RGB

The Case of the Missing Chacmools Soon after New Age icon and bestselling author Carlos Castaneda died in 1998, a group of his most loyal followers vanished, and many believed they’d made a suicide pact. Geoffrey Gray investigates the writer’s bizarre cult and finds himself entangled in a web of murky financial dealings, sex, possible foul play—and one death-defying supernatural being.

Along with @maciejwolczyk we've been training a neural network that learns how to play NetHack, an old roguelike game, that looks like in the screenshot. Recently, something unexpected happened.

Google rolled out AI overviews across the United States this month, exposing its flagship product to the hallucinations of large language models.

Some generations with stable diffusion

We live in an era of absurd musical abundance. Streaming services put the (in)complete history of recorded music at our fingertips, with sophisticated recommendation algorithms that promise to tailor us the perfect playlist. More than 100,000 new tracks are uploaded every day to platforms like Spotify, Apple Music or SoundCloud. As the hip-hop innovator Kool Keith put it in a 2020 interview: ‘There’s so much new music out there that it’s just too much for the average antique person.’ It can be too much for any person, antique or otherwise. We’re saturated, inundated with the stuff. But the problem isn’t just abundance: it’s what we do with the musical riches at our fingertips.

Do you believe in ghosts?

The EU is currently updating eIDAS (electronic IDentification, Authentication and trust Services), an EU regulation on electronic identification and trust services for electronic transactions in the European Single Market. That’s clearly a crucial piece of legislation in the digital age, and updating it is sensible given the fast pace of development in the sector. But it seems that something bad has happened in the process. Back in March 2022, a group of experts sent an open letter to MEPs [pdf] with the dramatic title “Global website security ecosystem at risk from EU Digital Identity framework’s new website authentication provisions”. It warned:

It also has inbuild radio, a very nice program but the learning curve is a bit steep.