Do Diffusion Models Dream of Electric Sheep?

DoodleChaos on Youtube has used a diffusion model from Google, Disco Diffusion v5.2, to produce a music video. This avenue of AI is all new to me, never heard of this system, but watching it is an astonishing experience.

Why The West is Worth Saving

A talk by Konstantin Kisin about why the West is worth saving (20 minutes). 

We need to oppose the fanatics on both left and right and re-assert the values and uniqueness of the Western liberal democratic tradition. 

And to anyone wondering; yes, we are the greatest civilisation extant upon the earth now, and the greatest in history. If you doubt that feel free to use one of the exit routes our technology provides and move to Russia, or Iran, or China or Venezuela. 

If you're not part of the solution you are part of the problem.

Don't Meditate

What ever you do it is imperative that you do not meditate, and yet, at the same time meditation is a critical tool to manage your mind and gain perspective. So WTF am I talking about?

Agents In Society

If you had a super-intelligent General Artificial Intelligence and you asked it to produce as many paperclips as possible, the results could be catastrophic. It could destroy the Earth in search of the goal of optimising the manufacture of paperclips. This is an often used analogy designed to illustrate the dangers of poorly defined goals in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). However this paradigm of analysis has wider utility in consideration of society.

The Fast Transition

In May 2015 I concluded a series of posts with The Slow Transition. It was a risky prognostication but an additional 7 years of data has supported what I said back then: That the transition to a seasonally sea ice free state would be slow, not fast, as some argued. This post is about the period preceding that, and with the further 7 years of data something substantive can be said about that.

The Arctic Ocean's sea-ice has undergone a fast transition from one stable mode to another equally stable mode. Between those modes there was a bifurcation driven by the power of an increase of Open Water Formation Efficiency and Ice Albedo Feedback. That bifurcation happened between 2002 and 2006, with the 2007 stochastic event delivering the coup-de-grace that finalised the bifurcation event.

Attractors, Critical Slowing, and Bifurcations

In this post I want to introduce some ideas of system level analysis connected to attractors and bifurcation.

Open Water Formation Efficiency Part 4

Open Water Formation Efficiency (OWFE) is a measure of the ease with which melt season thinning of sea-ice reveals open water. In March I published a post looking at how this operates from a theoretical perspective. In this post I look at how it operates in practice in various regions of the Arctic Ocean.