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OVERWORLD:
-AI companies are ultra-horny for data-

TWO BETWEENS:
-This camera turns any picture into a nude-
-Disneyland: pandemic ghost town to post-covid wonderland-

THE DEPTHS:
-The closest we’ll ever get to time travel-

“Practice what you know, and it will help to make clear what now you do not know.
— Rembrandt

✦TREND PICKS✦

AI

AI companies are ultra-horny for data.

Remember the horny Looney Tunes skunk? Pepe Le Pew? Insanely desperate guy. No limits whatsoever. The guy would violate just about any slightly curvy female skunk in sight.

It's a lesson even kids get: Ethics have a price tag, but if you're desperate, you're shopping elsewhere.

A desperate French cartoon skunk is funny. But a desperate multi-multi-multi-billion dollar corporation that holds the fate of humanity in its hands... pretty fucking serious.

You see, Meta, Google, and OpenAI are getting desperate. By 2026, they're expected to run out of data (Wikipedia entries, scientific papers, etc.) to train their human-crushing bots.

Yes, the 13 trillion pieces of data that GPT-4 is trained on isn’t enough.

Now, they’re getting Pepe Le Pew horny:

No lawmaking has prepared content creators and social-media users for this. It's all new territory. Big tech is most likely exploiting these gray areas in order to one-up each other in the race for world dominance. Doesn’t intuitively feel quite safe, but we’ll see how that goes.

If all else fails: Since lawsuits are already a threat (NYTimes sued Microsoft and OpenAI last year for stealing data), AI researchers are looking for a shortcut. Sam Altman of OpenAI discussed moving towards using synthetic data generated by AI to overcome this. This means that AI could potentially be training on AI-created data in the future, which is insane.

✦QUICK HITS✦

Pharrell dropped a new album on his 51st birthday. It’s a game-changer because it’s not on streaming. You can only buy it from this website. Hopefully, this is a start to the trend of musicians taking control of their music.

Elon Musk announced Tesla will unveil its robotaxi on August 8 on X/Twitter. The tweet upped Tesla’s stock rise by over 4.8%. Still, people are doubtful since Tesla once predicted robotaxis by 2020. Time will tell if Elon is talking out of his ass again.

Moncler is set to transform Milano Centrale railway station into a vast art gallery for Milan Design Week with "An Invitation to Dream," featuring collaborations with notable artists and curated by Jefferson Hack, co-founder and CEO of Dazed Media. Go there. Now.

Bubble Skincare warned their youngest customers against buying a new, harsh exfoliating serum. Thanks to TikTok, demand for skincare in the US has surged among teens and tweens, including girls as young as 8 and 9 years old, and skincare isn’t exactly optimized for faces that young. Do these kids even get acne?

Apple is updating its App Store policies to allow retro game emulators. That doesn’t exactly mean you’ll be jumping away on Super Mario Bros. 3 on your iPhone for free though. The games must comply with “all applicable laws” — indicating that pirated titles will be banned.

Beyoncé's "COWBOY CARTER" debuts at No. 1 on both the Billboard 200 and Top Country Albums, marking a historic achievement. With 407,000 first-week units, it's 2024's biggest debut, and Beyoncé becomes the first Black woman to top the Country chart.

Coinbase was ruled not to have violated securities law by the US Court of Appeals. This marks an important win for Coinbase overall, as they’ve been fighting law-breaching accusations for the past years, which significantly tanked their stock — they IPO’d at $342, and have been climbing a $30 bottom for the past years, currently sitting at $240.

A Superman comic book, featuring the first appearance of the red-caped chad, just sold for $6 million, making it the world's most valuable comic book. The previous record for a comic sold at auction was $3.6 million for a copy of "Amazing Fantasy No. 15," featuring the debut of Spider-Man. Snazzy.

Spotify is demonetizing all tracks under 1000 streams. The new policy wants to counteract manipulation and prioritize legitimate music consumption. Which is… good? Or bad? Both?

Read: An interview with a blind developer on how he works (2017)

 👀 This camera turns any picture into a nude
We are officially living in the times of x-ray vision. NUCA is a 3D-printed camera that instantly generates a nude AI rendition of photos.

It’s not really a “serious” project though. It’s an art project by Mathias Vef and Benedikt Groß and isn’t intended for sale but featured in an exhibition.

More than anything, it comments on AI's moral limits. It’s tech satire, kinda.

NUCA uses existing AI and deepfake tools to generate these images in about 10 seconds. The whole point is to spark discussions on consent, algorithmic fairness, and AI's societal impacts (and your sweet, sweet penis).

Check out 404Media’s article on it, they even included some actual NUCA nudes in their article.

🐭 Disneyland just went from a pandemic ghost town to a post-covid wonderland
Three years ago, COVID-19 turned Disneylands worldwide into ghost towns.

Revenues fell 35% in 2020, a nearly $10 billion decrease from the $26.2 billion the “experiences division” had made in the year before the pandemic.

Now, it’s fucking booming. The experiences division posted record revenue of $32.5 billion in fiscal 2023, a 16% increase from the prior year.

This is much thanks to new tech integrations, like mobile ordering and the ability for guests to pay to skip to the front of the line for certain rides.

It’s actually Disney's fattest money-maker, far outperforming their streaming & entertainment business:

• In 2023, experiences were the best-performing part of Disney’s business, accounting for 36% of the company’s total revenue but 70% of its operating income.

• Meanwhile, Disney’s entertainment division, which includes its theatrical and streaming businesses, represented 45% of revenue but just 11% of operating income.

Experiences are where it’s at: Disney is now preparing to push a $60 billion investment into experiences. 70% of that money will go toward “new experiences” in domestic and international parks, along with cruise lines. The other 30% will go toward technology and infrastructure, including maintenance of existing attractions.

THE DEPTHS

Photography

The closest we’ll ever get to time travel, with Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky 

This picture, of an absolute boss, is 113 years old.

Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky took it, and he was a pioneer of color photography in the early 1900s.

Born in 1863 in Murom, Russia, Prokudin-Gorsky's fascination with photography and color science propelled him to make a groundbreaking method to capture vivid, lifelike colors at a time when the photography world was largely monochrome.

Utilizing a three-color separation process, Prokudin-Gorsky meticulously took three black-and-white photographs of a scene through red, green, and blue filters.

Later, these images were projected using filtered lanterns that aligned precisely to recreate the original scene's colors.

This innovation let him produce photographs of astonishing clarity and depth, unveiling the vibrant hues of the Russian Empire to a global audience.

It was cool then, and it’s cool now. Whenever we see black-and-white pictures of the olden days, it’s almost like our brains can’t grasp the reality of it. But Prokudin-Gorsky’s work lets us get far closer to the times, which gives us a real understanding of life back then.

Perhaps the most significant chapter in Prokudin-Gorsky's legacy is his ambitious endeavor, sponsored by Tsar Nicholas II, to document the vast expanse of the Russian Empire.

Between 1909 and 1915, he embarked on a photographic expedition to capture Russia's diverse landscapes, peoples, and architecture.

His seemingly endless collection, consisting of over 2,000 images, offers a rare, colorful glimpse into the early 20th-century life in Russia.

It’s insane, we get to see everything; from the rugged terrain of the Urals to the majestic domes of historical churches, and the day-to-day lives of various ethnic groups.

The best pictures are those of the ordinary people of Samarqand. Above you can see a watermelon merchant, just vibing.

Here’s a picture of a ridiculous amount of horses on some dunes near Samarqand.

Neat stuff.