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Dave Palfrey

@01factory.bsky.social

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Dave Palfrey's avatar Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social
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I also appreciate the author links to Wikidata and VIAF. (1069 authors lack Wikidata items atm - 717 Spanish, 129 Czech, 89 Russian, 77 Italian, 35 French, 17 English, 5 German - so something to do!)

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Dave Palfrey's avatar Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social
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Agree re entitled connoisseurship. But I do savour the "compacted judgment" of words a bit like wine. Wrt that, thanks v. much for making me look up "compromised"! Orig. meant (as you'd expect) just 'agreed by mutual concession', later 'offered to communal judgment' (& thence damaged in reputation).

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Dave Palfrey's avatar Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social
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Haha. (Can't deny, if you do ever happen to meet a more grounded Jean des Esseintes, I would absolutely love to talk to them.)

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Dave Palfrey's avatar Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social
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Nice - though your term! I just switched its position :) Christianity's super-saturation of our imagination is presumably what still makes versions of Original Sin feel obvious or appealing, rather than v. specific & exotic constructions. We're still stuck in that local min. (I'm a Nietzschean, tho)

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Dave Palfrey's avatar Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social
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Don't you feel an odd mix of delighted gratitude, perplexity and excitement when you discover you're "com-promised"? I can't take seriously a grand purity morality, myself. But, sure, deployment environments and practices differ.

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Dave Palfrey's avatar Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social
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I'd be interested in any collection you make! But you def misunderstand me if you think I want to convict others of guilt for cultural associations of which I'm somehow miraculously free. To the extent I'm interested in guilt, it's my own cultural debt, cultural strands already insinuated in me.

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Dave Palfrey's avatar Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social
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Sure, I often drift from delighted obsession into pomposity. But bring on the jokes 💝 They're where a lot of the action happens, where incongruity meets ambivalence. And there's often a creative uncertainty whether something is a joke or not. "Can we invert things, and try predicting X from Y?"

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Dave Palfrey's avatar Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social
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Moral judgments, with a thin moral vocabulary, a fantasised (feared or triumphal) judgment day apparatus, a cartoon world of goodies/baddies? Absolutely not. Am I trying to draw 'thick' ethical judgments, enrich the vocabulary of my perceptual responsiveness? Every day. I'm human. And 'serious'?

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Dave Palfrey's avatar Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social
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Nice! Bourdieu somewhere calls for a doubled strategy to cope with the humanities/sci divide: humanistic investigation of science, & sci investigation of the humanities. So today with tech: philological close reading of linguistic echoes seems not substitute but complement to distant reading.

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Dave Palfrey's avatar Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social
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^^ maybe of interest to @tedunderwood.me @cyborggoddess.bsky.social . Who's paid sustained attention to this extraordinary language? Here's Angelica Harris-Faull on C17th print representations of the womb. But J. J. Sylvester's mid-C19th math use of 'matrix'? C21st tech bros?

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Dave Palfrey's avatar Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social
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Other echoes seem haphazard but intruiging. If one starts from maternal feeding, "feedback" looks different. Then ofc "embeddings" (and even "layers"). Different LLM "families", natch. (Tho gradient "descent" isn't lineage, even if structured by "linear" algebra, but reproductive micro-mechanism.)

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Dave Palfrey's avatar Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social
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This mini-🧵 quickly drifted into more psychoanalytic territory than expected. On the strange terminologies of AI as cutting the womb from the body, breeding without women. Corpus, matrix, generative AI.

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Dave Palfrey's avatar Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social
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The language of "grounding" AI also uncannily echoes these odd Greek myths: it is as if a new Erichthonius may be born from the earth.

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Dave Palfrey's avatar Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social
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The 'Greek dream of a womanless world' (Vigdis Songe-Møller) remixed? This AI fantasy denies all mother-child relationality: it brings into being an autochthonous (properly motherless) child, and with Parmenidean closure denies any relationality internal to the woman's pregnant body.

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Dave Palfrey's avatar Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social
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And a 'generative model'? The Oedipal fantasy was to kill and supplant the father, claiming his old power to sleep with the mother. Here the male fantasy appears to be to kill and supplant both the mother and her relationality, claiming a new power to breed alone.

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Dave Palfrey's avatar Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social
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Closer to home than Renaissance and early modern male anatomists, there is America's century of forced sterilisation of women by hysterectomy. Sanjana Manjeshwar makes clear the seriousness of this tradition in the Berkeley Political Review:

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Dave Palfrey's avatar Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social
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"And the aiynth figure sheweth the Matrix cut forth of the body, being of that bygnesse as it was sene taken Page foorth of a woman, at the laste Anothomye, which I dyd see at the uniuersitie of Padua in Italy."

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Dave Palfrey's avatar Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social
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Have historians of gender or anthropologists of kinship paid attention to the technical language of AI practitioners? From the corpus bring forth a matrix, and we shall attain the generative. Each half of this sentence has its own compacted violence, its own dark tradition.

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Dave Palfrey's avatar Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social
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hmm, you literally mean an analysis of literary style using game theory?

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Casmilus's avatar Casmilus @casmilus.bsky.social
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Does anyone know the earliest use of "landslide victory" in UK parlance? Seems to have been known in the late 70s, even though none of the 70s elections produced big wins. Was it a US import, from Nixon or LBJ times?

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Dave Palfrey's avatar Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social
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There will only be 'general intelligence', artificial or not, in a world in which there are general interests to which intelligence is put.

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Olivier Simard-Casanova's avatar Olivier Simard-Casanova @o.simardcasanova.net
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Pendant ce temps, au Royaume-Uni… Le bilan économique des conservateurs est tellement désastreux que le Financial Times, qui n’est pas franchement un journal de gauche, vient d’appeler à voter pour le Parti travailliste.

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grand theft eigenvalue 🔆's avatar grand theft eigenvalue 🔆 @akhilrao.bsky.social
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Good post 📉📈 This caught my eye If I wanted to {estimate some numbers real good} / {build the engineering pipelines to do so} with the latest methods published in <top_journal>, seems clear that: 1. I could not publish in <top_journal> 2. The folks who do the engineering get little/no credit

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Dave Palfrey's avatar Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social
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Not sure it's the aged, but there clearly also are a bunch of peeps "reverently, passionately waiting / For the miraculous birth"

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Dave Palfrey's avatar Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social
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lol by play count it's lower res? (Almost as if there were some uncertainty principle associated with aggregation: you can know the ordinal rank of a piece of music, or you can know what the cover looks like, but not both at once)

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Dave Palfrey's avatar Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social
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Thanks! He was politically conservative, with strong realist distaste for what he felt to be wishful thinking. In a bunch of places he inveighs against "clever-silly" intellectuals who run with half-digested fashionable thought, e.g. anti-theism (via Pavlov, Freud, Marx) or left-wing pacifism.

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Dave Palfrey's avatar Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social
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'War Thoughts in Peace Time'. Originally delivered as the Earl Grey Lecture, at King's College, Newcastle, published as a pamphlet (1931). Reprinted in Religion, Philosophy and Psychical Research: Selected Essays (1953).

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Laura K. Nelson's avatar Laura K. Nelson @lauraknelson.bsky.social
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#BookChallenge

The challenge is to choose 20 books that greatly influenced you. One book per day, for 20 days. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. Join in! 💙📚👀

Day 1

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Dave Palfrey's avatar Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social
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An admirable attempt at reflexivity? Or one which ultimately deforms and refuses reflexivity? Dear reader, you decide.

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Dave Palfrey's avatar Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social
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That is certainly using 'acknowledgements' in an, um, unconventional sense.

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Dave Palfrey's avatar Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social
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"LLMs are even better at 'knowing what they don’t know' than was argued by Kadavath, S. et al. 'Language models (mostly) know what they know' — they just don’t know they know what they don’t know."

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Lisa Wines's avatar Lisa Wines @lisawines.bsky.social
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"It is reported that General Zúñiga is trying to escape the capital of Bolivia in an armored vehicle."

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Dave Palfrey's avatar Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social
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@redstreamnet.bsky.social on the musk site:

BREAKING: Bolivia's union confederation announced indefinite general strike against the coup, effective immediately.

The Central Obrera Boliviana of workers and peasant unions is mobilizing workers and social movements to La Paz to repel the coup.

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Dave Palfrey's avatar Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social
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Def. no evidence that he is providing e.g. direct financial or logistical support (or afaik that he ever did after the 2019 election). But when Musk says he likes something, it has performative illocutionary force (affecting stocks and the like), in a way it doesn't when you and I say what we like.

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Dave Palfrey's avatar Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social
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As to your first point, he expressed himself straightforwardly in 2019. So far the reactions pro and con the coup attempt today make it look as if the alignments on each side are congruent with those of 2019.

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Dave Palfrey's avatar Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social
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Agree with your second point, that we shouldn't attribute too much agency to him just because (1) he likes the limelight, and (2) we happen to be on a social media site (and so over-inclined to imagine social media sites are causally important)

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Dave Palfrey's avatar Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social
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@progintl.bsky.social on the musk site:

BREAKING: 🇧🇴 Bolivia's trade union confederation COB has called for an emergency mass mobilization and a general strike in response to the ongoing coup attempt

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Dave Palfrey's avatar Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social
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Detailed research into neo-nazi use of tech is v. welcome. But MEMRI clearly has its own biases. Not read the full report (only available to members of government, law enforcement, media, academia and subscribers). But disturbing that neither Muslims nor Arabs are listed here as neo-nazi targets:

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Jeremy Noel-Tod's avatar Jeremy Noel-Tod @jntod.bsky.social
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I’ve tried to keep up with the new JH Prynne pamphlets that have been frisbeeing out of Cambridge at alarming speed in recent years. This post marks their appearance next week in a single 700-page volume by starting some reading notes that may never end someflowerssoon.substack.com/p/brim-over

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Dave Palfrey's avatar Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social
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Thank you! I found I couldn't decide where to put the stress when reading the last line's first four words. (At one point, I found myself wanting to re-order: 'And be here still...) Maybe staying with that perplexity of inflection is a useful indecision when reading the whole poem?

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