GILA WHAMM

A Guide To Asking Robots To Design Stained Glass Windows

The blogger at Astral Codex Ten plays around with DALL-E-2, the latest art-generating AI. (I can't play with it yet; there's a waitlist for access for people who have actual reasons other than "I WANNA", plus I am not sufficiently code-savvy to set it up myself, thus I have to wait until it's public and someone stuffs it into a Google Colabs notebook.)

Anyway, he's trying to get it to generate stained glass windows of the Virtues of Rationality and running into the (hilarious) shortfalls of AI.

WAIT NO I JUST GOT IT! The reason William of Ockham [Ockham's Razor] has the giant beard is because most of the corpus of images with people holding razors is SHAVING ADVERTISEMENTS!

(no subject)

rachelmanija reviews The Easy Life in Kamusari, a Japanese novel of a young man railroaded into learning forestry, but coming to appreciate the rhythms of mountain life. There are several occurrences in it that are mystical, but which are ambiguous and could be natural or supernatural.

https://rachelmanija.dreamwidth.org/2529934.html

Any recs for prose books, fiction or nonfiction, that have the same sort of thing (ambiguous supernatural, not forestry)? Don’t have to be Japanese—Western European would be especially welcome right now, as I’d like to read them for the vibes as regards the book I’m revising right now and it’s sequel, which is starting to stir in my head.

I could also go further into the supernatural vein if it’s got Mushishi-type vibes. (I’m aware of Natsume Yuujinchou.) I want prose right now: I am just not feeling comics, video or audio.