On the Artificiality of AI
What does it mean for something to be artificially intelligent? How is it distinct from natural intelligence?
Blog - Fractal Flame
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“When I Paint My Masterpiece”
Trying to write, one needs so much confidence in oneself to carry even a sentence. The moment the level goes down one realizes the futility of all things, the thin nature of the enterprise and language that refuses to work. -Antigone Kefala, Sydney Journals
Vibes Shift, and So Should You
People seem to forget that we’re in the postmodern era.
What AI is Doing to Work
I see a lot of people talking about how AI tools will make work more efficient, or expect that using them will make work more efficient. The gist seems to be that AI tools do more in less time than a human can and that’s an efficiency gain. We can crank out more widgets or features or completed tickets in the backlog or whatever in the same amount of time, we’re so much more efficient! AI, as a…
How I Understand Resilience Engineering
Resilience engineering has a working definition that I'm fine with adopting. But I want to get a bit more into what exactly resilience engineering is creating, if engineering is an act of creation.
Feedback and Folly
The benefits of feedback are central to the cybernetic age we inhabit.
I am determined to write.
Books are my comfort object. I read incessantly, and I think it’s getting in my way. I have a habit of carrying books around with me in my bag. This is a bad habit. I know it’s a bad habit because I bring them even to places where I know I won’t have a chance to read in peace like museums or restaurants. I tell myself that I can read when I have an idle moment. I have so much to read that I need…
On the Richness of Contemporary Philosophy
Clearly these two thinkers, despite their differences, chime. That is what I want to celebrate here.
Nonsense Machines
What is the technical essense of AI systems, whether we’re discussing GOFAI, early connectionist models, or the deep learning methods prevalent today?
Distinguishing Generation from Creation
It’s time to stop referring to “generative” AI as creative. That fact of the matter is that there is nothing creative about Gen AI, and we all know it. The abstract models instantiated in computers don’t produce anything new, don’t genuinely create anything, and in principle never can.
How Technosolutionism Works
For my purposes, I use the term “technosolutionism” here to refer to the idea in a capitalist economy that some given techne now available for purchase will solve its buyers’ problem(s). In other words, a given commodity has a use value. My experience has led me to be very critical of this idea…
Protect Trans People
The Trump administration, in its 2025 manifestation, is dead set on harming many. In this post I will focus on the harm they seek to do to trans people. I find it their goal unacceptable and repulsive, and urge other people of good will to join me in condemning and opposing it.
How to Solve Problems
I’ve some mixed feelings about writing on this topic. The reason is that it’s so ordinary to solve problems that it’s almost not worth talking about. What is life, after all, if not the continual creating and solving of problems? And death simply what one calls a problem that one couldn’t solve? But a theory of problem-solving may itself be useful for solving some problems, so here we are.
The Genesis of Data
Where does data come from and what does it mean? There’s obviously a story to tell here about the construction of sophisticated storage methods, from old clay tablets in Mesopotamia to S3 buckets in AWS. That story is bound to include the history of writing techniques. A section of it would focus on cybernetics and information theory; perhaps it would cite Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan’s book Code.…
The Economy of Thought
This is what I’m getting at when I talk about noology as central to economic life today. I hold that we are called to attend to many more things than previously due to certain changes in our lifestyles, and those calls to attention effect continual learning and thinking. We’re continually forced to change against our will and to our detriment.
Software is a Service
My basic premise is this: software works in a capitalist economy because it’s fundamentally a commodity. The code or “IP” isn’t the commodity, though; it’s the experience that code produces for customers and users. The business that owns the software uses it to provide its service.
The Differing Roles of Mathematics in Engineering
In this post I want to focus on the book’s third chapter, Figures in the Soil. It is here that Harvey and Knox dwell on the topic of mathematics and data in the work of producing a road. I think this is important because it says something about how agents and institutions use math, and numbers more generally, and thus reveal something about their cultural values. It serves as a great touchstone,…
Problems, Teams, and Methods
In his book The Logic of Sense , Gilles Deleuze devotes a significant portion of the text to considering the concept of problems. For Deleuze, problems are a state space of n -dimensions composed of differential elements and delineated from other problems by singularities. These singularities are points where a qualitative transformation occurs, i.e. an event happens. The state space is a…
The“Second Victim” and Beatitude
The idea of a second victim, as far as I can tell, comes from the field of medicine when an MD named Albert W Wu wrote about it in Medical Error: The Second Victim. Over time the concept has come to mean that when an “error” occurs which induces harm, the person or people who serve as proximate cause of that harm are themselves victimized when they feel bad about having done so. They are…
A Protest Against Enclosure
What got me so angry is that this business saw fit to exclude people from the space, probably specifically targeting people living on the street who have used it as shelter at night (i.e. outside business hours). This sucks.