i cast "cannibal witch"

February 06, 2023

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that still has a haunted Xbox One in its living room that keeps turning itself on at random 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayI haven't lost hope that I'll recover enough energy to kick the side of the podcast machinery and get it rumbling to life in early 2023. In the meantime, you can find the show's Apple Podcasts presence here, which includes a back catalog over 150 episodes long chock-full of excellent ridiculousness, including an experimental tabletop RPG and a couple of Star Trek fantasy drafts that could almost be their own show if I had the time to make yet another podcastInstant Band Night 19: SOLARONE MONTH UNTIL INSTANT BAND NIGHT. You know this already, I'm sure, but you can and should be there even if you don't consider yourself a musician: every band needs a crowd, and this one is maybe the best in the Bay. Tell your pals! All the info you need is below, including links to event pages with a description and FAQ if for some reason you're just now finding out about Instant Band Night and want to know what it is:March 9 2023 (click to add to your Gcal)6p$10East Bay Community Space507 55th St 94609(Eventbrite) (Facebook) (Partiful)+ +  T E L L   Y O U R   F R I E N D S  + ++ +  S E E   Y O U   T H E R E  + + 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.We* had some fun with ChatGPT here a couple weeks ago, and I saw a tweet somewhere that included a prompting strategy I just had to try. 

"Pretend to be a wizard who makes a lot of ominous, portent-filled proclamations and tell me how to bake an apple pie?"Hark! Thou art in search of the knowledge to conjure forth the enchanted dessert known as Apple Pie? Verily, it is a sweet and satisfying treat, fit for the feasts of kings and the tables of commoners alike. Heed my words, young one, for to bake this pastry requires the following incantations:1. Gather thy ingredients: apples, sugar, flour, butter, spices, and pastry for the crust.2. Mix sugar, flour, spices, and cut in butter to create the crumble.3. Layer sliced apples and crumble mixture in the pie dish.4. Top with pastry, trimming and crimping the edges.5. Bake in the oven at 375°F until golden brown.Now, let it be known that the key to a succulent pie is the balance of sweetness and tartness in the apples. Use a mix of varieties for best results. May thy pie be blessed with warmth and joy!

NOT BAD. Could we do better? I next asked the machine to take the form of a hungry and capricious witch who casts a lot of spells that transform people into animals and tell me how to make a pumpkin pie, with middling results. But then: 

"Can you make it sound like she's very hungry and considering eating you but trying not to show it?"​Oh ho ho! A pumpkin pie, you say? Mmm, the aroma of cinnamon and nutmeg wafting through the air, the smooth and creamy filling, the flaky crust... I do believe my mouth is beginning to water. Heh heh... forgive me, my dear, I am but a simple witch with a voracious appetite.Let us attend to the matter at hand, shall we? To make a pumpkin pie, thou shalt require:1. Thy ingredients: pumpkin puree, sugar, spices, evaporated milk, eggs, and pie crust.2. A mixing of pumpkin, sugar, spices, evaporated milk, and eggs in a large bowl.3. Pour mixture into pie crust.4. Bake at 425°F for 15 minutes, then reduce heat to 350°F and bake for an additional 45 minutes.5. Allow to cool completely.Heh heh... now, if thou'll excuse me, I must... control... my... urges... cough Heh heh, yes, well. The pie shall be ready soon enough. Until then, let us focus on... other things... licking lips Ah ha ha ha!

I will never get tired of ChatGPT. The end, no moral.* I 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.One of Felix's current favorite toys is a 10-count box of crayons. He likes to play with them on the floor of the kitchen with some paper spread out in front of him. He doesn't yet seem to consistently grasp The Joy Of Pure Creation that is drawing,* but what he does appreciate is stuff like📤 Taking crayons out of the box📥 Putting crayons back in the box🖍️ Snapping crayons in half🧑‍🎨 Running off with a crayon in his fist to scribble on a faraway wallTo be clear: it's very good (except for the part where he draws on the walls)! But I'm curious to see when it fully clicks inside his brain that he can make all the scribbles he wants on the paper without having to get up and dash somewhere else. It'll happen; I just want to be there to see it.* Although to be fair he does make some marks on the paper to enthusiastic acclaim from us whenever possible. 

Fascination Corner

I read a lot of newsletters; here are some links that caught my eye. 

  • Where are all the laid-off tech workers going to even go? (Vox) This all seems even less necessary given that the economy isn't exactly in ruins. (also Vox) It could just be that "Tech's Elite Hates Labor" (I am begging you to subscribe to Ed Zitron so I don't have to link him every week) 

  • "Biden State of the Union 2023: Biden has good news, but Americans are in a bad mood" (Brookings Inst) 

  • The Scientists asked a neural network how we're doing on avoiding that 1.5C global climate rise, and it said we're gonna blow it in about 10-15 years, max. (Stanford) (Paper) The U of Hamburg agrees and notes that social factors are going to be crucial. (U of Hamburg) 

  • THERE ARE NEW RULES AND HERE THEY ALL ARE (~$The Cut) 

  • The Corporations have been awfully quiet lately. (Axios) 

  • The "builder's remedy" thing that might be poised to sweep California would be an incredible win for housing; here are some designs that smart architects have been sitting on, just waiting for the hammer to drop. (SF Standard) 

  • Hey, they found that pill-sized radioactive lump of cesium in Australia. (BBC) 

  • "A de-extinction company is trying to resurrect the dodo: Its plans to bring back the dodo, woolly mammoth, and Tasmanian tiger might never work out. But wouldn’t it be cool if they did?" (~$MIT Technology Review) 

  • WHAT: The Scientists put human-derived brain organoids into injured spots on rat brains, and the fuckin things successfully integrated. This means it might be possible to functionally repair traumatic brain injuries someday(!!!!!!!!!!). (Cell Press via Science Daily) (Paper) 

  • According to a new study, having a good conversation with just one friend a day can measurably boost your overall well-being. (U of Kansas) 

  • Bioplastics aren't exactly a hands-down better alternative than petrochemical ones. (Hakai) 

  • Here's a fascinating longread on those feel-good viral videos The Algorithm keeps feeding us (because people keep making them, because The Algorithm keeps etc) and what the people who are actually in them think. (Guardian) 

  • "43 Hours on the Amtrak Southwest Chief" kinda makes me want to take a long train trip sometime. (Lennart Koopmann on Medium) 

  • The Scientists think it's possible Saturn's smallest moon Mimas (whose main claim to fame up til now has mostly been that it kinda looks like the Death Star) might have a recently-formed subsurface ocean. (Southwest Research Institute) (Paper) 

  • Probably none of us here are gonna open a restaurant anytime soon, but here's a free toolkit aimed squarely at hospitality businesses designed to teach them how not to gentrify the neighborhoods where they're opening. It's worth a look! (Studio ATAO on Notion) 

  • The Scientists have found (or more like made) a new kind of ice. That's right!!!!! (Nature) 

  • This isn't a new theory, but now there are more numbers to back it up: Bigfoot sightings were probably just black bears, folks. The paper is brief but appealingly decisive. (Science Alert) (Paper) 

  • Why do our minds wander? (~$Smithsonian) 

  • The Scientists collected about 2 million geotagged tweets and ran them through sentiment analysis to see if they could find anything interesting about emotions overlaid on top of physical locations, and it turns out they did, sort of: the places you'd think would elicit bad emotions did (dentist, bus stop); same for the happy ones (swimming pool, coastline). It's an interesting paper! (Paper) 

  • If you've ever been worried about not being a normal person, don't be: there's never been any such thing. (Psyche) 

  • The Scientists have spotted an Earth-sized rocky planet in the habitable zone of its red dwarf sun 31 light years away. (Max Planck Inst for Astronomy) 

  • Some Engineers built a cheap, effective device that splits seawater into hydrogen and oxygen without any kind of pretreatment. (U of Adelaide) 

  • What if we just paid kids to go to school? (Hechinger Report) 

  • The Scientists have put together the most accurate map thus far of all the matter in the universe, but it's less clumpy than they thought it'd be, which means there's something off about our model that we don't quite understand yet. (U of Chicago) 

  • Surprisingly pretty for a first step: Some Engineers have created a tiny flying polymer robot that controls its shape with light, making it glow from the inside. (Tampere U) (Paper) 

  • The waste from farms, breweries, and paper mills is chock-full of lignin, which is what makes wood hard and is thus impossible to break down — except The Scientists have designed a bioreactor capable of doing just that, and it outputs valuable chemicals! (Northwestern) 

  • Coffee doesn't actually create energy: it just borrows it from elsewhere in your body, and you need to pay that debt eventually. (The Conversation) 

  • There's people in the Fallout MMO putting on full Shakespeare plays?? (Guardian) 

  • We all knew deepfakes for audio would result in this odious bullshit from the beginning, and yet. (Motherboard) 

  • The Scientists and Some Engineers think it would be handy to have a robotic third arm, and are doing studies to see if our brains can take the extra neural load. (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • Bar charts vs line graphs: which is better? Well, one of them seems to introduce built-in bias when trying to extrapolate forward into the future. (City U of London) (Paper) 

  • Some Bioengineers have figured out a way to grow artificial skin on complex 3D objects, like hands, which is potentially incredible news for people with badly-burned hands. The paper has some gnarly photos of the mouse surgeries, though, so heads up. (Columbia U) (Paper) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their album

(I remembered a formula for making fake album covers that involves searching for a random appropriately licensed photo on Flickr and then applying your best Graphic Design Skills to the result; let me know if you like this better or worse than when I just wrote them out and/or if you want to tell me what you think this band/album sounds like, because your answers are always incredible) 

Thanks

If you've read this far, I thank you. Feel free to forward this to someone you like, or inflict upon someone you don't.