Including but not limited to a concise takedown of brogramming chauvinism, the thoughtful management of mixed metaphors, and an artful promotion of the author's company culture

"appealing to perverse vanity metrics, perhaps, but at the cost of everything that matters" - Marx's critique of capitalism in a nutshell, brilliantly brought to bear on the agential problematic ushered in by LLMs in this stellar piece of writing.

The entry on value is particularly lucid, as is the one dispelling disillusions about a Marxian 'labor theory of value' (he critiques the Ricardian interpretation rather than adopting it)

The translators' footnotes to the new translation of Capital vol I are an absolute contextual gold mine. Paul North and Paul Reitter did a stunning job. I'm sure they're great in context-- but they also work just one after the other, like a postscript or introduction

Our first session with reading coming up this Sunday! "The Working Day", a must-read for everyone who has ever been subject to a wage

Macos: i have no idea where your document is

Windows: “your” document? These are onedrive’s documents

Linux: /opt/fakevm/mounted/tmpfs/vmlinuz/ubuntu-36.0.01_x86_also-arm.0.21.013/snapd/docx-exporter.sx/0028492748901.txt.converted.bak/v/9/ms/1/0.out

At the limit, wouldn't all communication become more efficient if we just encoded it as PL theory / math? A very useful madness, this

The Sims a bad video game but also an incredible training ground for the imagination's domestication

Providence, with even easier commute access from Providence, which is a nicer city than Boston

Professor of the Practice in Computer Science with a Focus on Artificial Intelligence - Providence, Rhode Island job with Computer Science | 37970844 The Department of Computer Science at Brown University is seeking applicants for a Professor of the Practice position at the assistant, associate, ...

My department is looking to hire a professor of practice in CS, with a focus on AI. Job posting below. If you have questions I'll do my best to answer them, else find someone who can! We are in Providence, easy commute access from Boston.
jobs.chronicle.com/job/37970844...

This is wild. Trust the whizkids to turn society into the worst kind of videogame

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

Yeah this is a banger imo

🗄 history of NLP and the ACL | Are.na

I'm lecturing about the "History of NLP" this week. What should I include? Any favorite anecdotes, images, people, methods? Slides, books, papers, or talks for inspiration or grounding?

I've been maintaining a small collection here: www.are.na/maria-antoni...

Worth getting your hands on this one! A properly useful account of the embedding as a cultural technique in computer vision

leftism leaving people's bodies as soon as you ask them to wear a mask

evergreen.

This is great! A large part of this course came out of the attempt to teach Heinrich's introduction, and finding that it was still a bit too dense for many not familiar with the theoretical language

Absolutely! "Tech worker" is very broadly defined

Yep! We use the 2024 translation for volume 1.

"That during their calculation words are not grounded by their extensions, however, does not necessarily mean that LLMs are to be dismissed—after all, it is also human to make mistakes."

From our new issue, Mercedes Bunz's "On the Calculation of Meaning": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

It's not formally Wertkritik based: we'll focus mainly on episodes in tech that lend themselves to Marx's critique / its extension. But we're definitely influenced by and like Heinrich's introduction!

If you're a tech worker who's interested in reading Marx's Capital with other tech workers, there's a free online course that's starting later this month cftw.ohrg.org

Is there an online option?

Thinking about black holes in Rome in the next couple of days (join us): www.biblhertz.it/events/44861...

tom scott superimposed over yazi in /nix/store showing a few nix store paths in the background

i am here in the nix store

What was tripping me up was the suggestion that parallel computation allowed the entry of some opportunities to exploit perceived differences, like in arbitrage-- as the whole art of software parallelization is to keep computation in a straitjacket and not let it run away from itself

Hmm I see.. Maybe I don't understand enough about the financial instruments at work. I get that there's a reorganizing of computation in order that it can be done in parallel, and that this has structural affinities with (some kinds of) financial instruments.

I look forward to this publication, then!

Sponsor @breezykermo on GitHub Sponsors Support my open source work at the Free Computing Lab: https://freecomputinglab.ohrg.org

If you're a Rheo user, please consider sponsoring so that I can keep maintaining it! github.com/sponsors/bre...

Aren't these fundamentally different sorts of replication? I don't doubt that computerization is embroiled with financialization, but I'm not sure that parallelization is the elementary unit of that embroilment