Ivan Flis

Leblebija is one of the Turkish loan words in Serbian (funnily enough, not in standard Croatian which prefers the Slavic slanutak). Cool expression!

Kirill, whoever you are, I owe you one.

post by Rutger Bregman (@rutgerbregman.com‬) reads: Absolutely brilliant piece about the Left's TOTAL blindness on AI. Their dismissal of AI risks mirrors how climate deniers treat CO2. Will probably get a lot of nastiness for this on Bluesky, but I guess that's part of the same problem.

i shouldn’t give this piece any more attention than it has already garnered but i feel like it is worth pointing out some flaws in the argument/unquestioned assumptions

thread 1/

Makes me wonder: Can we meaningfully conceptualize models and modeling without appealing to representations and representing? Without assuming a corresponding entity?

Jennifer @JenYetAgain@beige.party in 2017 a popular twitter game was to type a partial phrase then see what your phone auto-completes it with. this proved so popular that it is now the only business model in the US. Feb 9, 2026 at 4:35:18PM Boosted by 968: Favourited by 1324:

mom they’re roasting the US economy on mastodon again

Good handle for an analytic metaphysician

This is also what I really like about reading broadly. You get to experiende all these recipes for ingredients and mull them over in what they do to the body of knowledge they induct you in.

There’s also all kinds of books. The ratio of analysis to description that is informative is also constrained by disciplinary norms. A good argument in a philosophical book is not a good argument in a historical one, and neither are appropriate for their hybrid or a more broader public facing book.

Does thinking about research in book-sized chunks constrain the ways we do historical research? It's something I have been wondering about... @standrewshist.bsky.social See: online.ucpress.edu/hsns/article...

Any millennial from the 90s and 00s knows this even if they didn't consciously realise it at the time, yup

Also, what goes on when some communities of scientists start deconstructing a metaphor, but other communities still stick to it. Productive tensions!

Lovely reminder how powerful good metaphors are not only for communicating science to the world, but as an analogical tool for coordinating research across disciplines.

“Generative models learn abstract patterns—“catness” instead of a specific cat—and elaborate them dynamically in several increasingly complex, partially randomized steps to produce entirely new images. The same model, given the same prompt, is exceedingly unlikely to produce the same output twice.”

“Mitchell, though, does have a concrete suggestion. Recently, he and a colleague proposed that the genome is like a generative model, the kind of computer program that powers AI art generators like Midjourney.” >>

“When I asked Fisher, Rodrigues, and Shyer about better metaphors, they said that they don’t have a ready replacement—though Shyer and Rodrigues are actively working with philosophers to develop new and better ways of thinking and talking about life. >>

The metaphors are so crass, if you read them in a sci-fi novel you would think the author is too on the nose.

The most soul crunching interaction is with the event organizers. “You are a fan of Tesla, it’s always nice to talk to people who are into Tesla.” I’m not into Tesla, I am into people who are into Tesla, which is a much more contested ground than even the infamous inventor.

I always debate for a while should I participate and legitimize such speakers with my presence to an extent. What gives in the end, if experts decide not to participate so as not to legitimize? The public hears only one story.

My sliver of the world is much tinier, but I do get invited to talk or listen to events where conspiracists, ultranationalists, esotericists etc. speak about Tesla in the register of historians, physicists, electrical engineers, sociologists, etc.

Hah, I have a similar one with psychologists. “Would you feel I gave a faithful account of your science if I treated your subjectivity by the same standards you treat the subjectivity of your subjects?” Uncomfortable conversation usually!

Imagine that.

Neovisno o tome sto mislite o Thompsonu i ustasovanju, svaki gradanin Zagreba koji glasa za HDZ nakon danas pljuje u lice svojem gradu i sugradanima. Mi ne zivimo u drzavi koja ima ustavni poredak, na milosti i nemilosti smo Andreja Plenkovica.

Zato je Zagreb besraman: bsky.app/profile/mmjs...

Apologies for all the typos, no edit function and foggy morning brain conspire. At least you know I wrote it, eh?

If the relationship to language is social, and if there is a machine that abstracts our language only to re-inscribe it, then that relationship-to-language becomes a “thing” — a manufactured commodity —that overshadows our relationship to language as a participatory social activity

Advancing regulatory variant effect prediction with AlphaGenome - Nature AlphaGenome, a deep learning model that inputs 1-Mb DNA sequence to predict functional genomic tracks at single-base resolution across diverse modalities, outperforms existing models in variant effect...

I had intended to post something about this new Google DeepMind paper that appeared yesterday in Nature, but the press coverage has added to what there is to say. So this is a long 🧵
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Artists trying and failing in representing the past tells us something new both about the past and about the present. Why the fuck would we want to automate that?

What the slop does though is cut out the inventive artistic vision of the past that reinvents it for the present. It gives us a collage of already regurgitated representations drawn from the data it was trained on, remixed not as a pastiche, but a shallow rearrangement.

No media production is an accurate reproduction of the past, some are slightly better, some are slightly worse, but they are always motivated by what our values make us look for in the past.

Which leads me to the 2nd point. It’s not that AI slop about historical themes like Aronofsky’s misses where other productions don’t.