Jeffrey M. Binder

Going to be talking about my book at the Society for the History of Technology conference on Thursday—come by if you're (virtually) attending! press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

Speaking of @shothisttech.bsky.social, the #SHOT2026 conference program is now online! We're all virtual this year, and there are lots of great panels, including a session I'm moderating w/Jennifer Alexander on the future of #histtech publishing. www.historyoftechnology.org/wp-content/u... 🗃️📜⚙️

My book, Language and the Rise of the Algorithm, will be coming out in paperback this winter! Check it out if you'd like a historical perspective—a long one, going back to the 1500s and earlier—about the current tensions surrounding AI. press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

Saying that LLMs “just predict the next word” isn’t the deflation people think, because it puts all the weight on “just.” It’s hard to place limits on what sorts of knowledge and inferential capability might be relevant to next-word prediction.

Bandcamp Friday again, and this time I have a new batch of analogue/modular synth drones: circlesofproportion.bandcamp.com/album/nine-f...

One trend I've noticed in industry is a desire to make systems "deterministic." This word seems to be straying from its computer-science definition into epistemic virtue territory, getting conflated with accuracy or certainty. Not exactly a reaction against AI, but a sort of footing readjustment.

It’s Bandcamp Friday, a good day to point out that I released some weird synth music circlesofproportion.bandcamp.com/album/prelim...

New publication alert! I contributed a chapter to the book Dis/Trusting the Digital World in Imaginative Literature (@edinburghup.bsky.social). My chapter touches on Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” the Mechanical Turk hoax, and Charles Babbage's approach to establishing trust in machines.

New publication alert! I contributed a chapter to the book Dis/Trusting the Digital World in Imaginative Literature (@edinburghup.bsky.social). My chapter touches on Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” the Mechanical Turk hoax, and Charles Babbage's approach to establishing trust in machines.

A problem with "LLMs are just autocomplete" as a means of explanation is that what autocomplete is doing—in terms of both objective and mechanism—is far from straightforward or widely understood. The analogy effectively amounts to explaining one black box by another black box.

German word for the special anxiety one feels when interacting with the Phone app, where one wrong tap could result in accidentally calling someone

RIP Sonny Rollins! My favorite musician and a genius. Time to spin St. Thomas.

It’s Bandcamp Friday, a good day to point out that I released some weird synth music circlesofproportion.bandcamp.com/album/prelim...

This is your annual reminder that Sun Ra made a Christmas song www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEpF...

In 2021, I developed PromptArray, which lets you muck around with the internals of GPT models. I moved on because this method doesn't work with closed-source models like GPT-3, but GPT-OSS makes it possible again. Read if you miss the weirdness of the GPT-2 era! jeffreymbinder.net?p=480

“Large language models like ChatGPT produce shallow, unoriginal ‘predictive text-y ideas’ and I worry that my students and others will increasingly believe that that’s okay—that there’s nothing better than that to aspire to.”

Is it possible for numbers to get too big? We’ll tell you about a shocking new development, after this.

My book made it to the Chicago Manual of Style! I don't know how I'm going to top this.

If you see this, quote skeet with a famous landmark you’ve seen.

Thinking of the time when I bought two CDs from a stand at the WFMU record fair—"Momentum" by Monolake and "Jonathan Sings!" by Jonathan Richman—and the seller seemed to have trouble comprehending that the same person could want both of these albums.

Got the Elden Ring DLC—and just like that, my acid reflux is back

One thing I didn’t anticipate in my book is the sudden schism between “machine learning” and “AI” as professional affinities. Not only stuff like XGBoost, but even BERT-style transformers are now called “classical machine learning” by people into prompt engineering, RAG, etc.

If you see this, post something orange.

Google AI summaries are still not appearing for me, even though I went into "Search Labs" and enabled the feature. Am I blacklisted as a known nitpicker?

post a *perfect* album from the 90s that isn’t nirvana, pearl jam, soundgarden, or alice in chains

People, one week left before the ACH2024 proposal due!

I couldn’t see the aurora from where I am, but at least I got to witness windows95man

New Homespring command just dropped www.nytimes.com/2024/04/03/u...

A hell of a way to start a book

We don’t talk enough about how Duolingo, as an attempt to undo the confusion of tongues that mankind was cursed with for building the Tower of Babel, is an affront to God

Now I’m feeling like a real Bluesky elder, even though I didn’t join until the Age of Alf.

My book Language and the Rise of the Algorithm was recently featured in the LSE Review of Books: blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofb...