Dmitri

Excited to share my latest publication, "Generative Aesthetics: On formal stuckness in AI verse." It's published in a special issue in the Journal of Cultural Analytics, expertly edited by Tess McNulty and Laura Chapot, on "Computation and Form, Reconsidered."
culturalanalytics.org/article/1448...

I didn't take pics but the feeling of being in a group of people with no visible beginning or end was so thrilling. The opposite of online anomie, and a living counterpoint to the wary, isolated, compartmentalized world the shitheads want to make. It's simple and obvious I guess but it means a lot.

One of my fave photos from today.

Loved that the folks leading the chants were regularly including trans rights.

WHEN TRANS RIGHTS ARE UNDER ATTACK, WHAT DO WE DO?

STAND UP FIGHT BACK!

notice the general mood of the timeline? how everyone is in a good mood and there’s a lot less misery and dooming? how there’s a lot of “we’re going to beat these assholes”?

anyway that’s why these events are important

You can't logic your way out of being burnt out. Unless you're me. Who should be able to do it and it's a personal failing that I can't

One curious thing on this site about speaking out against the encroachment of LLMs is that inevitably you get accused of being anti-tech. I don’t hate technology. I’ve used machine learning in my own code before. But I also recognize that oligarchs are so hellbent on pushing this tech for a reason.

men used to get unrealistic expectations from porn and women used to get them from romance books. now everyone gets them from playing immersive 100 hour videogames where an elf with a shadowy past comes to know love again through your shared adventure and offers up their glistening elf body to you

Welcome to GA! Salary compression and erosion of tenure in the USG suck but on the whole it’s a decent place to work for faculty (academic staff are in a tougher spot). Feels way better than FL or TX right now.

really should get around to writing my take that "AI uprising/robot uprising" fiction is just barely sublimated fear of domestic slave revolt

I’ll add their print version is also fantastic to have lying around the apartment! Just apart from the ideas the physical object is pretty well put together and a pleasure to pick up.

perfect. this is it.

ai is a political project, arguing about its usefulness as an office tool misses the point

This one is great. It’s deep but it’s got all these little flourishes, like the little oh-h at 2:03 and 4:56. Straight to the gym playlist.

i made a helpful reference

«Mausoleum of false memories» is a great way to put it. Does this kind of AI slop really trigger fond memories of shopping at Walmart? To me, it seems almost like second-order nostalgia, not a longing for an imaginary better past, but an unfulfilled desire for something worth remembering at all

working on a new unified theory of american reality i'm calling "everyone is twelve now"

Bonus panel here: www.smbc-comics.com/comic/xx
#smbc

Too late, Batman. Once this Tylenol floods the city's water supply, my wiki won't run out of editors ever again

What is the angle with right-coded concern about human trafficking? I’ve run into it a couple of times with my students oddly. Given epistemic divergence I’m sure their definition differs from mine but I’ve never quite been able to figure it out.

Ooh this could be helpful for better understanding my partner’s food aversions. I get some of them but it would be nice to have a more systemic view and a plan to work around them for shared meals. Checking it out!

This one was a few weeks ago but it’s worth revisiting regularly.

[the shooter is unidentified] the left must be purged with the sword

[the shooter is, again, a compulsive masturbator who loved Hitler] I believe it was pascal who said that the heart has reasons that reason may not know

Not beating the “xennials are a distinct cohort” allegations any time soon huh

I want to once again reiterate what I said earlier. The reason the vast majority of Democratic and so-called centrist elites have acquiesced over and over again is that they are COMPLICIT. Because they actually know that direct confrontation is how you defeat fascists and choose not to do it.

Quote by Marcus Aurelius “you are not compelled to form any opinion about this matter before you, nor to disturb your peace of mind at all. Things in themselves have no power to extort a verdict from you.”

Marcus Aurelius gives us all permission to occasionally shut up.

chatgpt is much like an improv comedy group

1) you are the audience, giving it prompts
2) it produces things roughly shaped like your prompt
3) it is trained to respond with Yes, And
4) it has the factual accuracy of improv
5) it does not understand comedy

But what iseducation? Embodied and enactive cognitive sciences remind us that knowledge is not something discrete that an individual possesses and passes down but an inherently dynamic and evolving endeavour that develops in the process of embodied, curious and engaged interaction through dialogue. The pinnacle of cognition, particularly ‘human knowing’, is inextricably interwoven with interactions we engage in

with each other and the physical, cultural and social world we inhabit, ‘so much so that individuals are not thinkable outside of their interactions and embeddedness in their (social) world’ (De Jaegher, 2019). Dialogic models of knowledge and education emphasize that interactions between a student and teacher and/or peer provide ‘scaffolding’ for how that child understands the world. The always in flux, active and continually transforming nature of human cognition necessitates that education be fundamentally an ongoing activity. Far from the reductionist view whereby ‘formal knowledge’ can be packaged and acquired from an LLM, the classroom is an environment where love, trust, empathy, care and humility are fostered and mutually cultivated through dialogical interactions

In this short piece, I lean on embodied cog sci to argue that we should refuse & resist llms in education (pp. 53-58) unesdoc.unesco.org/in/documentV...

"the classroom is an environment where love, trust, empathy, care & humility are fostered & mutually cultivated through dialogical interactions"

The big tension in modern right wing circles is how you can square a minimal administrative and welfare state with a maximal security state and the answer is that both make perfect sense in a country that isn't a democracy

Brendan Fraser is an interesting actor with some depth. If Hikari can subvert that trope or play with it a little bit this could be really good.

It’s crazy how good and prescient it is. A banger even by the high standards of The Dig.