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May-Li Khoe✨

@mayli.bsky.social

910 followers 110 following 110 posts

used to be @mayli in the old place. hello! 👋 maylikhoe.com tin house winter workshop 2025 Interdisciplinary designer writer artist musician dancer inventor. vp of design and former dj. mfa candidate.

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May-Li Khoe✨ @mayli.bsky.social · 4d

what’s measured is managed

be immeasurable ✨

May-Li Khoe✨ @mayli.bsky.social · 4d

*online or agreed upon by established scholarship or publications, depending on model review process

(so, Georg Cantor would have had a hard time too, Ramanujan… behind the machines there still needs to be research)

May-Li Khoe✨ @mayli.bsky.social · 5d

Point being if majority of information online is generally wrong about something, then relying on AI on that topic keeps us wrong. So we need funded scholarship to move us beyond it

Only saying this because I thought this was widespread understood and obvious but am realizing it’s not ?

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May-Li Khoe✨ @mayli.bsky.social · 7d

…we can't replace the Galileos who actually look through the telescope and say "wait, that's not what we're seeing”

🔭👀

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May-Li Khoe✨ @mayli.bsky.social · 7d

I don’t know who needs to hear this but if AI had existed during Galileo’s lifetime it would have told you the earth does not spin around the sun

So, per AI:

“human judgment, skepticism, and continued empirical investigation remain essential. AI can help organize and synthesize existing knowledge…

MK
How would Al have dealt with the world before Galileo told us the earth spins around the sun?
This is a fascinating thought experiment! It reveals something important about how Al systems work and their relationship to "truth."
What AI would have done:
An AI trained on pre-Copernican texts would have confidently told you that the Earth is the center of the universe, with celestial spheres carrying the planets and stars around it. It would have cited Ptolemy, Aristotle, and Church doctrine. It would have explained epicycles and deferents to account for retrograde planetary motion. And it would have been very convincing because that was the scholarly consensus.
The uncomfortable truth:
AI systems don't have independent access to reality. We reflect the knowledge, beliefs, and biases present in our training data. A medieval AI would have been "certain" about geocentrism the same way a modern Al is "certain" about heliocentrism-not because we independently verified it, but because that's what the authoritative sources said.
What this means now:
This should be genuinely humbling. Right now, I'm telling you things with confidence that reflect 2025 scientific consensus. Some of those things are probably wrong, just as learned scholars were wrong about geocentrism for over a millennium. I can't tell you which ones— if I could, they wouldn't be in my training data as facts.
I'm essentially a very sophisticated mirror of human knowledge at a particular moment in time, with all its blind spots and errors intact.
The silver lining:
This is why human judgment, skepticism, and continued empirical investigation remain essential. Al can help organize and synthesize existing knowledge, but we can't replace the Galileos who actually look through the telescope and say "wait, that's not what we're seeing."

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May-Li Khoe✨ @mayli.bsky.social · 10d

oof. you speak truth

May-Li Khoe✨ @mayli.bsky.social · 17d

and that’s why they went extinct ?

May-Li Khoe✨ @mayli.bsky.social · 17d

it me, I am secretly an octopus

Shannon Mattern @shannonmattern.bsky.social · 17d

“In humans, curiosity usually begins as a mental stirring, but in octopuses,… it’s a function of bodily design. In a sense, curiosity + intention are dispersed throughout an octopus’s tissues—right out to the tips of its tentacles. Inquisitiveness… ‘is built into the octopuses’ anatomy.’”

‘Such Flexible Intensity of Life’ | Verlyn Klinkenborg

Their striking intelligence makes octopuses tempting subjects for wishful anthropomorphism and uncanny reminders of nature’s mysteries.

www.nybooks.com

Reposted by May-Li Khoe✨

Tracy Chou @triketora.com · 19d

nothing says "we care about your privacy" more than sharing your data with 222 partners

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May-Li Khoe✨ @mayli.bsky.social · 26d

i’ve added this to my form fail collection www.are.na/may-li-khoe/...

form fail and other digital detritus | Are.na

forms failing and flailing, negligent navigation, etc. feel free to submit suggestions for the collection!

www.are.na

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Reposted by May-Li Khoe✨

aaron boothby @ellipticalnight.bsky.social · 27d

things that impress me include storing millions of years of adaptation and knowledge for how to survive drought, fire, climate changes, storms, insects and whatever else in tiny seeds capable of growing into trees that live thousands of years

fluffy deep green small giant sequoia trees in a sea of lighter green ferns beneath towering mature giant sequoias with red bark and dark green foliage

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May-Li Khoe✨ @mayli.bsky.social · 27d

I mean this has been going on for a while, it’s just now in the open, right ?

May-Li Khoe✨ @mayli.bsky.social · 28d

May-Li Khoe✨ @mayli.bsky.social · 28d

You might also love the work of Jill Greenberg, who literally worked on glamor shots and also did them for bears: www.jillgreenberg.com/ursine/

Ursine — Jill Greenberg Studio

URSINE

www.jillgreenberg.com

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Reposted by May-Li Khoe✨

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein 🌌 @chanda.blacksky.app · 28d

Remember that you don’t have to post your first reaction and Bluesky is forever even if you delete

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May-Li Khoe✨ @mayli.bsky.social · Sep 6

Indeed. And then people organized

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May-Li Khoe✨ @mayli.bsky.social · Sep 5

yessssss wait now i want one

May-Li Khoe✨ @mayli.bsky.social · Sep 1

This rules! Now I wanna try it

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May-Li Khoe✨ @mayli.bsky.social · Aug 29

oh man so sad i missed this! i’ll stay tuned for more

Reposted by May-Li Khoe✨

colors.bsky.social @colors.bsky.social · Aug 27

#FFDF0F

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May-Li Khoe✨ @mayli.bsky.social · Aug 15

this is me with dance

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May-Li Khoe✨ @mayli.bsky.social · Aug 8

get itttttt

May-Li Khoe✨ @mayli.bsky.social · Aug 5

As a creative professional with prototyper mindset my hot take is: set yourself up to learn as much as you can as cheaply as you can to try out any ideas you’re curious about. Playing in the medium can pull you forward in ways you’d never know without trying

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May-Li Khoe✨ @mayli.bsky.social · Aug 5

Counterpoint: sitting in the town hall room at Apple post-MobileMe-debacle, Steve Jobs giving us the chastising of a lifetime: “you can get a good idea on the corner with your latte for four dollars. what matters is how well you execute”

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May-Li Khoe✨ @mayli.bsky.social · Aug 5

bsky.app/profile/robe... there is also this

Scott Horton @robertscotthorton.bsky.social · Aug 4

This is the only rational explainer of the entire situation around Álvaro Uribe I have seen in US media. Álvaro Uribe was once ludicrously lionized in WaPo; it's when I realized that they simply didn't know what they were talking about when they wrote about Colombia.

The conviction of Colombia’s ex-president is a sign of hope amid autocracy’s rise | Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno

Álvaro Uribe was convicted of bribery in a development that would have seemed inconceivable a decade ago