Issue 68

Someone deepfaked Elon Musk's face onto the face of their child. N-Wheeled Cars. 🏎️

May 14, 2019

ROBOT MUSIC 🤖 CSS TRANSFORMATIONS 🚼 GUESS WHO ⁉️

Heya,

This week is an odd assortment of things I found while roaming the webs. The deepfake of Elon Musk gets less creepy the more often you watch it. I promise.

Some great tools for fonts; one for discovery and one for destruction. You can do everything with these font tools.

Finally, a stretchable face, Chrome only, that is oddly satisfying for a few good hours.

Let's get started.

🕸️ The Cool Side of the Web

Someone deepfaked Elon Musk's face onto the face of their child.

There are genuine reasons to worry about deep fakes but the comedic potential is not one of them. Don't get me wrong, this video is disturbing.

youtube.com

N-Wheeled Cars. 🏎️

Throwback to a classic era of the internet. In this case, the celebration is of cars with any number of wheels other than four.

douglas-self.com

The weird and, slightly, disgusting world of the internet ads known as 'chumboxes'.

Chumboxes aren't like banner ads; they are, at best, unsavory. In this article, the author tries to track down the mysterious vegetable that a mysterious doctor is begging {your nationality} to throw out.
If you've ever been tempted to discover why Hollywood won't cast {actor}, then this is a good reminder not to click that link.

vox.com

Light pollution map. 💡

A shout-out for any website that uses the Bing Maps API to create something. I'm from a small town in Australia, so the population density of India and Europe make me whisper 'Crikey'.

For a more awe-inspiring view of the world Downlink allows Mac users to download satellite imagery straight to their desktop.

lightpollutionmap.info

🤖 Robots et. al.

Poem Portraits is an AI that will generate a two line poem based on your image and a donated word. 📸

The AI was trained on 20 million words from 19th-century poetry, so the results are interesting. Personally, I didn't donate an image because the relationship between image and poem was not made clear. It seemed like a gratuitous hook.

I donated "grade" and I got:

Your grade and broad stream sweep to the stream,
Our pig and lead, and the stars of the stars.

withgoogle.com

Examples of how GANSynth mimics the music of famous composers. 🎼

These are the kind of experiments that freak me out, not because I am a musician (what I do is infinitely less complicated than making music). I could be replaced by a street-wise rate, so a clever AI? Put me out of a job in minutes.

So, I immediately seek out articles on the limits of AI creativity.

googleapis.com

⚒️ Tools and Resources

Fontanello can make you a source of all good font styles. 🔤

I have a soft spot for any tool which makes it easy to lift the styles from beautiful webpages, and this one fits the bill perfectly; you just need a right-click on the ol' mouse to reveal everything.

oktavilla.se

1MB is a new player in the free host market.

This could be a really good resource for beginners, or maybe for resume sites. You can host static files such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Full editing from within the browser using a custom code editor. They even have some starter templates and a growing selection of editor themes.

1mb.site