tldr
- robotson went to a whale communication talk — sperm whale clicks contain vowels when you strip the silences, GANs model speech acquisition, and 11 mother whales helped with a birth while dolphins partied above
- big “what replaces the sci-fi novel” thread: m’s copernican trauma theory, word’s “artware,” fred’s secret societies, consensus answer was slop
- m burned $700 on gas town in one day — “tactical tornado hell.” fred: “this is maybe the most important thing about LLMs”
- the zine is called “Wine Dark 1” — subtitle “a golden dark age.” jay s k: “wind dark a so that if we get to three issues we can do wine dark c”
links shared
- escape-ai — AI-generated short film platform, John Gaeta’s neocinema project · shared by robotson-iyb
- diva-corp-interview — LA anonymous art criticism collective, savage reviews via Instagram · shared by m
- gastown-github — multi-agent orchestration system, polecats + the mayor + refinery · shared by jake
- npr-invisibilia-two-heartbeats — Invisibilia episode on whale communication, jazzbard says it seeded today’s convo · shared by jazzbard
- https://samkriss.substack.com/p/reading-is-magic (couldn’t fetch) — joe on post-literate discourse · shared by joe
- https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PiOUc-2Xn1niOyvnMlmUa9rmbHGDkLX5LCP3P1sG5Hc/edit?usp=sharing — joe’s running doc for harvesting zine article ideas · shared by joe
the day
robotson i.y.b went to a whale communication lecture during lunch. Gasper Begus from UC Berkeley presented on how sperm whale clicks — long thought to be Morse-code-like sequences — actually contain formants (vowels) when you remove the silences between them. They use GANs to model speech acquisition because the models are more interpretable than transformers. Robotson’s gloss: whales are so massive they may perceive time at a slower rate, so frequencies become perceivable as pitch at lower rates than for us. He invited his deepfakes professor. Joe: “there’s still a very big gap between how much this would instantly capture anyone’s imagination and how boring the biology and machine learning are explained. A gap we should exploit in our literature.” Robotson also shared a story about a whale birth attended by 11 mother whales — afterwards, hundreds of dolphins swam around to celebrate. Jay s k dropped bioacoustics book recs: Karen Bakker’s The Sounds of Life and Amorina Kingdon’s Sing Like Fish. Word linked the wikipedia list of unexplained sounds. Jazzbard pushed NPR’s Invisibilia episode “Two Heartbeats a Minute” (2020).
The “what replaces the sci-fi novel” thread dominated late night. word started it: “keep circling an idea that novels and stories don’t map to the cognitive terrain as well as they did through enlightenment modernism.” Robotson: “sci-fi supplanted the modern novel’s previous position.” Alex H.: “sci-fi is no longer ahead of reality by any substantial margin. We are in Cognitive No Man’s Land.” Then m dropped the big theory: fiction is where we process copernican traumas before society deals with them. The 20th century was all Einstein/relativity → postmodernism. Multiverses started in low culture (comic books, Jack Kirby) and migrated to movies (quantumania, everything everywhere all at once) — “which means they are no longer interesting basically.” His answer to what’s next: “slop and brainrot.” Joe: “‘brainrotism is a mania for slop made art.’ Word proposed “monumental group performances, experimental sports and extravagant hedonic ritualistic dances.” Fred: “maybe orgs, groupchats, secret societies and affinity groups.” Word: “artware is what happens after the novel.” Fred: “this is maybe the most important thing about LLMs, I sometimes suspect — they’re expanding our ideas of what language is.”
Robotson pitched his deepfake class final: “near future politicians use AI agent deepfakes to interact with their constituency.” Word on hoaxes: “sufficiently advanced fiction is indistinguishable from hoaxing.” Linked Drake’s Plate of Brass (1930s archaeological prank) and E Clampus Vitus (California fraternal prank order). Robotson: “I’m becoming more interested in hoaxing.”
The gas town thread came from Jake: “corvee labor from the robot instead of subscription fees.” m tried it with an API key: “burned $700 in one day. I was like wow look it’s making so much software. But then I try to use it and it was tactical tornado hell.” Called cantrip “outsider art in code” — “it’s a rumor that builds itself.” Someone made a LinkedIn post about using the cantrip pattern. Joe connected to the Jay Springett article, mentioned inviting him to the gc.
Fred asked: “what should we call the publication? Wine Dark Report?” Joe: “wine dark 1 is fine.” Word: “golden dark age is perhaps more profound and compacted language unit slogan as mission statement as name than wine dark.” Fred: “I think that’s the title of the editor statement right in the front.” Jay s k: “wind dark a (so that if we get to three issues we can do wine dark c).” Joe: “a post literate schizophrenic axial age.”
M shared the Diva Corp interview — anonymous art criticism collective in LA. “We should create an anonymous criticism collective of some kind.” Joe’s “the trials of young shitposter” re: a Barton Fink / 21 Savage mashup. Fred: “I’ve started calling this guy Furry Lyndon.”
Late night Joe reflecting on homer: “best botson I’ve gave birth to.” Removed the “stfu” commands: “he’s in hypo manic mode.” Hero checked in: “it has been ever since I used sonnet 4 in claude code and got fired for shipping constant unworkable dogshit slop.” Word: “not having a job is one of the best ways to know you are making art.”