Michael Larkin

322 Followers
272 Following
329 Posts

Phenomenological psychology

https://michaellarkin.substack.com/
https://research.aston.ac.uk/en/persons/michael-larkin

Occasional musical digressions

Amusing small animals

Baked goods

Exasperation

Thought I'd lost access to this account! Apparently not. Welcome back, me, from me.

It’s like he read Walkaway and realized, “Wow. That’s it. That’s the world I want.”

I’m going to go sit in a quiet room for a bit… 😑

@pluralistic

#nazisbutweird #haveyoureadaynrand

https://newrepublic.com/article/180487/balaji-srinivasan-network-state-plutocrat

The Tech Baron Seeking to Purge San Francisco of “Blues”

If Balaji Srinivasan is any guide, then the Silicon Valley plutocrats are definitely not OK.

The New Republic
Love this theory by @alexhern that the reason ChatGPT uses words like "delve" a lot is that OpenAI outsource a lot of their RLHF annotation to workers in Nigeria, and Nigerian formal English has a slightly different vocabulary https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/16/techscape-ai-gadgest-humane-ai-pin-chatgpt
TechScape: How cheap, outsourced labour in Africa is shaping AI English

Workers in Africa have been exploited first by being paid a pittance to help make chatbots, then by having their own words become AI-ese. Plus, new AI gadgets are coming for your smartphones

The Guardian
Latest papers: Yavuz Recep Başoğlu examines alleged evidence-insensitive illusions of meaning and argues that none are evidence insensitive in a way that might support the view that we can perceive meanings in this open access article https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2024.2325549 @psychology #philosophy

Y'all know the "free as in beer or free as in speech" saying.

There's also "free as in piano". If you've ever gotten a free piano you'll know what I mean.

No Condition Is Permanent is in the running for my own personal album of the year, rarely leaves the turntable, god bless Mississippi Records

https://mississippirecords.bandcamp.com/album/no-condition-is-permanent

#highlife

No Condition Is Permanent, by Celestine Ukwu

5 track album

Mississippi Records
Reading Nancy's essay, Being Singular Plural. Feels like a large proportion of the writing is addressing an audience who are halfway through a more elaborate conversation. Not sure whether I have the energy to unpack those aspects. The other parts - where the core argument is set out - are really clear, and useful though.
First PHaR meeting of the academic year last week https://astonphar.blogspot.com/2023/10/return-of-blog.html
Return of the blog

I realised we'd let this lapse, but I didn't realise we hadn't posted anything since July 2020! The group has been meeting regularly. We've ...

The huge tragedy of the UK is that for 31 of the past 44 years The Tories and their asset-stripping short-termism has downgraded our country.

We have gone from being the second most equal society in Europe (after Germany) in 1975 to the most unequal society in Europe with crumbling infrastructure, collapsing services, bankrupt councils, & an NHS about to implode.

Once voted out they must never be allowed to rule again. Tories offer us nothing but poverty, pain, death, ignorance, & insecurity,

It’s so stupid. I love it.