Celine Nguyen > Recent Status Updates

extremely invigorating, also intellectually quite challenging to read—some very good synopses of everything from Saussure’s structuralism (which, Weatherby argues, is one of the best models the cultural humanities have for understanding how LLMs actually work)…

to the history of symbolic versus statistical AI paths (which may be overly dichotomized, in Weatherby’s view)…

really good but so dense!!

life-changing footnote on page 143 (it’s the one commenting on the parable about whether it’s possible for a person to understand the happiness of fish, and more generally if one’s own subjectivity/perspective makes it possible to understand other people’s perspectives)

the passages dragging Confucius and denigrating him in comparison to Lao Dan are very funny, as is chapter 10 (if this were published as a contemporary essay, the title would probably be ‘Against Sages’ or ‘Against the Pursuit of Wisdom’)

I know this seems like an embarrassingly minute update, but I did make it past the (thoroughly entertaining and poetically written) 37 pages of translator’s notes

very excited about this book, which explores the history of interactive computer interfaces & the rise of object oriented programming as the dominant paradigm through an unusual lens—the history of computer graphics research, especially the work based out of the University of Utah

(and interesting to think about how under-discussed Utah is when it comes to computing history!)

Finished part 1 (‘Commodities and Money’) ✌️ I can finally make jokes about commodity fetishism and the proverbial 20 yards of linen