2023-01-29
🟩Introduction
The seventh edition of Crow’s Curios! Hopefully you find the animated gif above as charming as I do, read on below to see how you can find one of your own.
Also this week is a conversation on “artificial intelligence”, an addicting web game involving trying to date photos, and one of those perfect short videos that you don’t know why you’re watching, but you do anyways.
Enjoy the collection!
-crow
🟩Writing of the Week: AI Snake Oil
A human bullshitter doesn’t care if what they’re saying is true or not; they have certain ends in mind. As long as they persuade, those ends are met. Effectively, that is what ChatGPT is doing. It is trying to be persuasive, and it has no way to know for sure whether the statements it makes are true or not.
Arvind Narayanan
by Julia Angwin for The Markup
Amongst all the chatter about AI and ChatGPT, I found this conversation between Julia (@Julia@journa.host) and Arvind (@randomwalker@mastodon.social) to be particularly insightful. It was hard to pull out a common thread running through all the examples of ChatGPT output that have been shared, but the above quote hits the nail on the head.
If you’re looking for an informed viewpoint on ChatGPT, take some time to read this discussion.
But if instead you want some non-machine generated content, continue on with my curios below…
🟩Web Game of the Week: Chronophoto
(Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
Thank you to @harper@modest.com for sharing Chronophoto. The premise is simple: the game shows you 5 photos, and you need to guess the year each photo was taken.
Personally, I learned that I’m too overconfident in my ability to date photos based upon the age of the cars in the picture. But alas, I keep coming back to try my luck.
And if you do like images of an early 2000s web vintage, this next item is for you…
🟩Old Web of the Week: The more GIFs the better!
I discovered this week that the Internet Archive hosts a really cool tool called GifCities, which lets you search an archive of GeoCities animated GIFs.
The “Welcome To” image I headlined this post with was found there, as well as this cool crow:
Delightful, no?
And if you’ve made it this far, round out your journey with a custom-built mitten dryer…
🟩Video of the Week: I wish I was this handy…
Sometimes a video is the perfect combination of an obscure topic, the right length, and a “why am I watching this?” feeling. And that’s exactly what this video about a mitten dryer by Matthias Wandel (https://woodgears.ca/) is.
The video is only a bit over 3 minutes long, so gamble a bit and give it a watch!
🟩Afterword
I’ll be back next week with more curios, but in the meantime always feel free to get in touch: @crow@lonely.town
A hearty “ca-CAW” from my tree to yours!
-crow