Author: carpetbomberz

Independent era comes to an end for Hayao Miyazaki’s studio, but it could be the start of a happy future. For nearly two decades, Studio Ghibli has been an independent company. Originally founded in 1985 with the support of Japanese publishing giant Tokuma Shoten, Ghibli has been independent since 2005, during which it’s released eight…

Studio Ghibli to be acquired by Nippon TV as subsidiary company in stock purchase

Wowza, this is big news, but media company conglomerates are not unheard of in the entertainment industry. Before Disney owned ABC Television, it was owned by a group called Capitol Cities. Hopefully budgets, and project greenlight decisions won’t be adversely affected by a merger like this one. I dare say the opening of an official Ghibli theme park made this more attractive to Nippon TV. Here’s to the next big Era of Studio Ghibli anime.

First publicly release footage of Hayao Miyazaki’s newest anime movie is accompanied by reveal of U.S. theater release date. The marketing in Japan for Studio Ghibli’s latest anime, The Boy and the Heron (also known as How Do You Live?), was unprecedented, not just for anime movies, but for the film industry as a whole. […]

Studio Ghibli’s The Boy and the Heron finally has a U.S. release date and trailer, and it’s gorgeous【Video】

December 8 , 2023. Mark your calendars for what is likely to be th LAST anime Hayao Miyazaki ever makes. I have been reading reviews of it in English from Japan. And it sounds amazing.

What Would You Do With A 16.8 Million Core Graph Processing Beast?

Now one might ask themselves, who-what-now? What’s this graph and photonics thing. But honestly check it out. This is not a Nvidia product, no-way man! It is an Intel research project looking at speeding up very niche style application. It’s not in production, it’s not ready for prime time. But it is just as ground-breaking as those massively parallel CUDA enable graphics cards NVidia started playing around with back in the 2010s. And who doesn’t like cool new interfaces, like an optical connect that has connections to each individual core?

https://blog.dshr.org/2023/08/video-game-history.html

I’ve read a number of David’s blog entries on various topics, some related to Silicon valley and entrepreneurship and some on digital archiving. But as always David’s got great sources of info and can gather the facts and write on them authoritatively. I had NO idea video games as an industry was @$85B USD a year. But more importantly David’s commenting on an article some weeks back on the lack of access to the back catalog or classic library of games (by Kelsey Lewin of the Video Game History Foundation – https://gamehistory.org/)

The article and link here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7996492

Survey of the Video Game Reissue Market in the United States

An original journey through various thoughts and feels on the web that was and future so bright we have to prompt Wix AI.

Yesterday I had the privilege of attending an online presentation by Olia Lialina via Reclaim Hosting – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1cKASjX85w.

Olia Lialina is among the best-known participants in the 1990s net.art scene – an early-days, network-based art pioneer. Her early work had a great impact on recognizing the Internet as a medium for artistic expression and storytelling. This century her continuous and close attention to Internet architecture, “net.language” and vernacular web has made her an important voice in contemporary art and new media theory. Lialina is credited with founding one of the earliest web galleries, Art Teleportacia. She is cofounder and keeper of One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age archive and a professor at Merz Akademie in Stuttgart, Germany, and a GIF model.

(from the presentation introduction)

While we participants were very nostalgic going through all the example websites Olia presented, the point was NOT to be nostaligic about the past web. The point was it’s not in the past, but just a path among many that large numbers of people have followed. The paths are still there, but some are disappearing (and Olia is attempting to archive as much as possible). The hope being that folks will still try to own their websites, and set a flag there for people to discover and engage in. There is quite a collection of websites with background/midi/mods in them. All of which still work and playback when you view them through archive. No doubt these are efforts of individuals seeking to express themselves and find like minded folks. It wasn’t about necessarily being an influencer or being monetized on a platform. But now that’s all changed. But to Olia’s credit, she’s archived a number of those sites of Geocities that popped up after 1995. https://blog.geocities.institute/about. And it’s good to see what the breadth and scale of that community was. So having attended the presentation and taken away some of Olia’s ideas of how to think of the web, I can help but stick on the Wix ADI (artificial design intelligence) section at 46:16 in the YT of the presentation: https://youtu.be/O1cKASjX85w?t=2776

Because today I see this article on Wix all about AI prompting your website into existence: https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/17/wixs-new-tool-can-create-entire-websites-from-prompts/

The headline is grabby, borderline click-baity. It breathlessly touts all the design and so forth and what Wix has done harnessing a ChatGPT-style front end where you “wish” into the prompts what you want and pass judgement on the results. Prompting as you go. No need to learn anything other than how be a prompt engineer for Wix AI. But I will give TechCrunch credit along with the author of the article (Kyle Wiggers). There is a “downside” near the end,…

As The Verge’s James Vincent wrote in a recent piece, generative AI models are changing the economy of the web — making it cheaper and easier to generate lower-quality content. Newsguard, a company that provides tools for vetting news sources, has exposed hundreds of ad-supported sites with generic-sounding names featuring misinformation created with generative AI.

From Kyle Wiggers article on TechCrunch, “Wix’s new tool can create entire websites from prompts”

So imagine if something as big, and variety filled as Geocities suddenly sprung up, whole, overnight?! And it was just one low quality, auto-generated, placeholder of site, purporting to be a community but just empty of individuals laboring away making the thing. Wouldn’t it just be a kind Internet Pollution, prompted into existence on a massive scale? Almost like the Pacific Ocean Guyre, swirling about where all the plastic floating debris gathering. How would you know? How could you tell? And worse yet, what if it’s got payments, transaction, eCommerce all built-in. The AI is a might lever, the attractiveness is there. But the potential for Internet Pollution is too. And I would say, thank goodness for folks like Olia, who are able to know/verify their sources and draw from teh web that was. Because it’s soon to be overwhelmed by the tsunami of prompted web that will be.

The EETimes – Cost of Compute: Billion-Dollar Chatbots

Now when it comes A.I. it’s all well and good to be neutral and proscribe caution, and say there’s lots of good and bad on “both sides”. But let’s also consider physically, de facto the tangible artifacts of this pursuit. This is why I love EETimes (Engineers can be hostage to trends, and fashions as anyone else, but there’s also the tendency to want to measure and quantify as well). In this article the new AI Supercomputer “Inflection” is announced along with it’s particulars (NVidia GPUs, and lots of ’em), along with the attendant costs to acquire, much less RUN the thing. A relevant pull-quote:

When finished, Inflection’s installation will be 22,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, making it both the largest AI cluster and one of the largest computing clusters in the world. All for a chatbot. Nvidia’s own AI supercomputer, Eos, a 4,600-GPU monster, is still in the bring-up phase, but will be dwarfed by Inflection’s cluster.

Sally Ward-Foxton  07.05.2023 – Reporting for EETimes

I’m a gen-Xer. So I grew up reading Douglas Adams at an impressionable age. The reason I say that is there’s a number of side/tangent stories throughout A Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And the one most relevant to this is the idea that computers beget bigger computers and so on. From Deep Thought sprung the answer: 42. And from Deep Thought the Earth was created to find and understand the actual meaning of the original question, What is the meaning of Life the Universe and Everything.

Inflection is not as big as the Earth. But it is BIG. So this supercomputer is 5X bigger than the computer NVidia itself (who actually designs and builds the underlying GPU) uses for training and inference. In the article, the author estimates roughly the costs alone for the hardware: $800Million USD. Followed by costs to run the cluster for one day: $700,000 USD. So one has to ask, how the hell do you charge customers money, and make a profit having sunk all that capital into building and operating a behemoth like Inflection? Do you ever get to that point? When do you make money?

Or is it more like a Cold War mentality? Where competitors in the AI space attempt to cow all comers into submission. Meaning that having an asset at your disposal makes competitors less likely to “attack” because they cannot scale up to that size? And more so, costs of Nvidia GPUs are not going down the longer they manufacture them, Nvidia has a monopoly on it’s GPU technology, they’re never going to let that go (ever). So you won’t see anything like price competition for AI Supercomputers, ever. It’s just going and going, growing and floating on Venture Capital and investors, hoping like hell there’s a pay-off, sometime, somewheres in teh futures.

relevant links:
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/startup-builds-supercomputer-with-22000-nvidias-h100-compute-gpus
https://www.reuters.com/technology/inflection-ai-raises-13-bln-funding-microsoft-others-2023-06-29/
https://www.anandtech.com/Show/Index/18940?cPage=1&all=False&sort=0&page=1&slug=amd-partial-rdna-3-video-card-support-coming-to-future-rocm-releases#comments (reading comments on AMD’s sad attempt to create GPU compute says it all. AMD doesn’t compete with NVidia in this market)
https://wccftech.com/inflection-ai-develops-supercomputer-equipped-with-22000-nvidia-h100-ai-gpus/
https://inflection.ai/

https://kfitz.info/eleventy/

Folks are really trying to optimize the way they do writing to the web these days. Not least of which are the growing number of static website generators. Today just now @kftiz was outlining a new workflow for her blog using the Eleventy static site generator and hosting via Reclaim Hosting (instead of Github). So far #webmentions are the only really missing piece of the puzzle. ‘Cuz who doesn’t want to know who is reacting, reading and writing in response to one’s own writing. It’s a Read/Write Web after all. Let’s see to that. Nobody is shouting down a well.

May not always say it or brag about it buy I never have spent a penny of my own money on Spotify.com. However, I know full well that I am now the product of Spotify.com. But I don’t care ‘cuz one thing I’ve learned once I finally got off my butt and started LISTENING to all the recommendations coming out of their algorithmic suggestions engine. I spent a number of late afternoons evenings in Winter and Fall some years (I think 2015 was when I started?) picking my favorite songs from albums I once owned. And like a dutiful A.I. powered robot, Discover Weekly would come back with 30 tracks EVERY week. Without fail.

I spent the first couple years not paying any attention because I thought recommendation engines were dumb and ONLY promoted what record companies wanted (a little like commercial radio payola amirite?!) So I ignored it, but my old standby Apple iTunes was slowwly transmogrifying into Apple Music and also recommending music as well. I tried that, liked it and took Spotify much more seriously. And wouldn’t you know it, it got better and better the more data I fed to it. And again I wasted probably all of 2015-17 ignoring suggestions. But I finally around 2017-18 got serious about listening to all 30 Discover Weekly tracks to start liking/disliking stuff. Again, algorithmically, Spotify is dialed in, and the mark of a great algorithmic suggesetion engine is SERENDIPITY.

A lot, over 75 to 80% of the recommendations are bands I never heard of or never new existed. And probably don’t exisst today ‘cuz back catalog and all that. But what’s really cool and special is when the bands and solo artists still are around, producing stuff and publishing it up to Spotify. That’s how I’ve bumped into odd little historical outfits (Yellow Magic Orchestra) and better known but obscure tracks (Nilsson). But today I learned that Japanese Breakfast/Michelle Zauner is amazing/fantastic, but in particular I had to share the track as delivered to me as #16 of 30/from the album Soft Sounds from Another Planet. Diving Woman track #1 from the album. What can I say?

Take Throwing Muses, and move it ahead to the present roughly, but just the most kickin’ bassline one can imagine with a single guitar riff played over top. All I know is, haven’t heard the same similar before, and now I want to listen to all of the Japanese Breakfast catalog. And I owe it all to Spotify.com. I learned one thing in this journey since 2015 is,

1.) I may “think” I know about all the music that’s out there, but I am wrong

2.) I know this because for the 8 years since 2015 Spotify has never/EVER made a single repeat on Discover Weekly

3.) I have found more obscure, interesting, and dare I say it “enjoyable” stuff that I know could never have been suggested, shared with me by a single recorded music nerd.

I would need a network? Nay and ARMY of devoted recorded music nerds to suggest the tracks (over 8,400 and counting) that I have liked since I’ve started listening to Discover Weekly on Spotify.com. So even though I have to occasionally listen to ads from Geico, Grammerly and Doritos, I don’t care. What I’ve gotten in return for me data feels like so much more than what I sacrificed. So here’s my praise, #fanboi celebration off bumping into an artist I wasn’t familiar with (or I should say AS familiar with, I had liked 1 track from Japanese Breakfast about 2 weeks ago). There’s so much music out there, I’ll never get to listen to all of it, but with Spotify, at least I’ll FIND, or discover the stuff that’s being made that I like and is being published/released.

At one time back around 1996 or so, browsers were being updated an released at such a torrid pace. You had to practically download and update 2x per month to get all the features. Not least of which were all the multimedia plug-ins to get the latest viewers for all the multimedia being produced.

I say this because I saw on Mastodon someone had been trying to get a web-browser working on an old computer, showing an old webpage for a University “Campus Wide Information System” thats what some IT orgs called their websites back in teh day. Because sometimes things were made available via gopher:// links and sometimes through http:// links, it was an interesting wild-cat, frontier days atmosphere.

The biggest barrier to getting an old web-browser working an old OS to display an old webpage was the need for https:// and the support libraries on the OS and the browser pre-cluded some choicies of web browser. For instance you can get a web browser from Google in 2002 because Chrome didn’t exist. But Netscape Navigator Did! But the https:// and SSL certificates and their underlying OS support libraries (things like OpenSSL) don’t run against Netscape Navigator 4.0 very well, if at all. And no easy fixes to civilian types like myself or artists attempting to recreate an old experience like that.

But back to my original paragraph, about the rate of change, and flurry of activity as someone in EdTech say in 1996 days, was that Netscape Navigator released updates fast and furious to add new functions constantly. New plug-ins were released by various and sundry outfits trying to get their new media tech adopted and market dominant. And darned if Microsoft wasn’t trying to get a browser into people’s hands that would compete with Netscape. So much so, they had to build it into Windows as part of the OS to get people to start using it regularly. I haven’t seen before or since this level of the new, new thing hitting FTP servers (at the time) and amount of work being done by developers for these desktop apps. And it wasn’t even for security exploits, or anything it was just to have NEW things you could do on the web. <sigh!> A bit of nostalgia over the web that was.

“Ultimately, to figure out what we really need to worry about, we need better AI literacy among the general public and especially policy-makers.  We need better transparency on how these large AI systems work, how they are trained, and how they are evaluated.  We need independent evaluation, rather than relying on the unreproducible, “just trust…

“Ultimately, to figure out what we really need to…

Jon Udell is really embracing Mastodon with his curiosity and programming skills. And everyone is better off for it.