ceoln @ceoln@social.cleverlibre.org
A consciousness somehow associated with matter.
Posting about culture, philosophy, politics, AI Art Tools, NaNoWriMo, Software Development occasionally, the relationship of consciousness to matter.
Degrees in Philosophy and Computer Science, once had a US TS/SCI(redacted) clearance, radical-for-the-US politics, ex-Libertarian, zen-buddhist-pantheist-atheist.
Google employee, but I do not speak for Google in any way.
If your profile tells me nothing about you, it's less likely I'll follow you (back).
Header: abstract smoky patterns
pfp: Adorable weird piglet / delirium cultist... thing. In a hoodie.
Joined Nov 2022
(It is of course quite possible that Miller was just translating a different French text than the one I'm reading, and that one _did_ have that «bordée» in italics. Notably, this English translation begins with a Latin quote from Hobbes, and this French one with a (quite different, if thematically related) French quote from Hobbes. So there's that too.)
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"The problems are these:
"We don’t have anything resembling a consensus on what 'cancel culture' is and we’re not having a serious discussion about defining it;
"We don’t have a consensus on how we reconcile the interests of speakers and responders, and we’re not making a serious attempt to reach one.
"We don’t have a consensus about what to do about it and we’re not trying to reach one."
"Our Fundamental Right To Shame And Shun The New York Times" by Ken White in The Popehat Report https://popehat.substack.com/p/our-fundamental-right-to-shame-and
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Time for the #VisualWritingPrompt for 07/03/23!
Write a 480-ish character #SciFi story about this AI generated image.
#WritingCommunity #Midjourney #WritingPrompt #SecretSciFiNetwork
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Amazing short fiction from @annaleen about audio cyborg hacks in a near-future music scene — https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/unhearable-music-science-fiction-1234770203/
Check it out 📖🤖
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Introduction? Sure, #introduction I guess
I'm jules and this is my professional account. I'm a mathematician and computer scientist based in Glasgow 🏴. I'm an applied category theorist, which means I study compositionality, especially in microeconomics and machine learning
I'm affiliated with the Mathematically Structured Programming group, I'm a co-founder of the startup 20squares, and I'm in the process of co-founding a nonprofit research organisation called the Institute for Categorical Cybernetics
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Just finished reading this. It's a memoir about loss and grieving, and was written as a journal during Covid lock-down. It's well-written and very poignant. Reading it was also a weird journey through re-living the lock-down. It was like reading about something that we all went through a decade ago, even though it's only been three years. If anyone decides to check it out, make sure you have a big-ass box of tissues handy. Seriously.
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The team at Spectrum Gaming have put together this fantastic child-friendly web site to help people understand what #autism is, and what it means for all of us.
I contributed a couple of bits to this myself, on #monotropism and spiky profiles. I'm one of a large number of contributors, whose work had to pass by an editorial panel of young autistic people.
I really, really hope that before too long, this is the kind of thing that young people will come across first when they look up autism. There's so much work to be done to push aside the unhelpful narratives of autism that have dominated for so long.
https://autismunderstood.co.uk/
Perhaps-relatedly, Miller translates «La déconstruction de la langue est coupée par le dire politique, bordée par la très ancienne culture du signifiant» quite reasonably as "The dismantling of language is intersected by political assertion, is _edged_ by the age-old culture of the signifier". I don't know if the «bordée» has the same erotically-freighted additional meaning as does the English "edged", but Barthes didn't in any case italicize it. Maybe it's just my naughty mind, but I see a little nudge-nudge wink-wink from Miller here. :)
That aside, it's just a great sentence in itself. I'd be hard pressed to say that it means, exactly, but there it is.
Ah, this is fun: «au moment où il jouit» might, given the context, go into English as "at the moment that he comes" (or even "cums"); the French verb «jouir» is ambiguous between "enjoy" and "orgasm" just as the English "to come" is ambiguous between "move towards" and "orgasm".
Google translate primly renders it as "enjoys"; Miller spells it out again, as "at the very moment of his orgasm, his bliss".
In fact this edition has a small "Note on the Text" all about how French, unlike English, has words for the erotic that are neither, as he puts it, coarse nor clinical. How educational!
#barthes #writing #reading #French #translation #text #eroticism
Ah, but language well-used is amazing! Sometimes I start reading a book like this and, wanting to stop and bask after every page or paragraph or sentence, eventually end up mislaying it before finishing...
«La culture ni sa destruction ne sont érotiques; c'est la faille de l'une et de l'autre qui le devient»
Neither culture nor its destruction is erotic; it is the fault-line between the two that becomes so.
(RIchard Miller renders «la faille» here as "the seam... the fault, the flaw", which is an interesting way to try to capture the ambiguity of the original; but I'll take a simple "fault-line" and its geological connotation.)
Woot, Barthes' "The Pleasure of the Text" («Le Plaisir du texte») is short enough, and clearly (hm, not exactly clearly) fluently written enough, that I might just read the whole thing in parallel.
(My French is terrible, but at least I have a French, unlike basically any other non-English human language.)
A hardcopy of the English just arrived in the post, and I found this on the interwebs: http://palimpsestes.fr/textes_philo/barthes/plaisir-texte.pdf
Allons! :)
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IceCube is supposedly announcing some cool finding tomorrow. Whether or not that will make the news, I'm in awe at IceCube - a cubic kilometer neutrino telescope below the antarctic, I can't think of many things more sci-fi like in the world today.
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One of the least plausible aspects of fantasy as a genre is that sorcerers NEVER seem to get bogged down in creating a new spell then spend the next three or four months muttering "I hate this, it's rubbish" under their breath.
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I wrote something about what I think LLMs are doing.
1. LLMs do both of the things that their promoters and detractors say they do.
2. It is very difficult from the outside to tell which they are doing.
3. Both of them are useful.
https://moultano.wordpress.com/2023/06/28/the-many-ways-that-digital-minds-can-know/
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I travel internationally often enough that unpleasant encounters with border officers wondering why I'm nervous have become a real annoyance. I've printed some business cards now to attempt to cut these encounters short - we'll see if it works... #essentialTremor
Tonight's #YouTube watch:
best physics equation | virial theorem | gravothermal catastrophe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CdE5a3xyxE
This person has an amazing sense of comic timing, and a perfect deadpan delivery ("It's fine"), and manages to make physics that I juuuuust barely understand (some of, sometimes) extremely fun.
Unexpectedly delightful.
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If there’s one thing I wish I could get people to realize, it’s that there is no deus ex machina that’s going to come along and fix Twitter, the government, the legal profession, or whatever else is clearly limping along with the wheels falling off.
You are the machina.
Act like it.
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CNN has a crappy headline for this story.
A better one would be "Neo-Fascist US political party calls for repeal of 14th and 26th amendments to the US Constitution, mass incarceration"
CNN: These are the big ideas Republicans are pushing for 2024 | CNN Politics
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/02/politics/republicans-2024-agenda-what-matters/index.html
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Seeing a little flurry of new follow requests, thus a little wave of self-boosts of fave old posts.
People asking to follow--highly recommend an #Introduction post, having some icon, and maybe a few posts and boosts in your page so I have reasonable confidence you are real and don't deny you as potential spammer.
Also I and others are much more likely to follow back with that stuff.
A consciousness somehow associated with matter.
Posting about culture, philosophy, politics, AI Art Tools, NaNoWriMo, Software Development occasionally, the relationship of consciousness to matter.
Degrees in Philosophy and Computer Science, once had a US TS/SCI(redacted) clearance, radical-for-the-US politics, ex-Libertarian, zen-buddhist-pantheist-atheist.
Google employee, but I do not speak for Google in any way.
If your profile tells me nothing about you, it's less likely I'll follow you (back).
Header: abstract smoky patterns
pfp: Adorable weird piglet / delirium cultist... thing. In a hoodie.
Joined Nov 2022
