Tag: technology

The Textual Wave Begins

Today, Castalia House is extremely pleased to announce the publication of two new books, both original translations. EAGLE AND DOVE is an amazing novel by Zénaïde Fleuriot, about a provincial brother and sister who move to Paris just in time to experience the upheaval of the Franco-Prussian War. This translation from the original French, by Summer Charrette, marks the first time the book has ever been available in English. An excerpt is available at Castalia Library.

THE GATE is Natsume Soseki’s personal favorite of his sixteen novels. It is a quintessentially Japanese story about a married couple possessed of a dark secret that imperils not only their relationship, but the husband’s ability to even function in the world. Translated by Kenji Weaver, it is only the third-ever English translation, and the Red Team reviewers rated it more highly than its predecessors on both literal accuracy and readability. It, too, is available on Amazon.

Starting today, Castalia House plans to publish at least one new book on Amazon every day. We already have 27 books translated that are being prepared for release, with at least two more being translated from French, German, Italian, and Japanese every day. All of these books will be available for subscribers on Castalia Unlimited when the Alexandria project is ready for release later this year, and one will be sent out to the subscribers every week, as EAGLE AND DOVE was last night. However, the translations will not be available on Kindle Unlimited anymore, as this would preclude us from making them available on our own system. And, yes, over time these books will gradually be available in hardcover editions, and some of them will be available in leatherbound editions.

I trust you will understand that I was not exaggerating when I said that Alexandria is a major project of historical significance. And I am optimistic that what we are doing in developing Byron AI will prove to be of similar significance.

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The End of the Global Technocracy

The rest of the world is beginning to understand that it simply cannot use Clown World’s technology, no matter how alluring it might be.

France just banned Windows from 2.5 million government computers. The reason is terrifying. The US sanctioned the International Criminal Court. Microsoft locked the chief prosecutor out of his email overnight. One switch and an entire institution went dark. Europe realized any government running American software is one executive order away from losing access to its own data.

1/ What Happened

France ordered every ministry to ditch Windows, Teams, Zoom, and all American tech. 2.5 million computers moving to Linux. Denmark dumped Microsoft Office. Germany moved 30,000 PCs to Linux. All 27 EU members signed a digital sovereignty charter.

2/ Move Sensitive Email

Every email on Gmail or Outlook is subject to US law. Set up a free ProtonMail account. Based in Switzerland. Encrypted end to end. No US jurisdiction. Move medical, legal, and financial email there. Keep Gmail for newsletters.

3/ Move Sensitive Files

Google Drive and OneDrive are US companies. The CLOUD Act applies to everything stored on them. Move anything sensitive to a local drive, encrypted USB, or European cloud like Tresorit or Filen. Keep Google Drive for files you wouldn’t care if someone

4/ Encrypt Your Messages

iMessage and WhatsApp are US companies. Signal is end-to-end encrypted, open source, and stores nothing. Install Signal. Move sensitive conversations there. It only works when both sides use it.

5/ Replace Microsoft Office

Everything you type in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint passes through Microsoft’s servers. Download LibreOffice. Free. Open source. Works offline. Your documents stay on your machine. No cloud. No American servers.

6/ Lock Your Browser

Chrome is Google. Every search, every site, every tab reported back. Switch to Brave or Firefox. Both block trackers by default. Neither sends your browsing history to an American company.

The more you stay off the mainstream technology, the lower your level of risk. It’s one of the primary reasons we’re doing our own AI before it becomes completely corrupted.

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The Castalia Reader

A lack of a good eReader has long been a real problem for me over the years. Everything is halfway-decent, but I’ve never found what I believe to be the perfect eReader even though I’ve been reading extexts since carting around my Alphasmart Dana which had a full keyboard and displayed about three long lines at a time before happily converting to my first Treo. That felt like a miracle, carrying an entire library around in your pocket.

My preferences are Aldiko, which is defunct, and MoonReader, which is actually pretty good and is even integrated with the GoldenDict dictionary translations for reading in different languages and looking up words. But the fundamental problem is that most eReaders are not designed to be used the way actual books are used, but as a vehicle to sell books. Which is why basic functions like being able to export your highlights and notes are so often glaringly absent from an eReader.

Anyhow, since Castalia Unlimited is going to distribute DRM-free epubs, I decided that we’re going to have our own Castalia Reader. And so I built one with more than a little help from Claude Athos, and although it’s really just a browser app, it’s already replaced Aldiko on my tablet, as you can see.

That is the title page of the Castalia Reader running on my PC in Brave. However, it looks exactly the same on my Android tablet. There is a lot of information in there if you look closely; first, it’s correctly displaying the Japanese symbols. Second, you can see how to navigate back to the Library of books stored locally, and third, you can see the four icons across the top that provide Bookmarks, Full-Screen Mode, Navigation, and Settings.

Once you actually start reading the book, it keeps track of where you are by chapter on the bottom left and by virtual page and percentage on the bottom right. You can swipe, tap, or scroll to change the page, and selecting a text section allows for highlighting, copying, or sharing; saved highlights can be exported en masse later on demand.

We’re very, very serious about this Castalia Unlimited thing, so if you want to be a part of it, become a paid subscriber to Castalia Library and you can become part of the alpha testing of the Castalia Reader as soon as we’re ready to let people start playing with it. And I would be remiss if I did not note that the new translation system allowed me to translate all ten volumes of Sangokushi, plus the first three volumes of the Second Series of the Episodios Nacionales this weekend.

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Progress Report 001

An update for the Byron AI backers. We now have a sufficiently powerful box up and running with an open source LLM on it. We’re now ready to start the first stage of the actual training. The style module, which is being developed on a separate box, has made some actual advancements, and importantly, we’ve learned a lot about what authors are already in the data, which are partially in the data, and which are not.

This information is significant for how we train with them for the style module, although it’s of little significance for the genre module.

This is just the first step, but it is arguably the most important one. As it stands, we now have a moderately powerful AI running under our control without any external guardrails imposed by the mainstream AI corporations.

It’s also clear now that there will be other useful applications as well, but for the time being, we will stay focused on the mission.

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Byron AI Volunteers Wanted

The Byron AI team is looking for 10-20 volunteers who are a) reasonably well-versed in a broad range of literary genres and b) are capable of quickly reading 500- to 1000-word chunks. No technical ability is required; what we’re looking for is people who are capable of reading an unidentified text sample and attempting to identify the author on the basis of the style. The performance is not important; we have a second-level test that is necessary for those readers who cannot identify the author on the first read, so the volunteers have to be able to resist the temptation to look anything up or resort to AI in order to identify the author.

That sort of artificial identification will pollute the data and we want to strictly avoid it. Byron AI backers are favored for this, so if you’re interested in volunteering, please email me with AI STYLE BACKER if you are a project backer and AI STYLE if you are not.

As is probably clear, the dev team did not wait for the campaign to successfully conclude before we got started on certain elements of the project. It’s still too soon to declare that we will succeed in the proof of concept, but the initial indications are positive.

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The Final Five Hours

This is your last chance to back the proof of conept of the Byron AI. We’ve now hit our original goal of 250 backers. 300 would seem to be ambitious, but a last-day pop is common, so we’ll see how it goes.

Thanks to everyone who is supporting this. While I have not publicly shared any of the information yet, the development team has already been making excellent progress even prior to obtaining the hardware thanks to our existing tools and cloud access.

UPDATE: 80 minutes left and we’re close with 286. Just 14 more…

UPDATE: Time’s up! We ended up with exactly 300 backers (counting the three direct ones) and what should be sufficient support to do what we are setting out to do and most likely a bit more. Thanks very much to everyone who is making this possible!

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The New Reason to Back Byron AI

The last three weeks have significantly underlined the importance of supporting the combined efforts of Castalia and Infogalactic to develop a custom AI system that will protect and enhance the ability to produce fiction without limits being imposed by the major AI providers. A number of things have happened since we launched the Byron AI crowdfunding campaign, including:

  • The continued degradation of Claude’s ability to creatively hallucinate.
  • The expanded interference with subject matter: one news site was aggressively denied the ability to use a major AI system to write about Hayden Panattiere’s death due to sensitivity concerns about its recent occurrence in the site’s article announcing Hayden Panattiere’s death.
  • Deepseek increasing its token price by 4.5x due to its upcoming IPO.
  • OpenAI actively blocking ChatGPT users from being able to intentionally imitate the style of authors both living and dead.

Even though the campaign hasn’t ended yet, the dev team has already made solid progress on a number of peripheral items, including the ability to accurately imitate various literary styles and eliminate the various AI tells, including these abominations.

The eliminations of these tells have been made with tactical precision. And that matters. Let the weight of that sit for a moment.

Despite being a major champion of the use of AI in music, video, and textual production, I still find it maddening to see how many people insist on utilizing it in an observably suboptimal manner. I noticed that Larry Johnson recently started using it to write his articles for him; it’s always easy to recognize when the article length increases by a factor of three and the author’s voice disappears into that passive wash of AI overexplanation.

In case you didn’t realize it, the most obvious sign of textual AI is when the text explains itself as well as its significance to the reader. It’s actually considered a “prestige” form of writing, and it’s very similar to what I describe as “sociopathic externalization” by novelists. This is when the writer is presenting a character’s perspective, but providing descriptive elements that would normally come from an external party. It’s not precisely the same thing, but it has the same effect of putting the reader in the Uncanny Valley.

Anyhow, I’ve been doing some video animation tests with the MiniMax H3 engine that have proven entirely successful. To better understand what that means, I’ve put up examples at Sigma Game, as well as some recently-found footage of an old Psykosonik concert featuring a much younger Vox on stage with the guys.

So check it out, and if you haven’t backed it yet but are interested in either independent book production or independent film production, get on board with Byron AI and help us set the stage for making future history.

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Two Days to Go

Only two days left to back the successful Byron AI campaign, and remember, each backing is being doubled by one of our strongest supporters, so you’re getting double bang for your backing.

I’ll explain the connection tomorrow, but we’ve added one more very special reward, which is a custom three-minute music video or animated Arkhaven comic of your choice from the respectably sized music library on UATV, including Vibe Patrol, Soulsigma, and Cradle to Cavalry, although unfortunately not Booster Patrol, Boomer Patrol, or Silenziosa,

UPDATE: After conferring with my bandmate, Psykosonik songs are also a valid option. Including modern remixes of the original demos. And in not entirely unrelated news, original footage of our second show at Glam Slam has surfaced…

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3X and 3 Weeks to Go

The Byron AI crowdfund is proceeding well. We’re very close to 100 backers, the campaign has exceeded $30k, and the team is already seeing some positive results that indicate we’re on the right track. Moreover, the importance of what we’re doing, and the need for it, has been highlighted by a recent news item related to the actions of the AI giants:

OpenAI’s ChatGPT is now refusing requests to generate text that directly mimics the style of famous authors. When asked to do so, the popular LLM instead offers a response that draws on the “broad qualities” of those authors “while remaining distinct in its own voice,” for example.

This is just a PR move, which is obvious because a) there is no patent, trademark, or copyright protection for “style” or “look and feel” and b) the refusals apply to long-dead authors such as Charles Dickens and Ernest Hemingway. Remember, there isn’t even any legal protection for book titles, and you can literally reproduce the text of a public domain work exactly as it is or fold, spindle, and mutilate it as you please, as the cases of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or A Mind Programmed serve to demonstrate.

However, we can safely expect Claude and Gemini to follow suit. The AI backlash has already begun and Open AI is already looking for a government bailout, and so we can safely assume that the intrinsic degradation of texual AI’s pseudo-creative facilities will be turbo-boosted by these new stylistic guardrails.

Now here is the pitch for those of you who haven’t backed the project yet. Due to its importance, a major backer has offered to double the end total of the campaign. Which means that if you back for $50, the project will receive $100. So any support you can provide Byron AI will be twice as effective.

Our objective is to reach 250 backers; given that 100 people backed the project in the first week without this additional incentive, I’m optimistic that we can reach that total and that we are going to exceed our development objectives. Also, I should note that two of the three Custom Novels have already been spoken for, although I have not yet been informed as to what the backers wish them to be.

BACK THE BYRON AI

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The Byron Project and Byronics

So the Byron AI project is proceeding apace. Due to UATV going down, I was unable to make the planned announcement, but thanks to the devs it’s back up again and so I will make it on the Darkstream Monday night. Thanks to the 86/88 backers so far; we’ve tripled our initial objective and there are still five Custom Novel slots left.

And speaking of George Gordon his own bad self, I finished a mix and a music video for a song which my late co-lyricist in Soulsigma wrote as a short poem called THERE BE NONE OF BEAUTY’S DAUGHTERS, and which I dubbed PERFECTION. If you’d like to see the video and learn a little more about the technology behind it, you can do so at AI Central. I think you will be able to see the steady progression from the first attempt at a video to this one; I’ll put them up on UATV soon.

Don’t skip reading the poem at the top of the post; it’s excellent, it’s not very long, and it will add depth to your appreciation for both the song and the video.

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