Birdkeeping We need new ways of talking about large language models. The artificial intelligentsia at frontier labs have beguiled us (and themselves) into using an exclusively calamitous tone of voice. If we are to take the Silicon Valley oracles at their word, the latest models are effectively sentient and thus pose existential risk , open weights models are as or more dangerous than nuclear or…
Taming jagged intelligence with beads and jj There’s no need for a prelude on how agential harnesses such as Claude Code , Codex , and Opencode are changing the political economy of software engineering. The entry barrier to writing code has never been lower. LLM-enabled agential harnesses won’t replace software engineers wholesale; but their existence and reasonable accessibility (at least while…
Writing weeknotes These past few days I have been inspired by Anil Madhavapeddy ’s and Jon Sterling ’s online presence to start a practice of weeknotes. Jon’s weeknotes offer a complete example of what weeknotes are, and I also recommend his post on intellectual junkyards as an overview of how the practice emerged. As he notes in that post, there was a kind of organic friction with the ‘timeless’…
Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian: Muskism After buying a hard copy of this book at the RiffRaff launch with Quinn Slobodian—Ben Tarnoff pulled out briefly before on account of illness—it has sat on my bookshelf for a few weeks while I’ve pottered around fulfilling various obligations to others and myself (a conference, a short presentation about my dissertation, a bikepacking route over the alps…
Writing in Typst | Hacking on Neovim with Claude What is a ‘good’ writing system? I have been incrementally hacking on my writing environment for some time now, since at least 2013 when I started seriously using computers in undergrad. A couple of years ago, I migrated to Orgmode as the best markup syntax for my needs, and wrote a post about how Emacs and Orgmode serviced my writing needs . Here’s…
Mladen Dolar, Rumors First on the syllabus in Rohit Goel's current BICAR course is Mladen Dolar's 2024 book Rumors . This short book is an extended and adapted version of Dolar's contribution to the 2022 edited volume Objective Fictions: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Marxism , and in its first sentence it lays out the topic at hand: To take rumors as a serious object of theoretical scrutiny and…
Alma Steingart, Axiomatics: Mathematical Thought and High Modernism (introduction) I started reading Alma Steingart's 2023 Axiomatics: Mathematical Thought and High Modernism in preparation for a reading group on Math(s), Philosophy, and History that I have been running for almost a year now. (We meet approximately bi-weekly, and wander from text to text based on the group's discussion and shared…
Writing with Rheo You’ve no doubt already heard about Rheo , the hot new typesetting and static site engine from the Free Computing Lab (FCL). In the unlikely event that you haven’t, let me clue you in. With Rheo, you can flow a folder of Typst files into various different publishable formats, such as PDF (paged documents), EPUB (reflowable documents), and HTML (websites). It’s developed and…
Karl Marx: Capital, Volume 1 (chapter 22) Chapter 22 of Capital Volume I– following the chapter structure in the 2024 English translation - builds on the previous chapter on simple reproduction , which had laid out the impossible position of "economic bondage" (Marx 2024, 532) of the wage laborer in relation to capital. Chapter 22 shifts from outlining the standpoint of the wage laborer to a…
Is psychoanalysis a Science? Psychoanalysis was once described as a ‘calling card’ that was to be left at the door of Science. The idea here, I think, was that psychoanalysis should not become (as Freud envisioned it in his first explorations of it) a ‘science’ in the sense of having an answer for everything. If psychoanalysis were to become a theory that accommodated every possible thing, every…
Karl Marx: Capital, Volume 1 (chapter 21) Up first today, some notes from chapter 21 of Marx’s Capital , Volume I, his chapter on Simple Reproduction . I returned to this text (in its new translation ) at a writing retreat in Connecticut over the weekend. After sharing a work-in-progress regarding the outline of a theory of a subject in Marx, it was sagely pointed out to me that, in order to…
Erich Hörl: Sacred Channels: The Archaic Illusion of Communication (chapters 1 and 2) Last week I read the first two chapters of a book recommended to me quite some time ago by a friend: Sacred Channels: The Archaic Illusion of Communication by Erich Hörl. The book was published in English in 2018, but was defended as a dissertation in 2003, and published in German in 2005. Friedrich Kittler was…
Terry Eagleton: Why Marx Was Right Over the holiday period (which I count as the entirety of January, as my wedding took place on the 11th January, and I have not seriously returned to work until very recently) I read Why Marx was Right by Terry Eagleton. The book was given to me by my father– over in Italy from New Zealand for the aforementioned wedding– as he had gone out and bought it after I…
Using NixOS My NixOS configuration For about a year now, the operating system that I use on my daily driver has been NixOS . I moved to the distribution from Arch Linux, as I was sold on the idea of having all my dependencies declaratively specified, and thus no longer having to mess with stateful package management ( apt-get update , pacman -Syu , etc). I was one or two years into grad school,…
Writing Academic Essays As an undergraduate student in the US, I feel like I never properly learned how to structure an academic essay. This was no doubt partially due to my being a bad student who never asked the right questions; but I do think that there is something in the structure of an interdisciplinary liberal arts education in the U.S. in the 21st century that regretfully avoids giving…
Fall semester 2024 update The pause in proceedings here has been principally due to a (final) semester of coursework and teaching at Brown University; the other side of a PhD in the U.S. I have now advanced to candidacy, which means that I have completed all requirements for my PhD except the submission of the dissertation itself. (This is also known as being ABD , ``all but dissertation".) I was…
Cycling typing Last summer I got into cycling. I've long been a standing desk-er, and going out for long zone 2 rides and wondering what to think about made me wonder: could I work at a desk while I cycle? I have a stationary bike trainer, so I first tried the obvious thing and just slid it slightly under my standing desk. This made certain kinds of work doable– watching videos and reading…
Using two ReMarkables I'm a PhD student currently, which means that I spend most of my work life reading, or thinking about what I should read next. The timelines for my reading schedules range from what I need to read before a class or meeting next week, to what I ought to read for a paper or research trajectory that won't have any meaningful check-in until next year. I bought the reMarkable 1…
Svitlana Matviyenko and Sarah Pourciau Today's log discusses two projects, Svitlana Matviyenko's and Sarah Pourciau's, as a follow on from the last log . Svitlana Matviyenko I came to Matviyenko's work through an event here at the IWM , which took place this past Friday. She is currently an associate professor at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in the School of Communication, and she was previously…
Amanda Holmes and Adrian Johnston I have been at the institute (the IWM ) for nearly a month now, the first month of three. It is the first time that I have had something close to my own office (I share a room with one other fellow), and the first time that I have had the space and time of mind to attend specifically to the task of my dissertation proper. As a PhD student in Providence, there is a…
Jane Gallop: Reading Lacan Finally returning to the task at hand, I yesterday continued Jane Gallop's companion to Lacan's Ecrits , expressively titled Reading Lacan . This book addresses the problem of reading Lacan; for it is in fact a problem, given how convoluted and arcane his writing can be. Lacan's gnosticism is not an accident of his inability as a teacher, writer, or thinker, but rather a…
Slavoj Žižek: The Sublime Object of Ideology (chapter 1, part 2) Introduction Today I worked properly through the first chapter of Zizek's Sublime Object of Ideology (towards an essay I am currently writing, outlined at the top of this log ). I've reported before on the introduction ( this log ), and the opening of the first chapter ( this log ) - in the latter of which I outline Zizek's homology…
Mladen Dolar: What’s in a Name? Today I'll report on Mladen Dolar's 2014 essay " What's in a Name? " (Dolar 2014). I read this essay recently in preparation for a session in a series on the subject of naming. Earlier in this series, we read the chapter "Che Vuoi?" from Zizek's Sublime Object of Ideology (Zizek 2009); Dolar's essay responds to and develops Zizek's chapter (which I will look to…
Jensen Suther: Novel, Organism, Form: Bio-Aesthetics in Hegel and Thomas Mann There has been an unintentional pause in this "daily" log of almost a month. I caught a head-cold around mid-month, and then traveled from New Zealand to Italy (via Berlin). The bodily strain has basically persisted through until now - which, in partnership with a general lapse in having the diligence to set aside time…
Writing Setup Introduction A slight digression from my regular train of thought to put to paper the environment in which I write these logs ; which is also the environment in which I have written academic papers for the past year or so. I write entirely within a terminal-emulated version of Doom Emacs , exporting to either PDF or HTML documents as is necessary. This environment supports all of my…
Slavoj Žižek: The Sublime Object of Ideology (chapter 1, part 1) This post continues thinking regarding Zizek's 1989 book The Sublime Object of Ideology . For some thinking on the preface and introduction (in the 2nd edition published by Verso), see 24.02.05 . Here, I want to unfold the thinking in the book's first chapter, titled "How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?". This chapter sets up a…
Slavoj Žižek: The Sublime Object of Ideology (introduction) It's been a few days since I logged; so a couple of thoughts are due today. The first is regarding Zizek's 1989 book The Sublime Object of Ideology , which is one of the "first" in my list on science and psychoanalysis. This book is absolutely essential for a number of reasons. Among the most important is that it represents some of the…
Matteo Pasquinelli: Eye of the Master Today: finally, I completed Matteo Pasquinelli's new book published in 2023, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence . I've been partway through this book for a month or more, as I could never quite bring myself to finish it off. I have fair investment in Pasquinelli, as I wrote a term paper last year addressing the majority of the…
Why we should give feedback to students Today's work doesn't fit on one of my three tracks, as it consisted of grading papers from a course for which I was a TA (Teaching Assistant) in the Fall semester, MCM 0150: Introduction to Modern Culture and Media . I submitted final grades for these papers for the students in my section in late December, but I had (until today) neglected to return students…
Jacques Le Goff: Your Money or Your Life Today's project was completing Jacques Le Goff's 1990 Your Money or Your Life: Economy and Religion in the Middle Ages . This book offers a prehistory of capitalism in the medieval figure of the usurer . The usurer is a person who lends money at interest in order to collect that interest at some point in the future and make a profit. From the 10th through…
Rebecca Carson: Immanent Externalities (chapter 2) Into the deep end: today I prepared a chapter of Rebecca Carson's Immanent Externalities: The Reproduction of Life in Capital . This book emerged through her dissertation work with Etienne Balibar, and it is a work of incredible precision apprehending and extending the conceptual system in Marx's Capital . One way to understand the book's project…
Streams of thought in my dissertation The posts on this website have one or more of the following tags: CaS code and systems WiG writing in general BgS before graduate school DiH the question of dialectics in history SiP the question of science in psychoanalysis MiT the question of mathematics in the twentieth century The first of these is the most generic. 'Writing in general' is how I refer to…
What is ‘modern culture and media’? As the new year has now turned around, I am (once again) promising myself that I will write something more regularly. I am entering the latter half of my third year as a PhD student at Brown University in the department of Modern Culture and Media– a department that, unless you happen to be invested in the landscape of a particular kind of institutionalized…
Deconstructing Urbit: The Politics of Software as Infrastructure The following essay was originally written as a contribution intended for the Routledge Handbook of Architecture, Urban Space and Politics. I proposed and drafted it in early 2020, and then submitted it for peer review. I returned to work on the final edit in July 2021, having not thought about the work for some six months, and…
On Stranger Things The set is small town America, a fictional place nested in real space: Hawkins, Indiana. The animal print clothing, Kate-Bush-heavy soundtrack and over-militarized technological anxiety attest to that space's imagined time: Reagan's 80s, as the Cold War runs out of breath. Russia is not the only enemy, however. In fact, it is small change in the grand scheme of a larger threat.…
Associative Archiving with DEVONThink (Part III) Annotations in DT have long been a bit of a brain tangle for me. My spec for annotations (since I didn't go into this in part I ) is as follows: There should be no constraints on how many annotations you can take from a document. You could take none, one or two, or ten thousand. An annotation should have an inlined quote (whatever text is…
Associative Archiving with DEVONThink (Part II) Following on from Part I , here I'll unpack how I archive in practice using DEVONthink (DT) as a driver. As I noted in part I, DT is a Mac-only application, and so in order to replicate my setup, you unfortunately need to have an Apple device. I'm actively looking for linux software that can simulate or replicate DT's functionality, as my primary…
Associative Archiving with DEVONThink (Part I) I've been using DEVONthink (DT) idly for almost two years now. For those who aren't familiar with the application, you can basically think of it as an extra layer on top of the Mac operating system for working with documents (PDF, images, RTF, etc) more effectively. It has inbuilt PDF viewing and annotation, facilities for syncing documents between…
Documentary Is/Not A Name A synopsis of Trinh T. Min-ha's argument in her 1990 essay, " Documentary Is/Not a Name ". You can find the essay here .
On Gods and Campervans If we characterize 'culture' as the gestures (rhetorical, occupational, infrastructural) that Man invents to make an environment wholly livable, it is clear that such gestures will be subject to Man's historical particularity at any given moment. One normative gesture in the plans of our present cultural architecture is Science. Science's pragmatism substitutes the need and…
Sweet Tooth (for baristas) A collaboration with Michelle Lord Goldman and Cecily Polonsky. Directed by Jhor van der Horst, edited by David Lopera, and featuring Natalie Plonk, Ben Diamond, Raheem Barnett, and Ysa Ayala.
A comparison of Elm and React (in code) Since React’s open source release in 2013, techniques inspired by functional programming have become an integral part of what many consider ‘best practice’ in front-end application development on the web. Functional programming as a concept has been around since the lambda calculus was invented to study computation in the 30s, and it became practicable…
The Towpath to React and Redux When you visit a URL, you are redirected through the internet to a server somewhere in the world, and code is triggered on that server, prompted by your request. Sometimes that code makes requests elsewhere, retrieving other resources from a database or elsewhere before returning files to your browser, which we can call the client , that made the request. This is how…