Author | Lightnews

Max Kreminski @maxkreminski.bsky.social · 8d

lmao

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Max Kreminski @maxkreminski.bsky.social · 9d

i'm kind of a doomer about this too but the x-axis *does* seem to mysteriously end right around the year 2020

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Reposted by Max Kreminski

Carlos Scheidegger @cscheid.net · 11d

This may just be the best CS paper I’ve read this year. Just read the abstract and first para of the intro! The rest of the intro is really wild too, but very very good:

dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

A screenshot of an academic paper. It reads:

Abstract
A "
'quine" is a deterministic program that prints itself. In this essay, I will show you a "gauguine": a probabilistic program that infers itself. A gauguine is repeatedly asked to guess its own source code. Initially, its chances of guessing correctly are of course minuscule. But as the gauguine observes more and more of its own previous guesses, it detects patterns of behavior and gains information about its inner workings.
This information allows it to bootstrap self-knowledge, and ultimately discover its own source code. We will discuss how-and why-we might write a gauguine, and what we stand to learn by constructing one.
CCS Concepts: • Computing methodologies → Philo-sophical/theoretical foundations of artificial intelli-gence; Theory of mind.
Keywords: reflection, probabilistic programming
ACM Reference Format:
Kartik Chandra, Amanda Liu, Jonathan Ragan-Kelley, and Joshua B.
Tenenbaum. 2025. Gauguin, Descartes, Bayes: A Diurnal Golem's Brain. In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software (Onward! '25), October 12-18, 2025, Singapore, Singa-pore. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 9 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/
3759429.3762631

1 A Way of Knowing

From time to time, we all have crises of identity-moments of radical and overwhelming uncertainty about our selves.
I' don't know whether the doubts that seize us can really be externalized in language, but if I were to try, I would express them as questions, questions like: Who am I? What am I?
What kind of person? What kind of mind?

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Max Kreminski @maxkreminski.bsky.social · 19d

i think of these as “target callers” and have been contemplating ways to autodetect them (see thread) bsky.app/profile/maxk...

Max Kreminski @maxkreminski.bsky.social · Dec 29

it's been ~10yrs since the *second* time Kathy Sierra was chased off the web

as always, her harassment was driven by a handful of "target callers": big accounts that pick out targets for a swarm of part-time volunteer harassers

if we want public social media, we have to solve target calling

Micah @rincewind.run · Dec 28

“why isn’t <person I really liked> posting anymore?”

the answer is pretty much always that people tore them to shreds for something they did not remotely deserve being torn to shreds for, and did it over and over until they decided they were happier offline

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Reposted by Max Kreminski

🐔 Brian Bucklew 🐔 ₑͤ＞∿＜ₑͤ ∞🌮 @unormal.bsky.social · 26d

when im forging the thesis: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!!

when it inevitably incubates the antithesis: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.

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Reposted by Max Kreminski

Liz Ryerson @ellaguro.bsky.social · Sep 23

Submissions to the Experimental Games Showcase at GDC are now OPEN through October 24, 2025! Please send us the weird shit you're working on! More info about the session and where to submit can be found on our NEW website here www.experimentalgamesshowcase.com

Experimental Games Showcase

SUBMIT YOUR GAME TO THE

www.experimentalgamesshowcase.com

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Max Kreminski @maxkreminski.bsky.social · Sep 5

ya i’ve only gone a couple times but it’s so huge that i mostly just find it draining

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Max Kreminski @maxkreminski.bsky.social · Sep 3

🫡🤠

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Max Kreminski @maxkreminski.bsky.social · Sep 3

tempted but not sure, soooo much travel coming up this fall. UIST + Portland + Northwestern for sure, plus maybe COLM EMNLP AIIDE NeurIPS. hbu

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Max Kreminski @maxkreminski.bsky.social · Sep 2

wait this is kinda profound tho. a trace of the true self remains in the false self

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Max Kreminski @maxkreminski.bsky.social · Sep 2

howdy

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Reposted by Max Kreminski

Alex Calderwood @xenoscope.bsky.social · Aug 19

A anti-correcting spellcheck? Work in progress

#vispo #autocorrect #spellcheck #texteditors

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Reposted by Max Kreminski

Hidden Door @hiddendoor.co · Aug 13

We’re launching early access 🔥today🔥!

Hidden Door is where roleplaying meets fanfic. Rise from the beyond to wreak vengeance in The Crow, go rivals-to-lovers in Pride & Prejudice, lean into after-dark vibes with Courtship & Crimson, and so many more!

Blog | Introducing Early Access · Hidden Door

We love stories! Books, movies, TV shows, comics, games: we love them all. But the thing about them is, well, they end—and when it’s over, it’s over. But what if you want to hold onto the magical feeling of that world? That experience of reliving the

www.hiddendoor.co

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Max Kreminski @maxkreminski.bsky.social · Aug 13

yeah, the currently online version is correct as of the last time i checked! didn't see that correction language tho, points for internal consistency i guess

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Max Kreminski @maxkreminski.bsky.social · Aug 12

i’m biased bc Noah was one of my phd advisors, but i still think his take on “alternative”, “expansive”, and “inventive” approaches to relating mechanics and meaning (from How Pac-Man Eats) provides a good theoretical framework for addressing these questions manchestergamecentre.org/blog-db/2021...

How Pac-Man Eats (book review) — Manchester Game Centre

In this blog post, Man Met Game Centre member Rob Gallagher reviews How Pac-Man Eats by Noah Wardrip-Fruin.

manchestergamecentre.org

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Max Kreminski @maxkreminski.bsky.social · Aug 8

what provokes that kind of reflection, though, seems really hard to predict. so it's very unclear to me that this particular mode of engagement will reliably push people more in one direction than the other, especially when you change the framing around the basic interaction

Max Kreminski @maxkreminski.bsky.social · Aug 8

i think it also depends on whether we stop at "wow, cool!" or actually start reflecting on how the experience of the riff relates to that of the original work. the Nighthawks instance was presented as "wow, cool" but it got *me* thinking about the scene from literal angles i hadn't considered before

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Max Kreminski @maxkreminski.bsky.social · Aug 8

as an artist i’d much rather a world where people are making all kinds of stupid riffs on my work a few decades or centuries or millennia from now… than a world where people have Figured Out The Meaning + stopped really engaging with it

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Max Kreminski @maxkreminski.bsky.social · Aug 8

this is why i tend to think of it as good to get people *playing* with art by whatever means. mere defamiliarization of the monumental is sometimes enough to revive the meaning-making process around a work previously thought to be Fully Understood & thus interpretively ~dead

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Max Kreminski @maxkreminski.bsky.social · Aug 8

obviously not all riffs on monuments are equally good or interesting – a riff that serves only to reinforce the original received meaning of the work, for instance, might do little of note. but even *careless* riffs can serve to get the blood pumping again through a monument’s calcified veins

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Max Kreminski @maxkreminski.bsky.social · Aug 8

one thing i’ve always appreciated about artists as a group is their irreverence. art history is full of explicit challenges to the monumentality of past monuments; when artists play around with or riff on monuments, they paradoxically *reinvigorate* these monuments, imbuing them with new life

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Max Kreminski @maxkreminski.bsky.social · Aug 8

but a monument can also be *pulled down*, back to the level of a document – for instance if we examine its specifics closely, discard or challenge the fixed interpretation of its meaning, open a new chapter in its interpretive history. this is a core activity of humanistic research

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Max Kreminski @maxkreminski.bsky.social · Aug 8

a document that is sufficiently widely circulated & debated tends to *calcify*: an interpretive consensus develops around its meaning & we start referring in our discussions to this interpretation of the work rather than the original work directly. it becomes a monument

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Max Kreminski @maxkreminski.bsky.social · Aug 8

you’ll never read most documents, but if you *do* read one it’s likely that no one will have yet told you what it means. a document is interpretively alive but consequently vulnerable to obscurity in death

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