Mikael Brunila

Chapter three from my thesis is finally out in @bigdatasoc.bsky.social! I explore the parallels between the "bit" and the "embeddings" that are a foundational structure in Large Language Models, showing how the latter endow tech companies with what I call "cosine capital."

bsky.app/profile/bigd...

Yeah, I use ChatGPT and Claude for individual scripts, but for a complex code base with many scripts referencing each other Cursor or some other AI-assisted code editor is the way to go

Cursor is great for greenfield coding a new project, especially if you're not very fluent in that language, but the autocomplete is surprisingly bad

Cosine capital: Large language models and the embedding of all things - Mikael Brunila, 2025 This article describes the emergence of a novel form of capital—which I call “cosine capital”—that finds objectified form in the “embedding” structures of large...

My friend @mikaelbrunila.bsky.social just published the first Marxist take on LLMs, check it out!
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Why is this horrible for Universities?

Just about everyone who isn't a citizen or green card holder already who's hired for a tenure track faculty position is hired through an H1B and then, after 3-5 years, applies for a green card.

This is literally "No more foreign professors can be hired"

In a stunning moment of self-delusion, the Wall Street Journal headline writers admitted that they don't know how LLM chatbots work.

'It's a Killing Field': IDF Soldiers Ordered to Shoot Deliberately at Unarmed Gazans Waiting for Humanitarian Aid IDF officers and soldiers told Haaretz they were ordered to fire at unarmed crowds near food distribution sites in Gaza, even when no threat was present. Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed, prompting the military prosecution to call for a review into possible war crimes

IDF soldiers have now themselves admitted they have been ordered to murder aid-seekers in Gaza.

Truly an atrocity built on atrocity.

www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...

it seems like almost every Silicon Valley adjacent book needs to mention Dunbar’s number. Alex Karp’s (Palantir) ”The Technological Republic” was no exception

the problem with most continental theory today is that it’s a lot of ”tell” and almost no ”show”. Incredibly tedious to read.

I would ask if they're okay and if there's a friend or family member I can call

existence of tensors implies existence of relaxors

The key chart right now:

Usually US economic pain is cushioned by falling bond yields and a strengthening dollar, which mean lower interest rates and more spending power for consumers.

This time we’re seeing the opposite, meaning the pain will be amplified.

Evidence of US brain drain?

US scientists submitted 32% more applications for jobs abroad Jan-Mar 2025 than during same period in 2024.

US-based users browsing jobs abroad increased by 35%.

Data from Nature Careers global science jobs platform.
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

10 yrs ago every euroleftist I knew was telling me to read Pettis

With all respect to the sanguine predictions from fellow economists: Standard quantitative trade models don’t seem to capture the loss of global public goods, such as the rules-based international order.

I just don't think there's evidence that the direction of LLM ability-increase is towards human intelligence or a superset of human intelligence. Really seems like they are their own thing that partially overlaps with human intelligence

Being a historian, people ask me if I think the US is living through Germany 1933.

I answer no, analogies are always imperfect but to me it feels more like Russia 1999: a blatant theft of state assets and liberals in a fugue state, refusing to believe the arc of progress is bending against them.

the mistake of Canada and Mexico was to think what he said he wanted was what he actually wanted

Ennen: vapaa maailma
Nyt: vapaa pudotus

Ukraina-seuranta | Reuters: Zelenskyi lähti Valkoisesta talosta etuajassa riitaisan tapaamisen jälkeen HS seuraa Venäjän hyökkäyssotaa ja sen seurauksia hetki hetkeltä.

Naamiot on riisuttu lopullisesti. Trump ja Vance osoittavat selvästi kenen puolella ovat - Putinin.

Tätä videota on vaikeaa katsoa, niin ala-arvoisesti käyttäytyvät.

Now this is some unambiguously funny stove touching

YouTube video by Guardian News Donald Trump shares bizarre AI-generated video of 'Trump Gaza'

Just watched the Trump Gaza video and whoever wrote a couple weeks ago about generative AI being the new aesthetics of fascism could not have asked for a better case in point

in the future, the most literate people will be inmates *with* access to a prison library but *without* access to smartphones or AI.

Right, that's true. On the broader point of RStudio as an IDE falling behind the times I don't think that's a satisfactory option. I guess/hope this is something they're addressing in Positron.

That looks promising, but afaict there's no support for Ollama or other local LLM frameworks. Or am I mistaken?

I have Ollama vibe coding plugins for Jupyter and VSCode, but I'm unsure how to integrate an AI coding assistant into RStudio. Is there an obvious way to do this? If not, RStudio better come up with it quickly, because the paradigm is shifting, and they'll be left in the dust.