Yikes, entirely AI created fake Podcast appears

Yikes people, this is the stuff we are heading for faster than I believe we can deal with. A fully AI created Joe Rogan podcast. I am not a fan but this just goes to show how AI can start pumping this stuff out and flooding the internet with whatever someone wants to put out there. Get ready for a new reality.

How thinking hard makes the brain tired

After a crazy day of complicated CG work, I can fully understand how this is a thing. I shut down mentally some days after a lot of complicated work. Don’t get me started on “Context Switching” and how the really messes me up.

“If cognitive fatigue is not caused by a lack of energy, then what explains it? A team of scientists led by Antonius Wiehler of Pitié-Salpêtrière University Hospital, in Paris, looked at things from what is termed a neurometabolic point of view. They hypothesise that cognitive fatigue results from an accumulation of a certain chemical in the region of the brain underpinning control. That substance, glutamate, is an excitatory neurotransmitter that abounds in the central nervous systems of mammals and plays a role in a multitude of activities, such as learning, memory and the sleep-wake cycle.

In other words, cognitive work results in chemical changes in the brain, which present behaviourally as fatigue. This, therefore, is a signal to stop working in order to restore balance to the brain. In their new paper in Current Biology, the researchers describe an experiment they undertook to explain how all this happens.

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There may well be ways to reduce the glutamate levels, and no doubt some researchers will now be looking at potions that might hack the brain in a way to artificially speed up its recovery from fatigue. Meanwhile, the best solution is the natural one: sleep.”

Stability AI CEO says AI will prove more disruptive than the pandemic

So much about AI will have unintended consequences. I was reading up on “Poisoning the AI well” the other day and it’s another crazy thing that is already happening. I’ll see if I can dig up the link.

“This is a much bigger disruption than the pandemic,” he told the audience, going back to his point about AI large language models successfully writing software code. OpenAI’s ChatGPT can pass Google’s exam for a high-level software engineer, Mostaque said, even though it’s a non-specialized model. “There’s no programmers in five years,” he predicted.

Across the software industry, big competitive shifts are coming, Mostaque said, with some companies that have regulatory protection or pricing power benefiting and others seeing their position eroded. Whole new industries will be invented, he added.

The world has been talking about so-called expert systems for decades, but now suddenly, they have actually arrived, Mostaque explained, and the disruption they bring is accelerating. “I’m not sure that any of us can cope with the speed. You know, frankly it’s terrifying,” he said.

Adobe Firefly testing

So I got into the Adobe Firefly beta and did some quick testing. It seems to be going for a more illustrative look then most other AI programs. Here are some images with my prompts to check out.

New Work in the Wild: Specialized

Some interesting retouching and grading work we did for Specialized went live a little while ago. Really fun glass work and toning going on on these. The lighting was really nice to work with.

So I guess we will be adding these to the portfolio update soon as well!

Art Director: Pete Panciera

Senior Designer: Walton Brush

Photographer: Yossiel Rodriguez

Producer: Erick Marcheschi

Post + Retouching: Danklife

Portfolio updates incoming!

Working on getting some portfolio updates posted some time soon and thought I would drop a preview since it’s been a hot minute since an update here. Just have not had a ton of free time to sort it all out. Hopefully, before May I can start getting these things live. Some fun stuff in here!

New Work in the Wild? Maybe?

Kinda a new Work in the Wild here. Played, recorded and mixed a demo for one of my bands a few weeks ago and one of the tracks got played on XRay.FM the other night. It was pretty awesome to hear on the real deal radio! Check out the demo here, this band is named “Manx”.

Not MIA, just a busy start to the year

Been abnormally busy so any free time I have has been spent away from screens and in meatspace doing things with my actual hands, lol! Here are some Houdini tests I did a month or so ago though. Hoping to carve out more time for blogging and getting new portfolio pieces up before the end of the month? Maybe?

Common Windows Maintenance

Here are some simple tasks to run to help maintain your windows machine and keep it virus free. I do this about once or twice a week. Does not take long at all with modern SSD drives.

Simple Windows Maintenance with Power Shell.

In the search bar, type, “powershell” and right click on that and pick, “Run as Administrator”.

Then type or copy and paste this:

DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth

Let that run, then enter this:

sfc /scannow

Run that till there are no errors reported and then reboot.

Windows Offline Scan

K, I was just describing this to someone and did not realize how deep in menus this setting was, good lord. Anyways, here we go. Follow this freaking click path.

Start menu > Settings > Update and Security > Windows Security > Virus and Threat Protection > Scan Options > Microsoft Defender Offline Scan.

Run that and your computer will reboot into scary mode and hopefully remove any deep buried malware on your system.

So there are three simple steps for a clean running windows system as of January 2023!

RIP: Jeremiah Green

45, yikes.

I first found Modest Mouse during a visit to Portland in 2001, just after 9-11. I was at Music Millennium and picked up probably one of the last CDs I ever bought, “The Moon and Antartica”. Back in LA, they became a soundtrack during skate sessions, backyard pool hunts, surf trips and many nights better left unsaid.

“Jeremiah Green, the longtime Modest Mouse drummer, has died, the band announced. Green’s bandmates had recently disclosed that Green was undergoing treatment for cancer. Jeremiah Green was 45 years old.

Green co-founded Modest Mouse with frontman Isaac Brock and bassist Eric Judy in Washington in the early 1990s.”