Page by Dr. Casey Fiesler | @cfiesler.bsky.social - skywriter.blue
good thread on the use of "public" social media posts in ML datasets
Ali Alkhatib: Defining AI
"Defining AI along political and ideological language allows us to think about things we experience and recognize productively as AI, without needing the self-serving supervision of computer scientists to allow or direct our collective work. We can recognize, based on our own knowledge and experience as people who deal with these systems, what’s part of this overarching project of disempowerment by the way that it renders autonomy farther away from us, by the way that it alienates our authority on the subjects of our own expertise." (I would add, though I'm sure Alkhatib would agree with this, that attributing authority to something that "learns from examples" is itself a political and ideological act!)
Nature's Folly: A Response to "AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably"
"Consider doing this same experiment, but, instead of poetry, it's literally anything STEM, and, when our criminally underpaid participants preferred ChatGPT, we gleefully write a paper titled 'AI-generated physics is indistinguishable from human-written physics.' It's unimaginable that such a paper would pass peer-review in any scientific journal."
The Enclosure of the Human Psyche - by L. M. Sacasas
"The individual human psyche does not seem like a thing held in common. But, in fact, that presumption may itself be a symptom of the enclosure of the psyche, although there are certainly many other forces leading toward that same conclusion.... From this perspective, the enclosure of the human psyche deprives us of a common world, which yields an experience of solidarity and belonging."
Places Overview
"100 million commercial points-of-interest (POI) worldwide and is rich with real-world information" some good open source data, but a lot of the actually interesting attributes (hours, tips, descriptions) are only available for $$$
[UPDATE] Nature's Folly: A Response to Nature's "Loneliness and suicide mitigation for students using GPT3-enabled chatbots"
"Their results say that 3% of participants' actual lives might've been saved by Replika. That means 3% of participants are tethered to life by a venture funded tech company that can simply disappear at any time, or, more likely, decide to charge more money, because they can. How much are you willing to pay to not die tomorrow?"
The False Radicalism of Corporate Disability Literature ‹ Literary Hub
"[E]conomic elites have 'avoided questions of structural violence and a broader critique of power relations' by convincing historically marginalized individuals that 'telling one’s story' doesn’t just offer healing, it can also lead to personal advancement... Unfortunately... 'the majority of those who tell their stories are not able to improve their conditions.'"
Mazes for Programmers: Code Your Own Twisty Little Passages by Jamis Buck
nyu library has this online, but it's in the goofy o'reilly ebook reader thing
Pandas Brain Teasers: Exercise Your Mind by Miki Tebeka
these are kinda fun
100STYLE - Ian Mason
"over 4 million frames of motion capture data for 100 different styles of locomotion"
Why I confronted Nancy Mace
"When the incoming administration leverages technology to carry out mass deportations and other human rights violations, do we have a plan to stop it, or at least mitigate harm and build power for the future?"
Long Covid - stuff that helps me — [janet gunter]
good list of things to try
When Cards Go Bad | MAGIC: THE GATHERING
this is about M:TG (obviously) but a lot of stuff here is relevant to designing, e.g., skill trees
Emerald Source Code Commentary
"[A] book in the spirit of "A Commentary on the Sixth Edition Unix Operating System" that examines and explains the source code of one of the most popular video games ever made, based on the decompilation work of PRET."
Impossible Word: Toward a Poetics of Aphasia | The Poetry Foundation
"The notion that the language of one (Cummings) is considered legitimate due to its production by an autonomous will or intention into language and its subversions, and the other (Wernicke’s patient) not so because it is an effect of illness and therefore an unintended accident, reproduces a system of value contingent on the Western subject of colonialism-capitalism. The division of poetic versus aphasic (read: not-poetic) speech is layered with the racism, heteropatriarchy, and ableism of a colonial order that also continues to delegitimate other syntactical and linguistic deviations found in linguistic practices."
An Indigenous Modernist Artist Finally Gets Her Due
"[T]he top panel of each piece... captur[es] the essence of her subject through narrative symbols and shapes... The middle panel riffs on the imagery established in the first panel, zooming in on particular forms to create a graphic pattern, inflected with Art Nouveau style... The third panel brings in Native imagery, often referencing Plains Indian culture, stories, objects, and motifs used in beadwork and leatherwork." gorgeous
African American Craft History – Syllabus
tons to explore here, esp David Drake
A Student’s Guide to Not Writing with ChatGPT
"[S]tudents [are] creative young people, so they empathize with robbed creators. They want tools that help them, not hinder them. And a lot of them are (rightly) concerned about the environment, so they’re shocked to learn that ChatGPT takes ten times the amount of energy Google does to answer the same question, usually worse." Also the Jared White quote: "You can literally just not use it"
Yellow Silence: Miniature from the Silos Apocalypse (ca. 1100) — The Public Domain Review
"Here sonic absence is visualized, and it is yellow.... Auditory interruption gets transposed onto the textual plane, as the rectangle veils the ruled lines it floats above.... The effect becomes all the more palpable when we consider that the manuscript may have been read aloud."
“Multiple Worlds Vying to Exist”: Philip K. Dick and Palestine (by Jonathan Lethem)
"... in Dick’s novels, again and again, the veil of a unitary reality is ripped off, in favor of the revelation that we live in an existential abyss—one that is also an existential plurality. However painful the transition may feel, the true nightmare isn’t this abyss of infinite possibility but the attempted imposition upon it of a single viewpoint."