Lachlan Kermode
@ohrg.org
PhD Candidate at Brown University / software at https://liminal-lab.org/. Freeing computers one terminal at a time.
The trick is to first migrate some code into nix to create such a problem.
November 27, 2025 at 3:24 AM
The trick is to first migrate some code into nix to create such a problem.
But unpublished position papers are banned from Pandemonium??! This is bound to cause an uproar, the procedural gall of it
November 25, 2025 at 7:01 PM
But unpublished position papers are banned from Pandemonium??! This is bound to cause an uproar, the procedural gall of it
He's got a boss of a personal bibilography / CV managed in Forester, too
Works of Jon Sterling
www.jonmsterling.com
November 23, 2025 at 2:18 AM
He's got a boss of a personal bibilography / CV managed in Forester, too
You also have to install it with opam, which is a red flag for usability if there ever was one. (`ghc-pkg` would be redder, but Ocaml is still pretty niche.) It also uses an undocumented potpourri of LaTeX/Markdown as its markup language. Which is a shame, because Jon's digital garden is awesome!
www.forester-notes.org
November 23, 2025 at 2:12 AM
You also have to install it with opam, which is a red flag for usability if there ever was one. (`ghc-pkg` would be redder, but Ocaml is still pretty niche.) It also uses an undocumented potpourri of LaTeX/Markdown as its markup language. Which is a shame, because Jon's digital garden is awesome!
Forester, the tool that this author, Jon Sterling, maintains and uses for his site seems powerful but not exactly easy. (The Zettelkasten styling and linking is confusing for anyone who hasn't spent some time with that system.)
www.forester-notes.org
November 23, 2025 at 1:59 AM
Forester, the tool that this author, Jon Sterling, maintains and uses for his site seems powerful but not exactly easy. (The Zettelkasten styling and linking is confusing for anyone who hasn't spent some time with that system.)
The safe option is to always call an antipodean a Kiwi. Kiwis will be chuffed you didn't misidentify them as an Australian, and Australians will be chuffed you thought they seemed nice enough to be a Kiwi.
November 23, 2025 at 1:45 AM
The safe option is to always call an antipodean a Kiwi. Kiwis will be chuffed you didn't misidentify them as an Australian, and Australians will be chuffed you thought they seemed nice enough to be a Kiwi.
retroactively make it count for the h-index
November 21, 2025 at 11:02 PM
retroactively make it count for the h-index
This is a great piece! I propose 'The Red Team' as the name for a new journal dedicated to literary interpretation of language models that will publish pieces like this.
November 21, 2025 at 11:01 PM
This is a great piece! I propose 'The Red Team' as the name for a new journal dedicated to literary interpretation of language models that will publish pieces like this.
You might know NZ's premier defense tech startup is called "Auror." (Embittered by the international community's essentializing of our national culture as reducible to what they saw in the LOTR films, we elect to fantasize about surveillance through British teenage fiction instead.)
November 19, 2025 at 1:37 AM
You might know NZ's premier defense tech startup is called "Auror." (Embittered by the international community's essentializing of our national culture as reducible to what they saw in the LOTR films, we elect to fantasize about surveillance through British teenage fiction instead.)
Obviously ghostly/ghastly objecthood doesn't do it justice, but there's something of its ring.
November 11, 2025 at 5:21 PM
Obviously ghostly/ghastly objecthood doesn't do it justice, but there's something of its ring.
Objectivity feels too colloquial and not as ghastly and frightening as objecthood, like Gegenständlichkeit or gespentige Geganständlichkeit (hear the grinding of the hard Gs and Ks against the SHs like a subject made automatic)
November 11, 2025 at 5:20 PM
Objectivity feels too colloquial and not as ghastly and frightening as objecthood, like Gegenständlichkeit or gespentige Geganständlichkeit (hear the grinding of the hard Gs and Ks against the SHs like a subject made automatic)
So objecthood evokes something like 'the social memory of being an object', which captures both the pastness of it as a process (having already become general) and something the Lukacsian thingnessiness of it as objectified (in the Hegelian sense).
November 11, 2025 at 5:17 PM
So objecthood evokes something like 'the social memory of being an object', which captures both the pastness of it as a process (having already become general) and something the Lukacsian thingnessiness of it as objectified (in the Hegelian sense).
For me it's that 'subject-become-substance' that objecthood manages to capture in English. Other -hood words---childhood, brotherhood, likelihood---are all socialized generalities of a singular attribution or process.
November 11, 2025 at 5:15 PM
For me it's that 'subject-become-substance' that objecthood manages to capture in English. Other -hood words---childhood, brotherhood, likelihood---are all socialized generalities of a singular attribution or process.
Isn't Gegenständlichkeit also 'tautological', though, and that's the point? It's an object-become-adverbial ("-lich-") and then ossified back to a noun with "-keit"
November 11, 2025 at 3:54 PM
Isn't Gegenständlichkeit also 'tautological', though, and that's the point? It's an object-become-adverbial ("-lich-") and then ossified back to a noun with "-keit"
It's true, I should have been more precise: a (very minor) gripe with the inescapability claim, but no contestation at all of the garbage and bloated thesis.
November 10, 2025 at 6:39 PM
It's true, I should have been more precise: a (very minor) gripe with the inescapability claim, but no contestation at all of the garbage and bloated thesis.
Agree, that's why I included an archiving process. The dead links could be made to point to the archived PDFs in the centralized hosting.
November 10, 2025 at 6:19 PM
Agree, that's why I included an archiving process. The dead links could be made to point to the archived PDFs in the centralized hosting.
Links to PDFs on personal sites, plus some kind of regular pruning of dead links / a web archiving process?
November 10, 2025 at 5:49 PM
Links to PDFs on personal sites, plus some kind of regular pruning of dead links / a web archiving process?
Minor gripe on the Overleaf point---Typst is now a legitimate and saner alternative (though without as much steam / popularity and so potentially not socially viable in many cases)
November 10, 2025 at 5:43 PM
Minor gripe on the Overleaf point---Typst is now a legitimate and saner alternative (though without as much steam / popularity and so potentially not socially viable in many cases)
Looks an absolute banger! Can't wait to read
November 2, 2025 at 12:14 PM
Looks an absolute banger! Can't wait to read
There's a GPT for that. Drop me a term sheet with a healthy slur of zeroes on it and I'll have something that won't solve your problem in approximately 10 years
October 29, 2025 at 8:35 PM
There's a GPT for that. Drop me a term sheet with a healthy slur of zeroes on it and I'll have something that won't solve your problem in approximately 10 years