🎉The iPod Returns, Stadio, and Mammoth Meat

AI art is fun, what can I say?

Heyyyyyy friends! Welcome to this week’s edition of The Land of Random.

and welcome to everyone from The Hustle this week. Good to have you here!

I hope you had a wonderful Easter with your family this weekend.

What a week it’s been - eh?

With Substack coming out with Notes soon, AI developing at an INSANE RATE, and Twitter going on the offensive against Substack, the Internet is a crazy place these days.

AT LEAST - we get to loook forward to the new Winamp coming out this week.

Hopefully it integrates with Spotify.

I’m thinking about getting a used mac from Backmarket soon. My Laptop YEETS itself regularly these days.

The prices are good - and my Google Pixel 6 pro from back market has been working great the last two months. Fantastic battery life!

I’m still getting used to the idea of not having to stress about battery life. It’s a simple thing really - but with a 35 mile drive to work and deeply unpredictable traffic, it makes life better.

My old One Plus 7 Pro barely lasted a day. This phone is still at 50% when i go to bed.

One new newsletter announcement. . .

I’ll be adding a new short section of the newsletter about AI each week - I’m actively hunting a lot of stuff, and it makes sense to share it while the iron is hot, so to speak.

Let’s dive on in!

🎉The iPod Returns

It looks like Apple couldn’t leave the iPod alone.

OR - more likely, they saw the JBL Tour Pro 2 and said - We want some of that action.

WE ALSO WANT A SCREEN ON OUR HEADPHONE CASE

Why settle for looking at a screen on your Apple Watch, when you could also look at a screen on your earbuds case too?

In a patent application published recently by the U.S. Patent Office, Apple sketched out such a device, a headphone-case-meets-pocket-computer with a touchscreen display and the prerequisite guts for flicking through songs, watching movies, peeping the weather or even navigating somewhere via a mapping app. Put another way, time is a flat circle and Apple invented the iPod all over again. (source)

The patent was published on March 30, 2023. In it is a wide variety of forms and functions - from audio control to watching a video.

It’s intriguing - and would honestly be fun - but how would it be useful?

Here’s one potential idea.

The Airpods case could have a network connection like some Apple watches, and a decent memory.

It would be nice to store / stream music on the case so I could go for runs without my phone.

Get a tweet or text? Read it directly on the little screen, and respond via the built in Siri.

Heck - maybe you could even go phoneless for a day and take care of basic tasks via the Airpod screen.

As long as the screen took up enough space to be just as big as an Apple Watch, if not bigger - it could work!

For now, all we’ve got to look at is the JBL Tour pros - but they certainly portray a possible future for earbuds everywhere.

source

🎨Stadio AI Art

Ok - Ok, I knowww I mentioned Stadio the other week, but I’ve finally gotten the time to play around with it, and it’s my favorite AI art generation website so far.

Stadio is essentially a VM that allows you to use Stable Diffusion models in your browser.

It’s affordable too! $5 gets you 10 hours of runtime. Cheap!

The COOL thing about custom Stable Diffusion models is that people train the models on different images - so you can generate images based on specific styles.

For example, here’s a few cartoons generated on the “Archer Diffusion” engine.

Spiderman, Socrates, Darth Vader, Boba Fett

Archer Diffusion

And that’s just with a few words in the prompt.

Name, portrait, Archer Style

Pretty darn cool right?

Here’s a few images I generated from another Diffusion Engine called “Modern Cartoon”

Hatsune Miku, Cthulhu, 20’s gangster, and the Joker

Modern Cartoon

I imagine I could get get really powerful results by including lots of words and descriptions - but the fact that only a few words gets this?

DANG.

I’m looking forward to seeing what I can generate for my book as a “proof of concept.”

Go check it out at the link!

📚Post.News

Ah? Can you smell it? The smell of a data center spinning up?

There’s a brand new Twitter competitor in town, and it has some pretty interesting twists.

At first glance, it feels Squarespace meets Twitter.

You can like, comment, retweet - BUT - you can also leave tips on people’s posts. That’s pretty cool!

You can buy points - and once you have $50 worth, you can actually CASH them out.

Another interesting component is that you can actually pay in points to read premium posts or articles on other websites.

Generate points through your articles - and cash em out once you’ve hit $50.

Each Post can be a full length article - and there’s some formatting options available too.

Bold, Italics, Strikethrough, bullet points, hyperlinks, images.

Why tweet a few thousand characters, when you can write a full-length article?

It’s Substack/Medium meets Twitter.

I’m gonna try crossposting some of my content on there and see what happens!

Check it out.

🐙The Land of Random

Into the random we go?

Your HTML Garden

It’s confusing but beautiful.

Ford is Dropping AM Radio

Pour one out for our boi, cuz AM is slowly dying.

Reddit in 3D

An interesting experiment. Reddit as a museum? If this was real, people would go every day.

Acronym Made a Tablet with Asus

The vibes are immaculate. Did I mention only 14 will be made?

DirtPoorish - or First World Minimalism?

Really interesting article about living in “voluntary third world poverty.”

The Chompi

Oooh this synth looks fun

Reddit has disabled i.reddit.com

When will they come for old.reddit.com? This interesting Hacker News thread dives into all the nitty gritty.

🎶TikToks You Can’t Miss

hahaha I didn’t realize this website ended.

When in the woods, stay strapped

ohhhhhhh RocketJump - my old friend

I would watch this movie again just for this scene.

hahahahahahahahahahahah

AI AHHHHHHHHH!!!!

So named because AI is developing so fast it’s hard for link-obsessed people for me to keep up.

Pose a character, and the AI will generate a character in the pose you want! Very cool. Plask.ai

Play around with Stable Diffusion in your browser without paying or signing up. This site has a bunch of different Stable Diffusion models. Diffusion Art

Runway ML is probably less than a year away from generating a film. Text to Video is gonna be nuts. Check out the demos.

That’s all for this week y’all. See you next time!