for her own pleasure not even thinking of his.” The next morning she’s appalled to discover he left her a $20 bill. The insult infuriates her and she is tormented by both a wish for revenge and the desire to repeat the evening.

more here.

Silvana Paternostro at the Paris Review:

Gabriel García Márquez died ten years ago this April, but people all over the world continue to be stunned, moved, seduced, and transformed by the beauty of his writing and the wildness of his imagination. He is the most translated Spanish-language author of this past century, and in many ways, rightly or wrongly, the made-up Macondo of One Hundred Years of Solitude has come to define the image of Latin America—especially for those of us from the Colombian Caribbean.

I have been writing about Gabo since 1995, when I met him for three days during a journalism workshop he led and decided that he himself would make an interesting subject. Colombia’s god of magical realism reminded me of my grandfather, I wrote in my first piece about him, which was later published in the Winter 1996 issue of The Paris Review. In the early 2000s, I began interviewing his friends, family, fans, and naysayers for an oral biography that appeared in an early form in the magazine’s Summer 2003 issue. 

more here.

Ohad Reiss-Sorokin in The Hedgehog Review:

Hollywood rarely shops for film rights at academic presses. Yet if Samuel Moyn’s thought-provoking new book, Liberalism Against Itself, were adapted into a movie, I would recommend making it a courtroom drama.

Imagine Moyn, professor of law and history at Yale University, as the prosecutor, approaching the bench with a steady step, looking at the jury, and reading the opening statement. “Cold War liberalism,” he says, beginning with the main defendant, “was a catastrophe.” Then he takes a deep breath before naming the victim—“for liberalism.” The indictment is long and detailed: Cold War liberalism abandoned what Moyn describes as liberalism’s original goals of “perfectionism” and the “highest of life.” It made us suspicious of any progressive historical change, replaced promises of global freedom with a “West versus the Rest” narrative, and, finally, supported a harsh regime of self-discipline as a precondition for freedom. Its champions persisted in an attitude of skepticism, even paranoia, toward the state, despite living in “the most ambitious and interventionist and largest—as well as the most egalitarian and redistributive—liberal states that had ever existed.” Their ignorance, prosecutor Moyn argues, left welfare states without intellectual backing as they fell prey to the neoliberals of the late twentieth century, who sought to dismantle the social safety net and economic regulation.

More here.

Lyndie Chiou in Quanta:

Understanding elliptic curves is a high-stakes endeavor that has been central to math. So in 2022, when a transatlantic collaboration used statistical techniques and artificial intelligence to discover completely unexpected patterns in elliptic curves, it was a welcome, if unexpected, contribution. “It was just a matter of time before machine learning landed on our front doorstep with something interesting,” said Peter Sarnak, a mathematician at the Institute for Advanced Study and Princeton University. Initially, nobody could explain why the newly discovered patterns exist. Since then, in a series of recent papers, mathematicians have begun to unlock the reasons behind the patterns, dubbed “murmurations” for their resemblance to the fluid shapes of flocking starlings, and have started to prove that they must occur not only in the particular examples examined in 2022, but in elliptic curves more generally.

More here.

Richard G. Wilkinson & Kate E. Pickett in Nature:

As environmental, social and humanitarian crises escalate, the world can no longer afford two things: first, the costs of economic inequality; and second, the rich. Between 2020 and 2022, the world’s most affluent 1% of people captured nearly twice as much of the new global wealth created as did the other 99% of individuals put together, and in 2019 they emitted as much carbon dioxide as the poorest two-thirds of humanity. In the decade to 2022, the world’s billionaires more than doubled their wealth, to almost US$12 trillion.

The evidence gathered by social epidemiologists, including us, shows that large differences in income are a powerful social stressor that is increasingly rendering societies dysfunctional. For example, bigger gaps between rich and poor are accompanied by higher rates of homicide and imprisonment. They also correspond to more infant mortality, obesity, drug abuse and COVID-19 deaths, as well as higher rates of teenage pregnancy and lower levels of child well-being, social mobility and public trust.

More here.

Sam Adams in Slate:

Sam Crane was in the middle of doing Macbeth when the bullets started flying. A veteran of the British stage, Crane was on the verge of playing the lead in the London production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child when COVID-19 shut down live performances, and by the U.K.’s third lockdown, he was itching for an audience. So instead of playing to a West End crowd, he found himself orating to a smattering of heavily armed lawbreakers inside the video game Grand Theft Auto. “If I could just request that you refrain from killing each other,” he calls out amid the tomorrows and tomorrows. “And don’t kill the actors either!”

The death-defying soliloquy is part of Grand Theft Hamlet, a poignant and deeply hilarious documentary that chronicles the attempt of Crane and his friend Mark Oosterveen to stage a full-fledged Shakespeare production inside the world of Grand Theft Auto. Co-directed by Crane and his partner, Pinny Grylls, the result plays like a cross between Waiting for Guffman and a YouTube playthrough, multiplying the challenges of no-budget theater by the chaos of online interaction. Potential actors pop in and out without warning, or grow bored and simply start shooting. Not even the Globe’s audience was quite so unruly.

More here.

Aparna Nathan in The Scientist:

In cancer immunotherapy, T cells are often the stars of the show. Many immune checkpoint blockade drugs keep cancer cells from evading T cells, and cellular immunotherapies arm T cells with chimeric antigen receptors (CAR). But Mattias Carlsten, a hematologist at the Karolinska Institute, switched to studying natural killer (NK) cells when he realized that they offered a unique opportunity to treat blood cancers like acute myeloid leukemia (AML).  Previous studies reported that NK cells are unique in that they target cancer cells without any prior training or specially engineered molecules like CAR.¹ But NK cells did not efficiently penetrate the bone marrow, which as the source of AML cells, was a prime target for lasting treatment.

In a study published in the journal Leukemia, Carlsten’s team described a new way to engineer NK cells to head straight to the source for more potent anticancer immunity.² By modifying molecules on the NK cells’ surfaces, they ensured that the immune cells homed to the bone marrow to hunt down cancerous cells. Carlsten thinks that this approach, which leverages molecules already found on NK cells, could make NK cell therapies a reality for blood cancers. “As a researcher, I like to capitalize on normal biology and take it from one context to another,” Carlsten said. In this study, the normal biology is two important cell surface molecules involved in NK cell function. First, Carlsten’s team focused on a receptor that binds the molecule E-selectin. In people with AML, bone marrow blood vessels increase E-selectin expression, which triggers signals that send the cancerous blood cells into a dormant state.³ The cells’ lack of activity hides them from chemotherapy, which targets dividing cells.   “If this is happening, why don’t we utilize this cue to home the NK cells better to this particular subsite of the microenvironment where the AML cells are?” Carlsten said.

More here.

Girl

Between the afternoon, resisting,
and the night, gathering,
the gaze of a young girl.

She abandons her notebook and writing,
all of her being in two fixed eyes.
On the wall the light cancels itself.

Does she see her end or her beginning?
She’ll say she sees nothing.
The infinite is transparent.

She’ll never know what she saw.

by Octavio Paz
from The Collected Poems, 1957-1987
Carcanet, 1987
……~~~~~

Original Spanish:

Niña

Entre la tarde que se obstina
y la noche que se acumula
hay la mirada de una niña.

Deja el cuaderno y la escritura,
todo su ser dos ojos fijose.
En la pared la luz se anula.

¿Mira su fin o su principio?
Ella dirá que no ve nada.
Es transparente el infinito.

Nunca sabrá que lo miraba.

Jeremy Scahill, Ryan Grim, and Daniel Boguslaw at The Intercept:

Anat Schwartz had a problem. The Israeli filmmaker and former air force intelligence official had been assigned by the New York Times to work with her partner’s nephew Adam Sella and veteran Times reporter Jeffrey Gettleman on an investigation into sexual violence by Hamas on October 7 that could reshape the way the world understood Israel’s ongoing war in the Gaza Strip. By November, global opposition was mounting against Israel’s military campaign, which had already killed thousands of children, women, and the elderly. On her social media feed, which the Times has since said it is reviewing, Schwartz liked a tweet saying that Israel needed to “turn the strip into a slaughterhouse.”

“Violate any norm, on the way to victory,” read the post. “Those in front of us are human animals who do not hesitate to violate minimal rules.”

The New York Times, however, does have rules and norms. Schwartz had no prior reporting experience.

More here.

Tomas Pueyo in Uncharted Territories:

The new Claude that was just released defines itself as self-aware.

Of course, Claude and similar LLMs are just next-word predictors. They are not self-aware. They were just fed all the science-fiction about AIs and their takeover, and they regurgitate that. For a real LLM to become self-aware, it would need to be more intelligent than humans and be able to self-improve. They aren’t, and they can’t. Right? Right?!

OK so Anthropic’s latest Claude is now more intelligent than the average human being according to Mensa tests. Faaaantastic.

But they can’t self-improve, can they? Well, researchers are working on it. I think we’re months away from AIs that can start improving themselves, if we’re not there already.

More here.

Xiaolan Fu at Project Syndicate:

We are living through humanity’s fourth industrial revolution, which is largely driven by breakthroughs in digital technologies. Some, like the internet and artificial intelligence, are converging and amplifying each other, with far-reaching consequences for economies and societies. For developing countries, the implications are profound, and questions concerning policy choices and the “appropriateness” of new technologies have become urgent.

Even if new technologies seem likely to fuel unemployment and deepen income inequality, no country can simply reject them outright. Instead, policymakers must understand the multifaceted and complex nature of a technology’s appropriateness (or inappropriateness) for development, and then pursue nuanced responses that aim to maximize the benefits and minimize the harms.

In development economics, an appropriate technology is defined as one tailored to fit the psychosocial and biophysical context prevailing in a particular location and period.

More here.

Zaina Arafat in The New Yorker:

It’s difficult to imagine Ramadan in Gaza this year. I want to imagine that, even at a time of devastation and deprivation, a personal act of sacrifice can still lend purpose to senselessness. Maybe it can give powerless people a small sense of control. When you fast, you can think, I chose this hunger; it was not forced on me. But maybe that’s wishful thinking. Hunger is painful. It is one of our most primal desires, and the most human; inflicting it on someone else can seem inhuman. The only antidote is to eat. And in the same way that food brings people together I wonder whether its absence keeps us apart. Hunger makes us weak, and not only physically. It cuts us off from the strength that comes from being together.

More here.