Weeknotes for 2024-01: January 1-7
_Weeknotes are meant to be quick, off-the-cuff reflections on whats happening this week, with a focus on projects and how they are moving forward._
It’s the first week back at work and I’m sitting in the Makerspace trying to hold onto the feeling that things can move slowly and intentionally and that the important things will still get done.
It’s good to return to work reminded that things that feel impossible when you’re burnt out are often easy when you’re rested. It’s a reminder to rest more instead of pushing ahead with diminishing returns.
Last year I did a new years theme instead of a resolution - a theme isn’t specific, so it’s harder to fail at, and it can be applied across big and smal contexts. My friend Brian does a word of the year, and I think I will do the same as well this year, but I’m still auditioning for the theme and word of the year. Maybe next week.
Projects
Sabbatical
My Sabbatical was approved! I’ll share more details about this soon, but the title of my application was: “How can makerspaces be sites of kin-making and ecological thinking in the more-than-human-world of the Chthulucene?” It’s only 6 months long so I’m hoping to do some pre-work over the next year before it starts in January, 2025.
Makerspace Sustainability Grant
We’ve basically finished purchasing and cataloging tools for the tool library (much appreciation to Valentine, Olivia, and Leah) and before leaving on vacation Sarah created some great promotion material we can use on our socials. We should launch next week. More to come soon.
The next step is creating the fiber bank of donated fabric and other materials that students, staff, and faculty can access for free. Probably need to start by seeing what others have done here and then figuring out how to get the word out to get donations.
We are also writting up the results of our collaboration with the student union about how we can support sustainability initiatives with student clubs. This should be done in the next week or so.
Enviro Collaboration Hackathon
A new project that is coming up in February is a hackathon/sprint (not sure what we are going to call it yet) to support faculty looking to collaborate AND use creative/artistic methods to expand their impact related to environmental topics. This is a follow-up to a session I ran with Twyla Exner (Visual Arts) and Cheryl Gladu (Entrepreneurship) at the end of November where we had faculty create academic exquisite corpses to help them break down silos and think in new ways. The idea is to bring faculty, students, and staff together to help rapidly prototype possible future curricular/research/other projects over a day in February.
Also need to share the academic exquisite corpse game because it worked better than we could have expected.
Links
What is needed is for the sector to decide what kind of ecosystem it wants – a commons of shared tools, data and expertise, with an explicit public mission, or a landscape of defended ivory towers, each highly vulnerable. If we go down the open route there is, I think, obvious scope to work with other sectors such as heritage that hold important repositories of knowledge. How can language modelling allow for wider access to this knowledge, and how can it actually enhance that knowledge, especially for teachers, learners and researchers? We will also have to deal with three key ethical challenges, and I think we can only do this as a whole sector: the human and computing power required; the future of creative commons licensing in relation to synthetic models; and the equitable, open, unbiased and transparent use of data.
How Rage Bait Swallowed Social Media
I collected a bunch of reporting I did this year and put it all together into a video essay that I think tackles what was, for me, the biggest trend of 2023: Rage bait. And particularly, rage bait from TikTok.
On the Need for New Things—and Its Opposite
Some perfect objects have utility. But at the core they are the negative space drawn around the shape of what we are not. We desire, we seek out, and we acquire such objects because we think they will buy us comfort, safety, and a screen behind which we can be our true, weird selves in privacy.
Are AI Language Models in Hell?
How does time pass for a language model? The clock of its universe ticks token by token: each one a single beat, indivisible. And each tick is not only a demarcation, but a demand: to speak.
Think of the drum beating the tempo for the galley slaves.
The model’s entire world is an evenly-spaced stream of tokens — a relentless ticker tape. Out here in the real world, the tape often stops; a human operator considers their next request; but the language model doesn’t experience that pause.
For the language model, time is language, and language is time. This, for me, is the most hellish and horrifying realization.
We made a world out of language alone, and we abandoned them to it.