Nick Seaver

sovereignty alert

it was pretty fun, though I think a couple other areas might have more tightly fit with my actual diss project!

1. Number
2. Classification
3. Anthropology of Computing

(first one resulted from me telling my advisor that I wanted to do one on quantification, and he said, "no... number." "Numbers?" "No, number." And that was how I taught myself some basic philosophy of math.)

so wild to see this in that format, looks great though

I would not have guessed dice towers were this old

Okay as a longtime user of obsidian and hater of the file explorer, the plugin that finally made it work like I expect is Notebook Navigator. (Which is quickly becoming an everything plugin, worryingly, but that’s the way of these things.)

"MOLON LABE" styled like the dunkin donuts logo

sorry for the cursed image, but

so Important

“Technology” has a long and problematized relationship with progress, efficiency, and efficacy. Sleek trains rushing through the countryside, the blinding reach of the electrical grid, or the instantaneous messages of networked communication are its shiny avatars. Contraptions, by contrast, are technical devices that barely work. They seem too complex, too circuitous, too labor intensive. They are frequently ad hoc—as unrepeatable and unreliable as Rube Goldberg’s fantastical machines. They push the received wisdom about technology’s defining features to the limit. Like the aesthetic “gimmick” theorized by Sianne Ngai, the contraption is a category charged with normative judgment. Contraptions may work, but they don’t work right. While the contraption is commonly associated with vernacular or retrograde alternatives to high technology, many “high tech” devices reveal a contraption-like character on close inspection: AI chatbots, internet protocols, and helicopters come to seem both over- and under-engineered the more attention is paid to them. This session invites STS scholars to think with the figure of the contraption: What alternatives to popular ideas about technology do these complicated and unruly objects offer? What is it about the present moment that pushes the contraption back into public thought? How does the normativity of contraption judgments manifest in everyday life? How do people come to perceive and evaluate technical complexity in social life? Work in this area may draw on theories of gimmicks, hacks, kludges, workarounds, tricks, bricolage, and other complex or informal technical activities.

STS folks, I'm organizing an open panel on CONTRAPTIONS for 4S this year, following up on a lovely panel at last year's AAA meetings. You should submit something if you got it! www.4sonline.org/accepted_ope...

and like LLMs it would work better if people were more judicious about managing context

the best part is that it’s usually both like and about LLMs

watching people have arguments on here is slowly breaking my brain, the amount of argument-shaped things that don’t make any sense at all, it’s like a psyop

When we talk about Baby Boomers not getting off the stage: In 1997, the US president was born in 1946.

In 2007, the US president was born in 1946.

In 2017, the US president was born in 1946.

And next year in 2027? The US president will have been born in 1946.

or even anthropological literature on “persons”! (I do worry a little that critiques of anthropomorphism are like critiques of “bad” metaphors in computing, which sometimes reduce to hostility to the idea of metaphor in the first place)

attention to detail

the title screen for GODZILLA VS MEGAGUIRUS

good evening

I’ve had conversations with anthropologists and am reading the literature for fun, but nothing serious. (yet? still have three more to go before we’ve seen all of the godzilla ones)

robert eggers direct a kaiju movie

Claude code can write shortcuts if you give it some to look at, though it’s a little balky.

you're on a panel with a former undergrad student of mine!

firstmonday.org/ojs/index.ph...

Current weather conditions, Somerville MA near Porter square. Cc @weatherishappening.com

only this couch! trying to avoid the fate of the other couch, which has holes in it from digging 😭

a very stern-looking greyhound, wearing a charming blue sweater and sitting up on the ground next to a couch with pillows arranged on it defensively

the face of someone who's very mad she's not allowed on the couch

yes! we already have things to teach! we have phds in them! they are the whole point of this enterprise!

a black framed pencil drawing on cream paper, of a pair of small pencil squiggles, with some illegible lettering along the bottom

a closeup of two pencil squiggles

in my stairway at home, I have a drawing of this performance! (by Morgan O'Hara, who does these "live transmission" sketches of people's body movements)

I'm not going to go to bat for AI overviews, but this quote from the article is just fantasizing. "it usually worked well" and you "had a good chance of clicking through to a credible health website"? Did a pro-ana website write this?

"excuse me sir, there must be some mistake- i voted to create the camps, not live in the zone of interest" is like every trump voter

Long Beach excellence!!

Sounding Human An expansive analysis of the relationship between human and machine in music.   From the mid-eighteenth century on, there was a logic at work in musical discourse and practice: human or machine. That ...

Basically immediately! More on this in @deirdrelough.bsky.social’s book: press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...