Illusions of the Thinking Machine

I read Stephen Witt’s The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip last week as I am interested in the history of GPUs (Graphics Processing Units). I did find it frustrating in that it is another great Silicon Valley man history, which is a tired trope really, but interesting in what it tacitly admits. The use of GPUs for High Performance Computing before Machine Learning was accidental.

I had sort of known that as I was on the edge of a CUDA center of excellence several years ago that received the latest cards every so often. The last one that I had to install needed a notch taking out of the card to fit it into the machine as it was so large, especially with the fan. I was out of that arena before the mining craze really took off. Anyhow …

I very much doubt that I am the intended audience but it was gratifying to read about a company still run by folk with engineering knowledge, rather than pure business. That written, there is a well trodden path of a good idea, some luck, and growing by buying/crushing other companies to become the core node in the hardware network along with the toolkit to use it.

This book sits on the shelf against the other large companies. I found it breathless in the telling and slightly hagiographical, but that could be the price of access. I am left wondering how the CUDA library potentially limits what can be done with it and how it will shape the humanities and cultural computing.


Archiving Sites

One job that I have been taking on over the last few weeks is archiving some old project sites using a CMS. We tend to render a copy into static HTML to keep them alive, but no longer updateable. Normally, I would use wget -r <site here> to flatten the site. Occasionally the –no-check-certificate option […]


Off to Lisbon

I had the fortune of getting a paper accepted for this year’s Digital Humanities conference, which will be in Lisbon. I will be talking about computational audible infrastructures as extension of Kyle Devine and Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier’s audible infrastructures. I will follow this up by talking at the MoCREN event that is straight afterwards. I will […]


Baudot Code and Signals

I was recently playing around with an Arduino and Baltic Lab’s Baudot Code for a quick experiment. I do want to continue doing some work on this to understand some of the issues in Strachey’s code for the Manchester Machine as in David Link’s article on God Save the Queen in Computer Resurrection #76. I […]


Playlists, Bots, and Hollowing Out

I have been reading Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist (Atria / One Signal Publishers, 2025), which is an interesting trip into the work of Spotify playlists. I got it on a hunch and it plays out very well against the previous Spotify book that I […]


You have not Read Your Favourite Book about Your Favourite Song

I was reading You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song (McDonald, 2024) today while doing some initial research for an overview paper. I had high hopes for it, but found that it was very one dimensional. Questions about culture and algorithms are largely pushed to one side and limited to a few things with […]


Go at Your Own Pace and Be Social?

I was recently re-reading Paula Bialski’s Middle Tech (Bialski, 2024), an ethnographic account of her time at a German software company that explores culture of Good Enough in software. It is an engaging book that seemingly moves against the Move Fast and Break Things culture, but I am wondering if it holds water there as […]


Porosity, Computation, and the City

David Berry’s Stunlaw blog has a series of interesting posts that are building to something very useful as well as through provoking. The one that I want to focus is the recent one on Porosity and Computation. The term porosity comes from the Naples essay by Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis (Benjamin and L?cis, 1925) […]


A mobile software lab to study software

This week, I went on another data walk in Coventry with some of our students in Digital Sociology. This meant that updating the Unheard City app in breaks while teaching another course. The app needed an update as the target software development kit (SDK) was an old one that also meant an update to most […]


Weeknotes: Tapestry, Robots, and Data

Started teaching this week and the world still moves. Having had conversations with the other staff (that will be ongoing), I sketched out some ways of donating data from the Unheard City project and using phones around it. It is a challenge. No doubt the work will change and move, but it raises some interesting […]