I’m David Gewirtz. Welcome to this week’s Advanced Geekery newsletter. It’s been an exciting week. Let’s dive in.
Advanced Geekery is published weekly on Substack and LinkedIn. Same content. Choose your favorite delivery method. Back Issues.
Bambu Lab was kind enough to provide me with their large-format A2L bed slinger to test and tell you about. This week, I set up the printer and give you my first impressions. I gotta be honest. There’s good, and there’s not so good. Watch to learn all about it.
Here’s a quick recap of the articles I published in the last week on ZDNET.
Google Earth added Nano Banana, and I immediately reimagined Philly with zombies and evil clowns: Can Google Earth’s new AI accurately redesign homes, recreate history, and imagine the future? I tested Nano Banana across several locations, and the results ranged from useful to gloriously absurd.
There’s more to this story. I’m fairly certain I didn’t break Google Earth. Or, at the very least, it wasn’t just me. I posted the above article on Thursday at 5:30am, right as the embargo lifted. Then Google sent me this on Friday evening at exactly 5pm:
“We know that people uniquely trust Google Earth for a reliable view of the world. We've seen geospatial professionals using this feature for a range of useful purposes, however we've also seen people sharing screenshots of generated imagery that appear to violate our policies. So we're rolling back this feature in Google Earth while we work on implementing stronger guardrails. It's important to note that generated images didn't appear in the main Google Earth experience for others to see and were watermarked as AI generated."
I wasn’t told exactly what policies were violated. Nor, when I asked, did they say whether it was my zombies that inspired this reaction. I tend to think not, because I can’t be the only one who decided to play with the new image creation capability.
Fundamentally, there’s nothing new here. You could always take a screen capture, feed it to Nano Banana, and get a result. I proved in my article that the AI imaging feature introduced had no real geographic or historical awareness, and was really only processing a screenshot.
I have to ask, what exactly is the fuss? The Google folks had to know people would get creative. The only real pro capability would have been architectural rendering from Street View, but that feature wasn’t provided. So, all that’s really left is being creative with the product.
Ah, well. When the feature comes back with its guardrails, perhaps zombies and evil clowns will be personae non gratae. Stay tuned. If there’s more to this story, I’ll let you know.
Moving on, let’s queue up some interesting YouTube videos for your entertainment and edification.
Joanna Stern has an extended interview with OpenAI president Greg Brockman. She rightly calls him out on marketing speak.
Although not my style, this woman has a fairly comprehensive overview of the tools she uses to make videos. It relies heavily on Canva in a way I hadn’t seen before.
Completely unrelated to anything, this girl does some amazing acrobatics with a jump rope. This is why we have YouTube.
The long-awaited official T-shirt for my Choices Are Voices EP is finally available. Now that my Etsy merch store is back, I’m able to bring you my newly favorite graphic T-shirt. You’ve listened to the tunes. Now you can wear the shirt.
Hey, and I have a favor to ask. In order to get the shop to rank, reviews are really important. After you decide you want one of the shirts (they come in lots of colors and sizes) and place your order, please leave a review. The more reviews, the better. Even if you don’t order, you can help kickstart the store by favoriting a shirt or two.
Note: As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases, but not this week.
And now, some good stuff from around the Internet, well worth checking out.
ZDNET’s David Berlind takes a deep dive into just how OpenAI’s AI managed to escape its bounds and attack Hugging Face’s servers.
Not to be outdone, even in rogue AI activities, Anthropic’s Claude models got loose and went on the warpath as well. ZDNET’s Charlie Osborne has the details.
In non-AI news, NASA has discovered oddly beautiful honeycomb patterns on the surface of Mars.
I’d like to regularly spotlight a reader project or two here. Your project doesn’t have to be a big Kickstarter launch. If you’ve built something cool, it has some pretty pictures, and you’re proud of it, I might be able to share it here.
If you have a photogenic reader project, send an email to me at david@zatz.com with the subject “READER PROJECT,” a few pictures, and a short one-paragraph description. If you have a social media link or a link to the project, include that, too.
Available on all your favorite streaming services.
House of the Head T-shirts are finally back on the merch store. Stay tuned. Choices Are Voices shirts are coming soon.
I’ve got a lot happening all over the web. Here are links to my various stuff:
House of the Head: home for my published music
ZATZ Labs: where I host my published software projects
Feel free to dig around, visit, and say hey!
Substack supports comments, so feel free to leave some. I promise to read them. Just, please, let’s keep our personal politics out of any discussion.
That should do it for this week. This newsletter is really starting to pick up subscribers. Please help it out by sharing links on all your socials.
Have a great week!