What We Talk About When We Talk About Anything: A Sketch of a Philosophy of Language.

But being exposed at 14 to the idea, “the people who exercise power over you can be loudly and confidently incorrect,” actually had a strong effect on who I am today. It’s encouraged me to admit when I make mistakes in class, and it’s encouraged me to think critically about the information I’m presented with. But I think this is also the genesis of a fairly important idea for me, but not for the above reasons. You see, it’s also where I discovered that being correct or incorrect doesn’t always matter.

Analysis, Written by: CameronCameron SummersOctober 2, 2024Language, Analysis, TeachingComment

The Decompositive Move (Contraslop, Part 3)

LLMs are among other things predicated on an atomistic logic of language. Because they simply work by predicting the next symbol in a sequence based on a large repository of statistical data, they cannot actually create a functional top-level structure except incidentally.

Written by: Cameron, AnalysisCameron SummersJuly 24, 2024Large Language Models, Teaching, AnalysisComment

Eerie Theodicy: On Townes Van Zandt’s “Lungs”

I first encountered the song “Lungs” by Townes Van Zandt about a decade ago. It’s the musical sting at the end of the seventh episode of the first season of HBO’s True Detective, a show we watch annually in the spring. It seems to have little to do with the content of the scene, but the vibe is immaculate.

The Pressure Cooker

If you don’t have the ability to bleed off excess pressure – if you don’t have that safety valve, if the exhaust can’t escape from the gas engine, whatever – then what you have is a very different machine: a bomb.

Eternal Return: Nostalgia, Education, and Coming Back to Persona 3

I’ve been connected to the Sony gaming ecosystem for quite a while, and up until the PS4, they were fairly committed to backwards compatibility. As a result, I’ve had the good fortune of being able to revisit these older games when I want to play something but don’t have the funds to engage with something new. As such, the game is still fairly fresh in my mind, despite the fact that it is old enough to buy cigarettes in some municipalities.

Gaming, Written by: Cameron, AnalysisCameron SummersFebruary 28, 2024Persona series, Atlus, Hiroki Azuma, Persona 3, NostalgiaComment