Janelle Shane @janellecshane@wandering.shop

Hello, everyone! Am writing while sitting near the coffee grinder at this shop. Every time they start it up, the smell is toe-curlingly good.

Via @UKClimbing , the experts weigh in on the future of neural net-named climbing routes.
@McHaffieJames and Visual Chatbot would get along well.
https://www.ukclimbing.com/articles/features/neural_network_trained_on_ukc_logbooks_-_the_results-10970

Thanks to UKClimbing.com I had a database of over 427k rock climbing routes to feed to a neural network. It did pretty well. http://aiweirdness.com/post/175339699997/blue-boulders-problem-1-more-rock-climbing-routes

Visual Chatbot doesn't do knock knock jokes.
demo.visualdialog.org/

One fun thing I discovered about Visual Chatbot: no matter what the photo is of, it will always report there are at least a couple giraffes.
It learned from answers that humans gave, and apparently nobody ever asked "how many giraffes are there?" when the answer was zero.

New blog post: When Visual Chatbot is wrong, it just keeps digging itself a hole.
Visual Chatbot is so much fun.
http://aiweirdness.com/post/175110257767/the-visual-chatbot

Biiiit of a #hailstorm just now in #boulder county

New rock climbing routes in Boulder and Joshua Tree, generated by a neural network. I like that you can tell which list is which, if you're familiar with both areas.
http://aiweirdness.com/post/174885047997/rock-climbing-routes-generated-by-neural-network

I trained a neural network on more than 43,000 jokes and asked it to invent new jokes of its own. http://aiweirdness.com/post/174691534037/why-did-the-neural-network-cross-the-road

I posted those #rollerderby names earlier and one thing led to another and... these are Sith lord guinea pigs.

I trained a neural net to generate roller derby names & discovered it doesn't quite get the concept of puns. It's excruciating to watch it try.
http://aiweirdness.com/post/174466734677/neural-network-generated-roller-derby-names

Nice aurora show at the South Pole Station webcam right now! https://www.usap.gov/videoclipsandmaps/spWebCam.cfm

The whole tree reduces to the CUTEST stick in the winter, because each leaf is a two-foot compound bipinnate megastructure. Now each huge leaf complex is slowly unfolding and turning from golden to dark green.
The way the whole tree reduces to a few sticks, and the way it waits a really long time to unfurl its leaf-megastructures, has earned the Kentucky coffeetree its nickname "dead tree". So it's mastodon-loving AND metal.
Tree has floofed out a bit more by now.

Like the avocado and papaya, they're probably still around because humans found them useful. I read that the Meskwaki make a hot drink from the roasted beans (hence their name), and the Ho-Chunk and Pawnee also eat the beans. The beans are also used for games and jewelry.

Floof tree is coming back! Very Excited to plant this when I found out it's a remnant from the days of mastodons. It relied on MASTODONS!
It's a Kentucky coffeetree, currently native to a few swampy river drainage areas in the Midwest.
It's got super hard seed pods whose seeds don't germinate unless they're chomped open by megafauna.
Nowadays they only germinate if they fall in wetlands that can rot the pods open. That seriously restricted their range.

Happy update: I've been trying for a long time to find a copy of Zenna Henderson's Ingathering stories, and one of my friends just lent me a copy!

In which I train a neural network classifier to answer the question: Metal band or My Little Pony?
http://aiweirdness.com/post/174211306032/metal-band-or-my-little-pony

220 Volt is metal, but Alice Cooper and Black Rose are definitely ponies