Our call for entries for “Noisy Systems: Aesthetics, Epistemologies and Computation” is open through 16 March. Here’s a 🧵⬇️ #cfp #ml www.biblhertz.it/3773193/2602...
04.03.2026 00:20
👍 25
🔁 13
💬 3
📌 3
Our call for entries for “Noisy Systems: Aesthetics, Epistemologies and Computation” is open through 16 March. Here’s a 🧵⬇️ #cfp #ml www.biblhertz.it/3773193/2602...
This is the good stuff for which I come to Bluesky
The user is expressing empathy for machines in an imagined scenario... Wait, actually it appears that he is deriding their inability to feel sadness
Georg Cantor was born today in 1845. What a guy
There's a lot to make sense of in tech right now. Erika Bussman and I are organizing a new iteration of 'Capital for Tech Workers' this Spring to unpack the ethics and politics of the software world by reading Marx. Send any politically engaged (or better, disengaged) tech workers our way!
join the Digital Theory Lab Mar 9-11 for Cultural AI: An Emerging Field (RSVP required)
as.nyu.edu/research-cen...
Yuk brilliantly resuscitates Kant's critique(s) as philosophical precedent that rebuts the (crazy, empty) claim that computers will soon be more intelligent than humans. Intelligence, for Yuk/Kant, is that which can confront and resolve antinomies (p.29) - 11/11
As Yuk puts it, for Kant morality is incomputable and incalculable, for "reason is forced to go beyond its comfort zone and to recognize the existence of entities that it cannot prove, yet without which it cannot operate." p.73 - 10/n
Yuk Hui has recently published a book called 'Kant Machine' that explores this same point by marking a divergence between the cybernetic notion of the human/machine (fundamentally unified by the 'substance' of information) and the Kantian critique. - 9/n
The spectre of code's automation resurfaces the fundamentally Kantian anxiety around taste's impossible universality in the domain of software development. Kant recognized that pure reason, practical reason, and judgment all could not be automated: thus his three critiques. - 8/n
It used to be that the ability to write code was what made a 'good' engineer. Now the placement of that 'goodness' is more diffuse, as writing functional code that conforms to a programming language's syntactic requirements has been automated through LLMs. - 7/n
The salience of 'taste' as a characteristic that distinguishes certain coders from others in the domain of software engineering is caught up in this same Kantian problematic. - 6/n
Karatani reads both the Critique of Pure Reason AND the Critique of Judgment as emerging from the problematic of taste's almost definitional resistance to universality. How can something founded in subjective apprehension ('do I like this?') be made into a universal proposition? - 5/n
"... Like Home, Kant acknowledged that the judgment of taste had to be subjective." pp.37-38. The judgment of taste for Kant is uniquely troublesome, as the possibility of its universality is a serious problem on account of taste's necessary entanglement with subjective apprehension. - 4/n
Karatani, in his book Transcritique, writes: "With Home, Kant seized the moment to reconsider the possibility of an aesthetic judgment of taste and to investigate its basis.... Home still dared to seek a ground where critical judgment could be universal..." - 3/n
As the story goes, Kant was inspired to write Critique of Pure Reason after being awakened from his 'dogmatic slumber' by Hume. Kojin Karatani makes the case that the author REALLY awakened Kant was not Hume but (Henry) Home. - 2/n
The emerging discourse around 'taste' in software development is best understood by returning to Kant's transcritical philosophy - 1/n
The description for a virtual-first Brechtian theatre group that will organically arise on Moltbook any day now
The first set of postdocs for our ERC project on popular government have just been advertised. These 3 postdocs will be based at UC Louvain with my co-PI Pierre-Etienne Vandamme and focus on contemporary democratic theory. Apply! jobs.uclouvain.be/Personnelsci...
I'd like to read! (Don't seem to be able to DM sorry)
(genuine question) has Anthropic always toed the American liberal party line in this way, or has their stance on 'ethical AI' ever been more radical?
Slavoj Žižek
Mladen Dolar
Alenka Zupančič
Joan Copjec
Education was better when all of the students' screens were powered by Linux: blog.cs.brown.edu/2026/02/17/a...
📢 We are hiring a Digital Humanities Scientist to join our interdisciplinary DH Lab in Rome
🔎 Focus: Digital art history, AI & machine learning, cultural heritage data, collaborative research
⏳ Deadline: April 30, 2026
🔗 www.biblhertz.it/en/opportuni...
Note that I do still use Kagi for research/search tasks in my Claude downtime, so I'm by no means advocating LLM veganism moralistically
As someone who no longer codes for a living (I get to read and write instead), I've found the token quota strangely calming/structuring. I'm only on $20/mo, and that last me about one 1-2 hour session. When I hit my quota, I think "okay, no more putting off the focused work"
if you're in Chicago in two weeks, don't miss this
AGI will be reached when a model can produce something this convincing for "a pelican riding a bicycle in the tour de france"
We should fundraise for Rheo and Bene. Tell investors they're a stepping stone on the yellow brick road to AGI and we're away cackling like the wicked witch