Google Brain can now “enhance” photos for real 

Sebastian Anthony at Ars Technica has written about Google Brain’s new software that has the ability to create detailed images out of extremely pixelated ones. The results in the article are spectacular, but there’s one thing to keep in mind:

It’s important to note that the computed super-resolution image is not real. The added details—known as “hallucinations” in image processing jargon—are a best guess and nothing more. This raises some intriguing issues, especially in the realms of surveillance and forensics. This technique could take a blurry image of a suspect and add more detail—zoom! enhance!—but it wouldn’t actually be a real photo of the suspect. It might very well help the police find the suspect, though.

Twitter releases new anti-harassment tools, still has a long way to go

In a viral post last year, Anil Dash laid out suggestions on how to save Twitter. Near the top of the list? Stopping abuse:

This is one of the rare areas where you shouldn’t just show, you should tell: Explain loudly and clearly that you don’t want organized mobs of attackers on your site. Make sure features like quoting tweets aren’t being abused by people who set others up as targets. Fighting these large-scale attacks matters even more than banning individual bad actors. Harassment mobs like the alt-right already think you’re censoring them, so you might as well make their dreams come true.

Not too long ago, one of Twitter’s top engineers promised more anti-harassment features were coming, and soon:

Today, we have the first glimpse of what these might be. In a new blog post, Twitter identifies three features they’re rolling out:

  • Stopping the creation of new abusive accounts – Shutting down a troll’s account used to be a largely meaningless act; they could just create a new one. Now Twitter is saying they’re finding a way to prevent users from doing that.
  • Introducing safer search results – It sounds like results will exclude content from profiles that have been blocked and muted. But will it algorithmically exclude similar content?
  • Collapsing potentially abusive or low-quality tweets – You now have the ability to collapse these in-feed and not see them.

Twitter says they’ll be unrolling new features in the days/months to come and this is definitely a good sign. But there are still some extremely basic things you should be able to do (or not do) that I think would go a long way towards preventing harassment, such as:

  • Preventing users from following you if their account is less than X days/months old.
  • Preventing users from following you if they have less than X followers
  • Preventing users from tagging you or quoting a tweet even after they’ve been blocked. Often a troll who’s been blocked will try to incite their own friends/followers to attack you.

Those are just things I would like to have happen. Last year Randi Lee Harper put together a pretty comprehensive list of suggestions as well. I hope Twitter keeps shipping this stuff, and quickly.

How ‘Black Mirror’ mirrors reality

Miranda Katz over at Backchannel has a comparison of Black Mirror episodes and their theoretically real-life counterparts:

What makes Black Mirror so chilling isn’t just its technologies, but their uncanny interplay with human behavior. The show can feel gratuitously pessimistic, yet it’s rooted in reality: nearly every scenario parallels something in our current world. In particular, an early episode disturbingly foreshadows the rise of Donald Trump.

It’s impossible to write off Black Mirror as fiction. So we’ve decided to nail down the parallels between the nightmares on screen and our world today. And so we present: the real-life equivalents of Black Mirror’s dystopias, loosely ordered by how closely each episode reflects our current reality.

Never doubt the power of SNL

The other day, Melissa McCarthy lampooned White House press secretary Sean Spicer in a devastating Saturday Night Live sketch. Over the weekend, Donald Trump was strangely silent about the episode on Twitter. Now, in a report from Politico, the fallout:

More than being lampooned as a press secretary who makes up facts, it was Spicer’s portrayal by a woman that was most problematic in the president’s eyes, according to sources close to him. And the unflattering send-up by a female comedian was not considered helpful for Spicer’s longevity in the grueling, high-profile job, where he has struggled to strike the right balance between representing an administration that considers the media the “opposition party,” and developing a functional relationship with the press.

“Trump doesn’t like his people to look weak,” added a top Trump donor.

Trump’s uncharacteristic Twitter silence over the weekend about the “Saturday Night Live” sketch was seen internally as a sign of how uncomfortable it made the White House feel. Sources said the caricature of Spicer by McCarthy struck a nerve and was upsetting to the press secretary and to his allies, who immediately saw how damaging it could be in Trumpworld.

Cards Against Humanity’s Super Bowl ad was a failure

Cards Against Humanity has written a spot-on parody of long-form Medium post-mortem pieces:

Most startups fail for one of two reasons: they run out of money, or they fail to reach an audience. We spent all of our money while simultaneously failing to reach an audience. This is a classic blunder.

At Cards Against Humanity, we believe that you can only become a master by trying and failing. In this way, failure is life’s greatest teacher; failure is actually success. At Cards Against Humanity, we fail all the time. We are veterans of failure. And constant failure, plus unlimited capital, is what led us to greatness.

The best ads of Super Bowl LI

I found most of last night’s Super Bowl ads to be pretty uninspired. Unlike years past, there were very few moments that will be cultural flashpoints, discussed heavily for the weeks to come.

That said, 84 Lumber, a Pennsylvania building supply company, made what I consider to be the best Super Bowl ad this year — a short film that told the story of a mother trying to immigrate into the U.S. from Mexico. There are a couple of quasi-controversies that sprung up as a result of the ad:

  • They only showed part of the ad because it was deemed too controversial to depict an imagined version of Trump’s border wall (read more).
  • Some viewers were angry because they thought the ad was advocating for illegal immigration (read more).

One overall theme that was obvious: corporate America is rebelling against the government’s position on isolationism and nativism in a big way. They are betting that Trump’s attitude is not only wrong, it’s also unprofitable. We’ll see soon if they’re right.

There were many more examples of this. The Anheuser-Bush ad really got to me, as an immigrant (even though its story is completely fabricated):

And this ad by Coca-Cola is actually from 2016, but took on special resonance last evening:

What were your favorite ads of the night?

The absurdity of voice acting gigs

This short film by Tim Mason is absolutely uproarious. It captures so many of the absurd aspects of voice acting gigs: the mind-numbing repetition, the dubious acting direction, the bored but patient sound guy, the willingness of the voice actor to press on no matter what.

Also, love the juxtaposition between what’s unfolding in the booth and the nonsense outside of it. This incongruity often exists in real life too, albeit not in as extreme a fashion.

Melissa McCarthy’s impression of Sean Spicer on SNL

McCarthy’s impression was funny, but I’m more curious about what impact this will have on our actual politics, and on the White House’s relationship with the media. In saner times, Tina Fey’s impression of Sarah Palin showed it could re-shape the popular perception of a vice presidential candidate from a major political party. That was before we had a president who actually seems to watch SNL somewhat regularly and complain about it on Twitter.

I appreciated Emily Nussbaum’s take on it:

It seems possible that Spicer, already a target of Trump’s occasional anger, may face some kind of reckoning for it.