A Special Request
Pledge Drive Season Is Upon Us
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The Computer Science Fetish
On the Valorization of Technical Authority 💡Nerd Alert: 1/5. Readable, but also mostly venting about weird encounters at a conference in San Francisco. The academic AI critic is often either bored or angry. Bored because everyone keeps saying the same things, or angry because all the same things need
Toward a Critical Agentic Systems Design Practice
For designers, who will choose for themselves and for the rest of us. 💡Nerd Rating: 3/5. Remarks prepared for the "From Interface to Agency: A New Discourse for Design and AI" forum on design practices for emerging technology at UC Berkeley, which this year focused on Design
Modeling Language with Plaster
💡Nerd Rating 3.75/5: This post is about a late-19th-century debate in academic mathematics, but it's plainly written and relevant to LLMs. What is a model, anyway? Doing math used to involve touch. We used plaster and wooden models, weird cubist-looking sculptural objects you turn over in
Stochastic Flocks and the Critical Problem of 'Useful' AI
You might not agree, but there’s a growing consensus, even among reluctant users, that LLMs feel different. I don’t think it undermines critique to ask about the stakes of those feelings — and of this new goal of “agential AI.” In my latest piece for Tech Policy Press, I