The third stack is here. A path for ai that isn’t the stale U.S.–China binary, but something assembled, sovereign, and stubbornly local. My essay in Noema: www.noemamag.com/a-third-path...

“Effective LLM use is metaprogramming for wordcels and that’s why almost nobody is doing it: because they either don’t know metaprogramming or they are not wordcels” a sentence I just uttered at work, help

Does the Empire have equipment fanboys, like the A-10 Warthog stans we have in real life? I like to imagine some Imperial Remnant Lieutenant General ordering an AT-AT through a mountain pass the width of a McDonald's drive-through and shouting "all terrain means *all* *terrain*!"

imagine if a family of beavers randomly showed up right now and finished whatever thing you've been putting off

This is completely wrong: neither LLMs nor product managers are abstractions because there is no systematic understanding of what information is lost in forming the model. It is just indirection.

This is completely right: the whole project of management - especially indirect management - is controlling people through language and resources

Seems like an excellent idea. In Germany, plug-in panels are sold at supermarkets, "renters have a legal right to balcony solar," & the tech has been proven safe. Almost 10% of households have plug-in solar. We need this in the US, too. www.washingtonpost.com/climate-envi...

ChatGPT talks to adults like it’s grooming them. Ohhhh wowwwww you’re so mature for your age. Nobody understands you.

1954 Shawmut Bank (Boston) ad: “What will YOU do with Cybernetics?” (H/t Sean Manion!) — makes some familiar promises re: “substituting the machine for the many functions of the human mind,” leading to “more production, more jobs, more income and far, far more leisure.”

Image from a 1952 Esquire article, “Cybernetics: Doom or Destiny?” in which we see the birth (?) of the “robot using a machine rather than being the machine” trope

While OpenAI keeps trying to create a "PhD level" chatbot, Google did it by mistake.

this is why we need robots because otherwise they get entitled to put humans in that position and will organize society for the worse to get them

All the sins of Wade–Giles romanization, rendering 北京 as "Peking" and all, are forgiven for setting up this joke.

Thoughts on Manchukuo 1987, the rich, pulpy, violent alt history by @yoshimired.bsky.social conflatedautomatons.org/2025/08/04/m...

COMRADES! MANCHUKUO 1987, THE ALT HISTORY MILITARY SCIFI DETECTIVE NOVEL... IS NOW AVAILABLE! IN A DYING FASCIST EMPIRE, WAR CRIMINAL KEIZO MUNEKATA TRIES TO FIND JUSTICE PURCHASE LINK BELOW VVVVVV

“Instead, there are exquisitely layered performances […] and many, many candlelit silences into which Mark Rylance’s Thomas Cromwell glides, his expression, as always, that of a ferret saddened by developments in France.”

I am running another contest to award $2000 to the ten best pieces of original solarpunk art. The contest will run from Jun 20 - Aug 20, 2025. Details within - and if you support this, please send this to your best artist friends! medium.com/@yishan/sola...

There's a paper at the top of my Philpapers page called 'Can we repudiate ontology altogether?' and I keep misreading it as 'Can we repudiate ontology together?' which makes it sound like the best chat-up line ever

Unfortunately, the existing literature runs kind of orthogonally to what I want to do with it, but I'm starting to put together a through line. The end goal is an argument about the ways Mormon doctrine shaped information technology and the methods of the modern administrative state.

next time I teach these courses I'm setting the final assessment as an interpretative dance piece

There was no neurodiversity in the 1940s, just Oxford Dons.

It's my pleasure to announce https://storyseedlibrary.org/ - a #library of #solarpunk #art and story seeds to help you imagine a better #climate future! Huge thanks to all the artists who shared their art under various #creativecommons licenses, including @the_lemonaut , @NiwlCraft and […]

“Following Raiß’s wildly popular Women in Trees (2016) and More Women in Trees (2017), this volume gathers some of his favorite images from his 25 years of collecting this charming photographic genre.”

Solarpunk art under creative commons storyseedlibrary.org/art/

Might anyone know of a good digital archive of colorful *public domain* PATTERNS — e.g., Art Nouveau book endpapers, Victorian fabrics, Arts & Crafts wallpapers, Pattern & Decoration art, etc.?

so they're mycoblogging

*There must be some contrarian somewhere who is willing to seriously argue that Katy Perry is in fact an *ideal* astronaut *The avant-garde of what 21st-century space travel will, in fact, become *Don't make me write that myself pitchfork.com/thepitch/kat...

diffractionscollective.com/2025/04/06/d... @conflatedauto.bsky.social

Man after my own heart

Would be really funny if "slop" turns out to be the general category of all commercial visual culture and we are just offended by looking at it through alienated lens of gen ml.

Tested against hurricane winds!

*This is getting really annoying and complicated, so how about if there's some neat, cheap, one-click Chinese AI shortcut for "removing all the American AI"

Why it's okay to use ChatGPT, in 4 graphs

So strange for a long discussion on the politics of Fight Club to not mention the Boxer Rebellion

The idea that this is about the formation of publics rather than misinformed individuals is exactly right

We're getting the social media crisis wrong The bigger problem isn't disinformation. It's degraded democratic publics. On Zuckerberg today and Musk over the last few weeks. www.programmablemutter.com/p/were-getti...

::: The hippocampus, a lighthouse keeper, traces its cipher through dendritic fog: here, synapses bloom as black markets, hoarding light in synaptic coffers :::

Wonderful that the simulation in The Matrix is in the year 1999, the high neoliberal crest of the end of history, Fukuyama's compromised paradise.

look i made it the 1979 ibm warning

I think the thing about smartphones vs laptops, is that there is some hidden degree of freedom that has gone missing. It's not the lack of windows, keyboard, or file system. It's that these were always reflections of some deeper set of transformations possible. And those have quietly gone absent.

For people who frequently move/travel/commute, a phone is a stable “place” to externalize & store the outputs of your mind in a way that a computer is not. The problem is that you can do less thinking with it.

Reminder: inline non-numeric citations are a comprehensibility-destroying genuflection ritual that reinforce scholar hierarchies

Browsers should do one shot search on DOIs

*What if you were a jailbroken AI killer-robot but you thought you were a *fantascienza writer*

"We've been sitting in our tree chirping like foolish birds for over a century now, wondering why no other birds answered. The galactic skies are full of hawks, that's why. Planetisms that don't know enough to keep quiet, get eaten." -Greg Bear

this is one of my favorite artworks

Tired (and wrong): video games are art Wired: video games are rigidly vectored sets of rules within aesthetic environments