iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 13/09/2026

Found a folder of papers I’d printed and annotated in grad school and it feels like a weird glimpse into another person’s life.

A selection of papers on theoretical syntax and formal learning theory

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 08/09/2026

I still think a good bit of this paper is true and I generally endorse the overall project but I wish I engaged more with the work on the philosophy of measurement at the time.

At the core of this debate is the set of images and metaphors we use to understand our technology, and within this context the agentive approach isn’t only the most natural but appears to be the only show in town. The language of ‘learning’, ‘training’, and ‘knowledge’ has been baked into machine learning for decades. It is not enough to insist that LLMs are not intelligent and that they don’t understand the meanings of the tokens they are processing. Within the context of this debate, there is an onus on the critic of the agentive approach to come up with an alternative image. As long as our practices look like engagement with agents, adopting an intentional stance to their behaviour has prima facie validity that can’t be ignored and the more we ‘communicate with AI’, the more natural it will be to speak as though we do.

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 08/09/2026

Looking forward to teaching this paper this year: philpapers.org/archive/MANB...

Believing without Reason, or:
Why Liberals Shouldn't Watch
Fox News
By Eric Mandelbaum and Jake Quilty-Dunn

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 01/09/2026

The list does not contain itself.

Wikipedia page for List of Star Trek lists

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 28/08/2026

The Irish national epic is about how you shouldn’t steal a cow from an Ulsterman and long-story-short Magnus Olafsson is now buried outside Downpatrick in Co. Down, the last Norwegian king to die abroad on a raid.

Picture of Magnus Barefoots grave in Ireland

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 26/08/2026

This is a classic philosophical question to be fair

Question: What should I do when I am too nervous to work?

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 26/08/2026

The new edition of Kurt Gödel’s Philosophical Notebooks is full of useful advice.

Remark: Ways to come into contact with people:
1. strong exhaustion, 2. say something stupid (in general, do not pretend to be anything that you are not), 3. milkshake (fill your stomach).

Maxim: Decline all parties outright (maybe let a doctor attest that parties are harmful).

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 19/08/2026

I did and it was wonderful! The pathway is so well preserved and the interpretive centre is great. If you visit one Iron Age bog trackway in Co. Longford, I’d recommend this one.

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 19/08/2026

Check out this cool diorama of the Corlea bog trackway!

Little model figures building a trackway through a bog. Around them is woodland. They are felling trees, carrying them, hunting, cooking food.

Men at work building the trackway through the bog

Hunters return with their dinner in the background

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 14/08/2026

The cliff did fully materialise in the end

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 14/08/2026

(Uncontroversial opinion) Donegal really is a beautiful county

A photo of Glenveagh national park. A lake lies surrounded by mountains with trees growing on either side.

A road winds past a statue of Enya (I assume)

A derelict wooden boat lies in a riverbed

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 14/08/2026

Sliabh Liag like a ghost above the heather makes tales of Hy Brasil seem more credible.

A photo of heather. Above it in the air, suspended by mist, are the cliffs of sliabh liag. The mist creates a kind of visual illusion.

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 09/08/2026

New biography of Flann O’Brien! By Brian Ó Conchubhair! It’s 700 pages!! And in Irish!!!

Cover of An Saol Bocht by Brian Ó Conchubair

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 09/08/2026

True patriotism isn’t complaining about the casting of Hollywood movies online, it’s turning your garden into a replica of the Battle of Thermopylae.

Sign in front of the garden: KILWARLIN
BATTLEFIELD GARDEN
This Battlefield Garden is the legacy of Rev Basil Patras Zula,
* Rev Zula, a Greek patriot, found refuge in Ireland after involvement in the 19th century struggles for Greek independence.
After training and ordination to the Moravian ministry, he served
Kilwarlin Moravian Church 1834 - 1844
The terrain of the garden is a replica of Thermopylae, where a most significant battle was fought between the Greeks and ® the Persians in 480 B.C

A small mound labelled Path of Ephialtes before a larger mound with a sign saying Mt Callidromos

Signage: Discover the Secrets of Zula's Hollow
This unusual earthworks was built in 1839, after the church was rebuilt in 1834. The Hollow was designed by Rev. Basil Patras Zula, and built by local people. It's mounds and hills represent the Historic Battlefield of Thermopylae and it's topography as it was in 480 BCE.
The garden also includes some features not connected to the battle, like a fountain, Alpha and Omega flowerbeds and a summer house. This is one of most unique gardens

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 05/08/2026

Just figured you might like to see this.

A cover of SFX from 1998 with Patrick Stewart as Picard on it, he has Spock’s hair, make-up, and his head obscures the F making the title look like it reads SEX.

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 01/08/2026

Alcohol and meat free beef bourguignon, your move France.

An image of alcohol and meat free beef bourguignon. It has carrots, beyond beef strips, mushrooms, maybe a bit too much thyme. I’m using Eisner 0% Merlot (very affordable at Tesco).

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 23/07/2026

I unironically think that working with a dialect coach to invent a novel accent that sounds European without sounding like it comes from any particular country is a brave and creative thing to do.

The accent, we just made up, literally," said Damon, who worked with dialect coach Tim Monich. (Watch our interview with him above.) "We kind of thought, theoretically, what we needed, it couldn't be modern English. It had to be understandable. And then [Monich] made rules for it, the way he does for any dialect we're working on. So we
kind of cobbled it together that way."

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 10/07/2026

He’s right! This is exactly word-for-word what I do when I’ve arrived somewhere new. Humboldt has captured something completely normal and universal here.

When far from our native country, after a long voyage, we tread for the first time the soil of a tropical land, we experience a certain feeling of surprise and gratification in recognizing, in the rocks that surround us, the same inclined schistose strata, and the same columnar basalt covered with cellular amygdaloids, that we had left in Europe, and whose identity of character, in latitudes so widely different, reminds us that the solidification of the earth's crust is altogether independent of climatic influences.

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 08/07/2026

Having students formalise this the next time I teach logic.

Quote from Adam Tooze: If, as Barry Eichengreen quips in his recent history of money, the successor to the dollar was the dollar, that is because it wasn't.

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 08/07/2026

The Ong book is a lot of fun. I remember spending some time trying to figure out if one necessarily faces an injustice if speaking to a Corkman.

In oral cultures a request for information is commonly
interpreted interactively (Malinowski 1923, pp. 451, 470–81), as
agonistic, and, instead of being really answered, is frequently
parried. An illuminating story is told of a visitor in County Cork,
Ireland, an especially oral region in a country which in every
region preserves massive residual orality. The visitor saw a
Corkman leaning against the post office. He went up to him,
pounded with his hand on the post office wall next to the
Corkman’s shoulder, and asked, ‘Is this the post office?’ The
Corkman was not taken in. He looked at his questioner quietly
and with great concern: ‘’Twouldn’t be a postage stamp you were
lookin’ for, would it?’ He treated the enquiry not as a request for
information but as something the enquirer was doing to him. So he
did something in turn to the enquirer to see what would happen. All
natives of Cork, according to the mythology, treat all questions
this way. Always answer a question by asking another. Never let
down your oral guard.

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 07/07/2026

Reminder that the Belgian away kit is designed as a tribute to René Magritte shop.rbfa.be/en/x-8797

Belgian footballer in their away kit with an hat and apple before his face as in the painting The Son of Man, Le fils de l'homme

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 05/07/2026

Disappointing follow-up to Sharpe’s Eagle

Merlin bird ID for Sharpe’s Wren, Cinnycerthia olivascens. The image is of a rather dumpy looking little brown wren.

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 25/06/2026

The Minions speak the Language of Thought (LOT).

Guardian headline: Bello! Why gen Alha subconsciously speaks the language of the Minions

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 21/06/2026

Northeast England last night

Black land marked by lights of villages, network of streets and motorways, gold-glowing cities of Newcastle and Sunderland (I think). Above the arch of earth is reddened by yesterday/tomorrow’s sun.

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 20/06/2026

The Circus Maximus, site of the original “Mario Kart”

The circus maximus under baking heat. The field has some grass left but is parched. Behind it stands the Domus Severiani, a red stoned ancient house.

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 20/06/2026

Passing through St Peter’s Square on World Refugee Day. It seems the previous pope had this new statue installed.

A bronze sculpture depicting huddled masses, their clothes are rags, some carry luggage, others sheets, one girl has a pet dog. Behind them hidden in the throng are two wings of an angel

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 18/06/2026

Not a bad spot to pick up a couple life birds

The Temple of Saturn in Rome. Its columns are dusky and orange-tinged.

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 13/06/2026

Aguirre, the Wrath of God really is one of the best performances Herzog got out of Kinski

Miguel from the charming animated film The Road to El Dorado

Miguel, Tulio and a horse in a jungle (from the charming animated film The Road to El Dorado)

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 10/06/2026

I don't think most of my colleagues are stupid and incompetent

Norman Rockewell's Freedom of Speech (painting)

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 09/06/2026

Fun fact: Arnold Schwarznegger’s Junior had the same tagline as John McDowell’s Mind and World which came out the same year.

Poster of Junior. A pregnant Arnie looks surprised while Emma Thompson holds his shoulder and Danny Devito holds a stethoscope to Arnie's belly.

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 09/06/2026

I just didn’t think The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle [2000] was that bad

Rotten Tomatoes Review: WOW THIS WAS ONE OF THE DUMBEST HORRIBLE MOVIES I HAVE EVER SEEN AND A REALLY PAINFULL EXPERIENCE
THROUGHOUT!!!!!!!!!! EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS IS JUST WRONG ON
S000000000000000000000000000
MANY LEVELS!!!!!!!!!! | WILL DESPISE THIS CRAP TO MY DYING DAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Rotten tomatoes review: This is why 9/11 happened the following year.

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 08/06/2026

This is the quote mentioned in the article.

If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organization of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 06/06/2026

A heron failing to eat an eel on the Water of Leith

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 06/06/2026

I think it would be good if people were better at distinguishing describing a position and endorsing it (especially when taken out of context - third image). cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-wpfsx/wp-...

Critical race theorist Khiara Bridges endorses a radical perspectivalism about truth:

CRT, like its Critical Legal Studies predecessor, has been heavily influenced by postmodernist and poststructuralist philosophy and literary criticism — which has been

identified with thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Lacan. One of the many ideas that postmodernism introduced was the possibility that there is no such thing as objective truth. Postmodernism proposes that truth is not a unitary thing that is “out there” and is entirely independent of context. Instead, it proposes that truth is contingent; it depends on the frameworks and the systems of knowledge that society has created to ascertain what “truth” is. According to postmodernism, the truth is that there are many truths, all of which are dependent on the perspective that the truth seeker brings to the quest to know it. Truth, then, is profoundly subjective. (Bridges 2019, 66)

This chapter describes the more controversial methodological
choices that scholars operating within the CRT paradigm have
made (namely, the choice to tell stories in legal scholarship) and
the substantive claims that they have made that have been
subject to the most criticism. Before beginning, it is worth
reiterating that those who employ a CRT framework in their
scholarship are a motley crew. Thus, while some critical race
theorists have engaged in storytelling and have made the
provocative claims explored below, it would be an error to assert
that all critical race theorists have done the same. CRT is
capacious enough to accommodate those who find storytelling
incompatible with their own disciplinary methodologies; and it is
roomy enough to include those who disagree with the claims
described below. To put it more bluntly, CRT is a theoretical
approach; it is not a cult

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 05/06/2026

And people said analytic philosophers were ‘apolitical’ and afraid to take brave political stances

Cover of David Lewis: Papers in Ethics and Social Philosophy

Contents.
Semantic analyses for dyadic deontic logic

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 05/06/2026

If Anthropic are so serious about protecting people from Mythos, how come I just saw it in Tesco?

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 01/06/2026

Spent a train ride yesterday reading Gillian Rose explain that you can‘t understand the emergence of sociology without grasping neo-Kantian interpretations of Kant’s transcendental logic.

They turn Kant's critical method into an autonomous logic of validity based on an original, underivable unity which is not the unity of consciousness. In both cases objectification is the correlate of the
logic and can be methodically examined in any individual science. 'Validity', 'objectification' and 'method' do not have a transcendental or formal status but constitute a metaphysics of a new kind.
Morality and Method The development of the idea of a scientific sociology was inseparable arable from the transformation of transcendental logic into , the paradigm of validity and values. Prima facie the idea of a sociological account of validity appears contradictory. For a sociological interpretation of experience, like a psychological one, might be expected to address itself to the quid fact, not the quaestio quid juris, to the history and

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 30/05/2026

A tale of solidarity in Durham: www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

"Durham Pride won't be getting a single penny from this council next year," the deputy leader, Darren Grimes, said last summer. "Taxpayers shouldn't be bankrolling it.? But in a testament to an enduring relationship forged during the miners' strikes of the 1980s, this year's event has returned bigger than ever, thanks to funding from trade unions. Stephen Guy, the chair of the Durham Miners' Association (DMA), said that when it became apparent Durham Pride was under threat, he took it upon himself to "encourage the trade union movement to step up and do the right thing, and stand shoulder to shoulder with the LGBT+ community".

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 25/05/2026

"In fact, as with every major technological shift, AI tends to amplify the power of those who already possess economic resources, expertise and access to data."