Notes
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when you think about it, all music is psychedelic music.
if it’s not, you’re not trying hard enough.
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🔖 TIFA: Text-to-Image Faithfulness Evaluation with Question Answering –
TIFA uses a language model (LM), a question answering (QA) model, and a visual question answering (VQA) model. Given a text input, we generate several question-answer pairs with the LM and then filter them via the QA model. To evaluate the faithfulness of a synthesized image to the text input, a VQA model answers these visual questions using the image, and we check the answers for correctness.
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🔖 Caspian Vale – "The Entropic Self" –
The Entropic Self, in this context, represents a departure from the humanist ideal of a stable, autonomous, and rational subject, and an embrace of the fluid, fragmented, and distributed nature of human subjectivity in the age of AI.
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after changing jobs to a workplace where it’s not widely used, i’ve rediscovered the joy of email. i also credit this to the start of the ephronathon, which led me to watch YOU’VE GOT MAIL (1998) and re-read Hanif Abdurraqib’s essay about it.
while i like pithy communication for some things, sometimes deeper thoughts need a broader expression of one’s own voice. a turn of phrase that feels wasteful in a text message no longer has the pressure of economy and parsimony. in an e-pistle, i can let the real me come out ever so slightly. i don’t worry if closing a message with “best” is passive-aggressive; i don’t fret about miniscule things. the power is in the whole: header, body, attachments.
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🔖 Caitlin Berrigan, "Kinship is Anarchy" –
This is the practice of being-with the kinships we do not choose—human and more-than-human. This is the practice of living inside of contradiction and contamination.
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🔖 Hydra – Livecodeing networked visuals in the browser –
I somehow missed this when it dropped. There’s a new microgrants program, too.
Reminds me a lot of Cracked by Bill Orcutt.
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🔖 Matt Schellhas, "Your Team Doesn't Need Eleven Goalies" –
At the core of it, this framing makes it clear — I build my teams to the benefit of the team.
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I have a principled stance on incorporating information about gender in structured data: I do not think it should be added without a person’s permission, or without considering how the person would want it presented. I strongly believe that Wikidata’s P21 (sex or gender) property is a property that may violate the privacy of living people. One of my deepest frustrations about this in Wikidata is the prevalence of people and bots that add P21 statements by making strong assumptions based on a person’s given name. I have written and presented a lot about knowledge organization, autonomy, and liberation, and as such, I ask you to respect my privacy and not include this information.
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I’m hiring for a mid- to senior-level software developer to join our team at Stanford Libraries. We’re very remote-friendly, and we have great colleagues. Apply by August 19 for earliest consideration!