@ncfavier.bsky.social
PhD student at Chalmers University of Technology working on cubical type theory. https://monade.li
What is vulgar materialism and what does it have to do with this? (I realise this is a shitpost but maybe there's something to learn anyway)
24.09.2025 22:03 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.
Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).
Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.
Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles
Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...
We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n
back to it
04.07.2025 18:06 — 👍 198 🔁 30 💬 10 📌 1This is essentially @gro-tsen.bsky.social's answer reformulated in a simpler way: consider the set of programs which syntactically have one of the two forms
fun n => if n = 0 then k else …
fun n => if n = 0 then loop () else …
OK, so let T be the set of data ⟨n,e⟩ where e is a Turing machine and n∈ℕ such that φ_e(0) finishes in ≤n steps. Consider the program h that takes ⟨n,e⟩∈ℕ and x∈ℕ and runs φ_e(x) except that if x=0 its execution is allowed to run for at most n steps, else h enters an infinite loop. … •1/6
24.05.2025 14:59 — 👍 2 🔁 1 💬 1 📌 2Right, this was asked in the comments of my answer and I answered it negatively.
24.05.2025 16:09 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0OK, I'll edit my answer.
24.05.2025 15:27 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0Amazing, thanks! Do you want to post this as an answer or should I edit mine?
24.05.2025 15:17 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0Also note that this might depend on the choice of admissible numbering φ. The question was more specifically about Turing machines.
24.05.2025 14:49 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0(That is, there is a partial computable function ℕ → bool that restricts to the halting function on S.)
24.05.2025 14:34 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0A positive answer to this would answer my question negatively, but the actual question is: is there a decidable subset S ⊆ ℕ that meets every equivalence class of ~, and for which the halting problem on the empty input is decidable.
24.05.2025 14:33 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 3 📌 1(Well, one more question; the second one was just me being silly.)
24.05.2025 14:09 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
I answered a question on CS Stack Exchange, but it only raised more questions: cs.stackexchange.com/a/172967. Maybe @gro-tsen.bsky.social or @joeldavidhamkins.bsky.social can help?
24.05.2025 13:51 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 3 📌 0
wiktionary saying ^.^ is an "Alternate form of ^_^"
13.05.2025 14:47 — 👍 97 🔁 9 💬 3 📌 0Medieval psalters be like
🌺🌿🌿🌿🌿🌺🌱🌱💫
🌿🟡🟡🟡🟡🟡🌼🌱💫
🌿🟡🟦🟦🟦🟦✨🌱💫
🌿🟡🟦🤴🏾🦄🌝🟦🦚💫
🌿🟡🟦🟦🟦🟦✨🌱🍆
🌿😼🟦🤺🥀🏹🟦🐕💫
🌿🟡🟦🌸🦜🐉🟦🌱💫
🌿🟡🟦🏹🐒🐝🟦🌱💫
🌿🟡🟦🟦🟦🟦eatus vir
🌿🟡🟡🧜♂️🟡🟡🌷🌱💫
🌺🌿🌿🌿🌿🌺🌱🌱🌼
@gro-tsen.bsky.social you might enjoy this:
29.04.2025 19:48 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Proof sheet for the lost 1932 edition of 《走到鏡子裏》(“Through the Looking-Glass”) prepared by the Commercial Press in Shanghai, with Yuen Ren Chao's hand-written annotations. The 1932 edition of the book was destroyed when the Commercial Press building was bombed during the Japanese bombardment of Shanghai in 1932. Image source: https://repository.lib.cuhk.edu.hk/en/item/cuhk-2023559
I did a long twitter thread on Chao's Jabberwocky translation and his invented Chinese characters, including an image of his annotated proof of the lost 1932 edition of 《走到鏡子裏》("Through the Looking-Glass") prepared by the Commercial Press in Shanghai but blown up by the Japanese.
29.04.2025 11:06 — 👍 29 🔁 11 💬 3 📌 1I've been obsessing over this ever since I moved to Sweden. It seems like the phenomenon is called [Viby i](sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viby-i) (named after a place, not the English word!) but none of the Swedish people I've talked to said they'd noticed it. It seems very widely spread these days.
10.01.2025 20:08 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
