Brent - lesser daemon (Page 2)

26

Jan

DeepSeek-R1 Initial Notes

While I've been traveling, little-known Chinese research lab Deepseek released an open-source model that can compete with the best closed-source products OpenAI and Anthropic have to offer. Everyone appears to be freaking out about it.

The reason for this is its astonishingly low training cost compared to performance (it reportedly cost $5 million dollars to train), the fact that it's open-source, and even if you choose to pay for its API, it's about 90% cheaper than its American competitors. The model is also available to try for free immediately. This is all possible because of how much cheaper the

5 min read

25

Jan

What Comes After Post-Modernism?

I saw a talk at MAGfest today by Rym Decoster and Emily Compton which attempted to sketch a theory of current post-post-modern cultural output. It's very much a work in progress, but their concept of "metacontextualism" is the idea that after postmodern deconstruction and irony, we are starting to see a trend emerge towards building meaning through choice out of its ashes: being aware of the fractured contexts of a postmodern world, and that there's no single way of knowing or being, but choosing a forking path and going down it. They argue that art is how a society engages

2 min read

24

Jan

On 100 Days of Making

I am now on day 10 of 100 days of writing, and it occurs to me that I haven't actually explained what this is or why I'm doing it. This is a practice I've done at least once a year since 2022, and has proven itself over and over to be one of the best things I can possibly do for myself, so not writing about it yet seems like a bit of an oversight.

100 Days Of Making is pretty much what it sounds like. You pick a thing (preferably a creative one) and produce a variation on that

6 min read

23

Jan

Letters of Recommendation: Signalis, Mushroom Coffee

Since I've spent most of today waiting for a delayed train or on said train, I decided to write about two of the things that got me through it.

1) Signalis

This 2022 game by Berlin studio Rose Engine has been sitting in my Steam library for a few months now, and I finally picked it up this week. I play a lot of artsy indie games, but I don't think I often see overlap between those and the survival horror genre. This threads the needle beautifully - hallucinatory dream sequences, beautiful pixel art, and compelling poetry, punctuated with some

3 min read

22

Jan

An Ode To Hopelessness: Squid Game 2 Recap

The last five years were hard on all of us.

I haven't watched a lot of television for the past year or so. I tend to go through periods where I'm only consuming one type of media, and in a nice surprise lately it's mostly been books - getting an e-reader, along with having a commute for the first time in four years, ended up getting me reading again in a way I haven't in a long time. Overall, this is probably a good thing, since I'm told that reading is "good for me". Still, I try not to be

11 min read