‘Everything is a signal’: speaking circuits and noisy signs in the making of language‐oriented AI Contemporary artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are often presumed to be capable of revealing unmediated truths about the world, including the truths language might hold, echoing the long-stan...

early view of my article is out! it explores the twinned ideologies of referentialism that often subtend language and "AI" and how those ideologies break apart in the R&D pipeline, where the social-pragmatic dimension of both speech + data come to the fore rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

CBI's MOSAICS logo, basic information on the MOSAICS Symposium, and list of the members of the Program Committee.

Call for Papers for CBI's MOSAICS Symposium: cse.umn.edu/cbi/call-pap...

Thrilled to announce this & to work with Sareeta Amrute, @babintsevak.bsky.social, @anitachan.bsky.social & Gerardo Con Diaz!!

MOSAICS Symposium: October 15-16, 2026

Proposal Deadline: May 29, 2026

#AIstudies #histtech

Compromise?

bsky.app/profile/leif...

Yes! I’m certainly not mad about the prospect of back-to-back years of hangouts with you

Aka “John Haugeland is pretty great, actually”

Awesome! I come back to it a lot. Actually though, that whole Amodern issue is extremely good content

If you’re around Cornell this Friday, come by to hear me and others transform unstructured data into actionable insights

One of my favorites is Avery Slater’s Cryptomonolingualism (excellent bib, too): amodern.net/article/cryp.... And Lydia Liu’s Wittgenstein in the Machine rules: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Hot off the press: @paolo-caffoni.bsky.social on tokenization: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Opinion | It’s Called Silicon Sampling, and It’s Going to Ruin Public Opinion Polling

In lieu of lecture blogging on simulation and prediction, check out this fortuitously timed op-ed in the NY Times by @leifw.bsky.social and me on the absurdity of Silicon Sampling. (Related lecture blog tomorrow!)

Tremendous essay by Paolo Caffoni that approaches tokenisation in machine learning systems using critical translation literature with ideas from the study of political economy. doi.org/10.1007/s001...

Vector Media Dispelling the notion of “generative” AINeural networks are designed to dissolve all media into the vector space—a universal space of commensurability....

It's Easter so I thought it would be appropriate to be back from the dead to announce that this is coming out at the end of this month: www.upress.umn.edu/978151792167...

Source map incorrectly served when in production · Issue #28001 · oven-sh/bun What version of Bun is running? 1.3.10+30e609e08 What platform is your computer? Microsoft Windows NT 10.0.26200.0 x64 What steps can reproduce the bug? This in server.js: import homepage from './i...

Possibly the smoking bun

github.com/oven-sh/bun/...

eclipsearchive.org/projects/PAG...

Not to be missed! Mercedes does some real heavy lifting here to theorize intertextuality vis-a-vis generated writing

War crime

The Poetics of Bureaucracy Language models are a bureaucratic technology

Coarsely summarizing perspectives on the bureaucratic culture of language models by @himself.bsky.social, @azjacobs.bsky.social, and Lily Chumley.

Lily Chumley! She’s got a few (forthcoming?) pieces in the works. Here’s an abstract of hers from a recent talk

I will be at @cornelluniversity.bsky.social on April 10th 2026 for the Semiotic Machines symposium, together with some of my favourite people on a brilliant lineup. See you there ✨

Or even what programming should/might be, I think. Taste’s role right now is not unlike the abstraction stuff we were talking about yesterday. What even is code now? Eh, text is text, it’s all just software. What’s programming now? Taste

Taste is definitely influencer/hiring manager speak, but it also seems to be the refuge for writing code when your keystrokes aren’t often about making edits in a source file

This is spot on, yes

Re: taste-making: AI-assisted coding etc seems to have pushed everyone into using taste as the final adjudicator for what makes a good software engineer right now. We saw that earlier somewhat with model builders talking about how to train good models, but “taste” has ballooned

Artificial Intelligence, Interactive Measurements, and Assemblage Theory Fuck Heidegger.

In this post, I serve as an unreliable narrator of the talk I gave two weeks ago at the Cultural AI conference at NYU (thanks again to @leifw.bsky.social and @t-shoemaker.bsky.social for organizing this unique event and for inviting me to share my perspective):

Wait, also: what’s your thinking on all this taste-making stuff in SWE? I think it’s a response to these new forms of abstraction post-CoT

Is this symbolic AI 🫴🦋

Yes! Weirdly, writing this pushed me to Dijkstra in a big way. Critique can/should decompose systems, but abstraction is also inescapable here---and in fact, attempts to decompose systems sometimes miss the key role abstraction plays in software

Relevant parts in the structured programming essay

You have to. But you’ll have help from one of the greats

Flusser brained (complimentary)

From there, I overview several new "language model programming" approaches before turning to a final case study: Golden Gate Claude. Come for the software studies, stick around for the bridge that never was

I put some standbys in software/digital studies—Wendy Chun and Yuk Hui—into dialogue with the computational linguist Christopher Potts, whose thinking as of late contains a media-theoretic kernel I develop into an account of the model object +