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Jeffrey M. Binder

@jbinder.bsky.social
726 followers 1.5K following 90 posts

Author of Language and the Rise of the Algorithm (U. Chicago Press, 2022). Intellectual historian/programmer, currently working in applied ML but still a humanities person at heart. PhD from CUNY. Opinions my own.

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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
What year was it—2023 I think—when it got up to like 70 degrees here in January? Could happen again
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Let’s get drinks or something! I’ll likely be around
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Looking at these replies, it’s striking how toxic Bluesky is getting, at least when the AI boogeyman comes up. Mindless friend/enemy battle-line drawing.
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Bandcamp Friday again, and this time I have a new batch of analogue/modular synth drones: circlesofproportion.bandcamp.com/album/nine-f...
circlesofproportion.bandcamp.com
Nine Facilities Not Otherwise Specified, by Proportion
9 track album
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Right! A stochastic system with a fixed random seed still behaves like a stochastic system in many important ways. I feel like we lack a good way of expressing what we’re really concerned about and “deterministic” has stepped in as a substitute.
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Kind of tired myself so I may have to pick this up tomorrow!
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
In any case, the term is spreading beyond the technical field and seems to be capturing an array of concerns that haven't really been sorted out clearly.
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
The result, it seems to me, is a general sense that deterministic systems are more trustworthy, which is half true. Some deterministic algorithms can be proven to get the right answer in all cases (e.g. long division), but others have varying levels of accuracy and some just don't work.
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Nondeterministic systems require a different approach to testing because you can't just check the output against a single correct value. This has inspired broader concerns about how such systems could be made reliable.
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
In CS, a deterministic system is one that always behaves the same given the same input. Most current AI is nondeterministic in this sense because there's some degree of randomness in the output.
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
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.
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Are you familiar with LangSmith? Not sure if it's exactly what you're after, but it stores structured traces of what agents are doing docs.langchain.com/langsmith/tr...
docs.langchain.com
Trace Claude Code applications - Docs by LangChain
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 01/05/2026
It’s Bandcamp Friday, a good day to point out that I released some weird synth music circlesofproportion.bandcamp.com/album/prelim...
circlesofproportion.bandcamp.com
Preliminal, by Circles of Proportion
15 track album
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
I should have said $70k/yr IF they hit the jackpot on the job market
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
That'll show those humanities professors who make $70k/yr and are losing their jobs left and right /s
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 27/06/2026
Error message from a furniture store website saying, "Loading Issue / Please continue shopping."
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 12/06/2026
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.
The cover of Dis/Trusting the Digital World in Imaginative Literature, edited by Adam Kelly and Katerina Pavlidi.
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 12/06/2026
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.
The cover of Dis/Trusting the Digital World in Imaginative Literature, edited by Adam Kelly and Katerina Pavlidi.
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 06/06/2026
I agree that referencing autocomplete can be helpful as a starting point, and I've used it before when teaching. But it only gets you so far in explaining what LLMs are doing unless you go into the details, like what “predict” means in this context, the role of training data, etc.
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 06/06/2026
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.
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
German word for the special anxiety one feels when interacting with the Phone app, where one wrong tap could result in accidentally calling someone
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 26/05/2026
One of the first jazz musicians I got really into.
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Josh Shepperd @joshshepperd.bsky.social · 26/05/2026
RIP Sonny Rollins! My favorite musician and a genius. Time to spin St. Thomas.
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 17/05/2026
I spent several weeks doing basically nothing but checking the citations in my book. It wasn’t fun, but…
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 01/05/2026
It’s Bandcamp Friday, a good day to point out that I released some weird synth music circlesofproportion.bandcamp.com/album/prelim...
circlesofproportion.bandcamp.com
Preliminal, by Circles of Proportion
15 track album
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 21/04/2026
Reminds me of this inverted digital clock I made a few years back: jeffreymbinder.net/apps/clock/
jeffreymbinder.net
This is a clock where the hours move first and the minutes second. That is, each half-day (this is a US clock) is divided into 60 mours, each of which is divided into 12 hinutes.
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 20/03/2026
First thought in my head: 1964 or 2064?
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 16/02/2026
I'm personally skeptical that hallucination can be solved in the current paradigm, but the Computer World article is basically misinformation, and people are jumping on it because it confirms their biases.
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 16/02/2026
Plausibly, they might. I am not defending OpenAI's position. My point is that the Computer World article is misrepresenting its source, and we should raise our standards.
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 16/02/2026
This seems to be making the rounds again, and the framing is highly misleading. The mathematical result only applies to “base” models that haven’t gone through RLHF. The study actually argues that hallucination is _not_ inevitable. www.computerworld.com/article/4059...
computerworld.com
OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws
In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limi...
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 11/01/2026
Clearly, this shows a man soldering his own finger to the soldering iron’s power supply
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 26/12/2023
This is your annual reminder that Sun Ra made a Christmas song www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEpF...
youtube.com
Sun Ra presents The Qualities - It's Christmas Time (1960)
A holiday tribute to Sun Ra fea, Doo Wop produced by Sun Ra on Saturn Records, 1960. Written by Alton Abraham and Sun Ra.
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 23/11/2025
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
jeffreymbinder.net
PromptArray, meet GPT-OSS! – Jeffrey M. Binder
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 19/09/2025
Still in New York, continuing to keep on. We should catch up some time!
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 19/09/2025
There’s also Choco Leibniz, named after the inventor of choco calculus
Chocolate-covered Leibniz biscuits
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 06/08/2025
I made an online simulation of this method: jeffreymbinder.net?p=304
jeffreymbinder.net
Artificial Versifying – Jeffrey M. Binder
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 03/08/2025
“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.”
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Ryan Cordell @ryancordell.org · 22/01/2025
I do not see how we’re going to have productive academic discussions of "AI" until we stop accepting the marketing that lumps all machine learning methods & technologies into one amorphous thing called "AI"—so we get minimalist & maximalist responses that echo that marketing—we don’t have to do this
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 23/11/2024
Just thought of one. My mom saw a picture of a corpse-painted black metal band—I think it was Immortal—and said, "I remember bands like that. Like Kiss."
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Stellbound: Stellraiser II @antlervel.vet · 18/11/2024
Adam Smith
An Inquiry into
the Nature and Causes of
The Wealth of Nations
Stella • 23m
@antlervel.vet
Do I need to spend $100 on bottles of high-end skincare product?
Many people would say no.
However, the manufacturers of $100 bottles of high-end skincare product would say yes. And it's important to consider all viewpoints
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Sep 28, 2023 at 12:17 AM
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 14/11/2024
“Griping in the Guts” Checks out
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 01/11/2024
Is it possible for numbers to get too big? We’ll tell you about a shocking new development, after this.
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Matthew Kirschenbaum @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social · 12/10/2024
The Theories and Methodologies cluster on #criticalAI co-edited for PMLA by @ritaraley.bsky.social and myself is now online, open access. it consists of eight interventions by leading voices, as well as our framing essay “AI and the University as a Service.” www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
cambridge.org
FirstView | PMLA | Cambridge Core
PMLA - Brent Hayes Edwards
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 30/09/2024
Today I learned the word "ultracrepidarianism"
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 25/09/2024
Not sure about Llama3, but have you looked at the structured output modes offered by some LLMs? python.langchain.com/docs/how_to/...
python.langchain.com
Structured Output | 🦜️🔗 LangChain
It is often crucial to have LLMs return structured output. This is because oftentimes the outputs of the LLMs are used in downstream applications, where specific arguments are required. Having the LLM...
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 24/09/2024
My book made it to the Chicago Manual of Style! I don't know how I'm going to top this.
A page from the book Language and the Rise of the Algorithm reproduced as a figure in the Chicago Manual of Style.
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 23/09/2024
*raises hand*
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 17/09/2024
If you see this, quote skeet with a famous landmark you’ve seen.
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 08/09/2024
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.
Album cover of "Momentum" by Monolake."Jonathan Sings!" by Jonathan Richman
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Jeffrey M. Binder @jbinder.bsky.social · 07/09/2024
This post goes really well with the Wittgenstein I was just reading
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