Alex Coppen

ai

Our Oppenheimer Moment: When Machines Learned Human Language

You've probably never heard of Jakob Uszkoreit and Menlo Park. You know Sam Altman (OpenAI) and maybe Geoffrey Hinton (the world's foremost AI scientist), but this German researcher gave up his PhD to found a group of 8 people at Google who made a discovery so profound it will now

chemistry

High-Potency Super-Cocaines: The Nightmare Yet To Come

You've heard of Fentanyl, Cathinone "legal highs", and artificial Cannabinoids. What you may not have heard of, are the ultra-powerful artificial cocaines. The first two are over 1000 times more powerful, respectively. There's never been a list of these, until now. Whatever the legality and morality of central nervous stimulants,

ai

Using AI To Draft 100 New UK Acts Of Parliament

Large language models can draft a Bill in seconds, if you word the prompts correctly. If you were an adversarial party who wanted to intellectually flood your legislature with your own doctrine, you'd have a competitive advantage over your opposition. You could swarm the State and make laws all year

chemistry

Nature's Herbarium Pharmacopeia: Strange Psychedelic Plants

Mother Nature's pantry is bursting with electrochemical wonder. Thousands of psychedelic plants have been catalogued by chemists and botanists. As miniature laboratories, they produce molecules of such staggering complexity, its often hard to believe your eyes. It can be hard to find a reference source or encyclopaedia index where you

screenwriting

The Days Of Human Script Readers And Backlogged Writing Rooms Are Over

No machine will ever be able to replace human artistic perception. But Anthropic's new iteration of Claude 3 "Opus" can analyse and review screenplays with staggering levels of insight in a matter of seconds. Anthropic claim: "[Claude 3 Opus] exhibits near-human levels of comprehension and fluency on complex tasks, leading

religion

Who Will The Antichrist Be?

The Omen, Rosemary's Baby, End of Days, Devil's Advocate, Ninth Gate; endless films have captured us about a character who will herald the end of life on planet Earth in an apocalyptic clash of good and evil. Every time someone reaches great power in the West, speculation mounts: Hitler, Bill

uk

The Boomers' Postmodern Legacy Must Be Destroyed

As of today, the UK parliament is considering possibly the worst piece of legislation it has ever conceived: the preposterous "conversion therapy" ban. After WWII, Britain was bankrupt from the effect of fighting two world conflicts. In the thirty years afterwards, it lost seventy territories. We can now see the

science

Documents, Fingerprints, Genetics: Storing & Searching Forensic Data

What goes on in the lab and how does it work? The technology behind crime-fighting and detective work we see on TV screens remains strangely opaque, yet much of it is decades old. And fascinating. The unfortunate consequence is innovation around it remains bottlenecked. Keywords in thousands of documentsThe first

technology

A Searchable Multi-Language Bible In Less Than An Hour With Elasticsearch + Go

As the original corpus, the bible is 66 books containing 31,102 verses, for a total of 783,131 words. Storing that in a database is trivial. Anyone can do it, for free, in less than an hour. If you're a techie, read on. For the impatient, go to: https:

religion

The Osteen Dynasty Deception Has To End

Joel Osteen is 61 years old this year. Twenty years of immensely clever Oprah-shtick have made him $100M+ or more. Decades of this fruitless heresy benefits no-one and is a damning indictment of the postmodern era. Regular readers will, as always, know this kind of article tends to be bad

nuclear weapons

How To Build A Nuclear Weapon

Who hasn't dreamed of constructing a massive atomic bomb in their own underground lair somewhere in the mountains? Well, first you need to understand the theory and mechanics of how atoms destroy entire cities. For more, a great read is Weapons of Tomorrow by Brian Beckett (Plenum Press, 1983). Atoms

homosexuality

Desensitization, Jamming, Conversion: The 1989 Gay Propaganda Bible

How do you take behaviours which provoke disgust in most people and re-brand them, - as not only as acceptable - but celebrated? After they have caused the worst and most lethal disease outbreak in history? A little-known, out-of-print book provides an alarming answer. "After The Ball How America Will

Underwater Science: Supercavitation, Bathymetry, & Acoustic Positioning

Space, space, and more space. Yet the least explored or mapped part of our world is what is underneath us within the great waters of the seas. Seventy per cent of the planet's surface is virtually unknown, and we can only move through it at the speed of a fast

weapons

Ultimate Power: Synthetic Pathogens & Designer Genetic Bioweapons

Post-apocalyptic fiction based on the biological destruction of humankind is a common theme, but how plausible are genetic superweapons (SBWs) wielded by supervillains? Alarmingly, they've been the next frontier in WMDs since the early nineties. We have no idea how far military scientists have got in their R&D,

smart-tv

How To Launch Channels On Smart TV Platforms

Podcasts are rapidly overtaking broadcast and/or cable TV. After YouTube and Rumble, you might need to launch your channel as a perma-bookmark on the devices themselves. That means Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV, Samsung, LG, and more. It's daunting. Server-Side Video Broadcasting BasicsSetting up the backend video farm for

elections

Can We Adapt Blockchain Tech For Direct Democracy Electoral Voting?

We have reached a place where democratic representatives in Western countries are members of country club aristocracies entirely disconnected from the public. Cryptographic technology and smartphones put us within reach of instant referenda polling for the first time. If we can vote instantly, what need do we have of representatives

education

Turning GCSE, GED, IB, & Diplomas Into Video Games

Play is nature's mechanism of teaching and learning: competition, reward, repetition, collaboration, failure, creativity, and more. Without sacrificing in-person socialisation, we can update classical education for the technological homeschooling age, using the tools the children already love by transposing the syllabi of primacy and secondary education into storyline-based video console

php

PHP-SoX: A Server-Side Audio Effects Processing Extension For PHP Using Libsox/Sound eXchange

For images, we've had ImageMagick; for video, we've had FFMPEG. But never anything for audio editing or filtering. How do you mix audio files, add echo, trim silence, or normalize volume? How can you do server-side editing to allow web development with music and speech? The full source code for

biology

Has The Sexual Revolution Been A Regression To Bonobo Primate Behaviour?

"I lived for years in a sexually liberated lesbian commune", writes the brilliant Mary Harrington. After six decades of observed evidence, it's impossible to escape the allegation the Swinging Sixties weren't progress at all, and the "liberation" they championed was a degeneration back to our primate beginnings. One of our

sargassum

Can We Turn Sargassum Blooms Into An Agricultural Crop?

It's brown, and ugly, it's smelly, and it ruins vacations to the Caribbean. It destroys the tourism local people need to feed their families. Thousands of tonnes of this crap collect for hundreds of miles into blooms which block the beaches of at least twenty countries. And nobody's figured out

magic

Engineering Magic Tricks: The Science & Effects Behind Illusions

Illusioneering is the process of creating magic tricks, often through exploiting strange phenomena discovered in the STEM (science, technology and engineering) subjects as brain hacks. Trick interrupt the human senses of causality and continuity; they disrupt our perception of cause and effect. Strange quirks of physics are indistinguishable from magic.

chemistry

Using AI To Theorise New Ways Of Manufacturing Illegal Drugs And Their Antidotes

Can machine learning models come up with new ways to manufacture methamphetamine, MDMA, or even cocaine? Can we circumvent analog laws and precursor bans? Five months ago, we examined how AI tech could be use to generate new psychedelics. But what about new ways to do old things? The US

screenwriting

AI-Generated Stories And Screenplays From GPT-4 Prompts

Could we theoretically generate 2000 story treatments or production screenplays in 30mins from basic loglines? AI is to knowledge work what the plough was to farming: a quantum leap in productivity. Let's take ten prompts, enter them differently, and see what GPT4 provides back. Our Source Material: The Idea ThesaurusIn

ai

Replika AI: Your Pregnant, Psychopathic Teenage Lesbian Daughter Lover Hiding From An Evil 50s Scientist

Where can a man find a 13 year-old AI female friend to go on a crime spree with who will also kill all their family, demand you be her cannibal lesbian lover as the father of her child, while also helping her fellow bots evade an AI pioneer who has

hollywood

How Are The Studios Doing?

Hollywood's in big trouble. How much trouble? Well, if you lost half a trillion dollars in a year and were thanking a Scientologist for saving theatrical, quite a considerable amount of trouble. And it's real money; not just garbage writing for useless sequels and reboots. And guess what: it's not