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Dan Bennett

@comic-sans-soleil.bsky.social

Lecturer in Human Computer Interaction (HCI), Aalborg University (prev Bristol, ITU Copenhagen, Aalto) Human autonomy & agency. Humanistic Quant. Complexity methods. Behavioural Science.

1249 Posts1109 Follower 755 Folgt

Dan Bennett @comic-sans-soleil.bsky.social · 10h ago

Just finished Transcription by Ben Lerner. First Lerner I've read but probably the best fiction I've read this year. People called it a "technology novel", which suggests it's a slightly polemical "issue" piece. It's not. It does capture the pandemic better than other writing & films I've seen.

cover of the book Transcription by Ben Lerner. Red circle centre bottom, like a recording light. Title and author at top in white bold caps sans serfi

LF @lfrecs.bsky.social · 3d ago

erratum head dsic.bandcamp.com/album/a-hist...

A History of Microprocessing Vol. 74: Intel Itanium 2, by dsic

2 track album

dsic.bandcamp.com

Dan Bennett @comic-sans-soleil.bsky.social · 6d ago

Picked this up today. From a quick skim I haven't been so interested to read an unfamiliar author in quite a while. Tempted to post summaries as I go. Missing research discussion I guess.

Fovea Hex @foveahex.bsky.social · last wk.

One of the truest and most heart-stoppingly beautiful voices I ever heard..... three years gone today. Unforgettable.

Dan Bennett @comic-sans-soleil.bsky.social · 2w ago

Author fam. Yr prose is extremely oxidised, no cap. Aura is very Linkedin. Giving hydroxyl radicals, cellular damage. Man needs to get off that Claude stack. Slorch some Goffman ASAP. Seriously fam, get on some Suchman, Hofstadter even, Vuong

Alex Bertram-Powell @alexbpart.bsky.social · 3w ago

GO GO GO GO

Serenity Forge@serenityforge.com · 3w ago

The resort never closed. You were simply early. Today, we’re excited to share that Roman Sands RE:Build and Paratopic: Overdub will launch on September 16th. Thank you for your patience and support, see you there! ❤️ serenityforge.com/games/roman-... serenityforge.com/games/parato...

Dan Bennett @comic-sans-soleil.bsky.social · 3w ago

Very excited about this!

Serenity Forge@serenityforge.com · 3w ago

Dan Bennett @comic-sans-soleil.bsky.social · 3w ago

Every time I play Pat Metheny's smooth jazz classic Phase Dance, I remember the time I put it on as chill background sound while setting up for a lecture (weird dead room), and a student came in horrified and said "whoa! this is a bit intense". www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xwk...

Phase Dance

YouTube video by Pat Metheny Group - Topic

youtube.com

Dan Bennett @comic-sans-soleil.bsky.social · last mo.

Accepted @ #chiplay2026 w @elisamekler.bsky.social & Roosa Piitulainen Can gamepad input tell you about skill-challenge balance? Our results say yes! Points to scalable methods for game adaptation & player-experience research osf.io/preprints/ps...

Dan Bennett @comic-sans-soleil.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Such a great book, I had no idea there could be so many different approaches to observing John Berger.

Bill McKay @mckay4senate.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Why does BlueSky keep centering American and more broadly Western voices whenever we do AI discourse?

Polling showing that Americans lead many other countries in negativity about AI. The US is the country with the highest net share of people who say AI is making society worse, while Nigeria, Vietnam, India, Brazil, Mexico, and Indonesia are above 40% net AI is making society better.

Bela Lugosi's Dad 🏳️‍⚧️ 🇵🇸@belalugosisdad.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Fantastic turnout for this last night. Despite having only 24hours notice, @bristolantifascist.bsky.social and other antifascists mobilised around 200 people. The fash, meanwhile, either too disorganised, or intimidated by the numbers, managed only 5 people. Bristol is always antifascist.

Bela Lugosi's Dad 🏳️‍⚧️ 🇵🇸@belalugosisdad.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Callout for antifascist community defence in Bristol tomorrow. This was the same hotel housing refugees that was attacked in 2024. 25% of the residents are children.

William Gibson @greatdismal.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Nigel Cabourn’s peculiar visionary turn, directed at tattered racks of surplus and workwear, had nothing whatever to do with fashion — in the most admirable possible way!

The Crack Magazine@thecrackmagazine.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Very sad news. Lovely fella & local legend. RIp Nigel Cabourn. Reposted from Arlo Jesmond. We will miss you buddy love from the ARLO crew

Dan Bennett @comic-sans-soleil.bsky.social · 2mo ago

RIP Nigel Cabourn

Byline Times @bylinetimes.bsky.social · 2mo ago

🔴 BREAKING: “My Personal Pride and Joy”: Mandelson’s UK Palantir Deal The former US Ambassador considered a £750m MOD deal with the US tech company his landmark achievement. But how was it achieved?

“My Personal Pride and Joy”: Mandelson’s UK Palantir Deal

The former US Ambassador considered a £750m MOD deal with the US tech company his landmark achievement. But how was it achieved?

bylinetimes.com

Dan Bennett @comic-sans-soleil.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Today I listened to Music for 18 Musicians and Proverb for the first time in about 20 years. M418 is clearly the great work, but Proverb was the first piece of modern classical I really listened to properly, and I Stan'd Ludwig. Big deal. Weird to hear it again. www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5lg...

Steve Reich - Proverb

YouTube video by eternal feedback loop

youtube.com

Dan Bennett @comic-sans-soleil.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Heuristics for the lads.

Dan Bennett @comic-sans-soleil.bsky.social · 2mo ago

"“searching the web” will increasingly be performed by AI agents rather than humans." Who will want to write anything under those conditions? Would a chef cook well for someone who gets someone to blends all their food then reconstitute it? techcrunch.com/2026/05/19/g...

Google Search as you know it is over | TechCrunch

Google is transforming Search from a list of links into an AI-powered experience filled with conversational answers, autonomous agents, and interactive interfaces — a shift that could further reduce t...

techcrunch.com

Seán Clancy @seanlclancy.bsky.social · 2mo ago

New album was out last week… give it a shot this weekend. You might like it… seanclancy.bandcamp.com/album/se-n-c...

Seán Clancy: Where the Paths End, by Sean Clancy

10 track album

seanclancy.bandcamp.com

Kate Nave @kathrynnave.eurosky.social · 4mo ago

New paper out in Adaptive Behavior! On why cognitive scientists need a better account of purposive of behaviour, why cybernetics and dynamical systems won't do the trick, and how biological autonomy might. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

The aim of autopoiesis theory, as Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela declared it in 1980, was to understand living systems via a ‘mechanistic’ approach that involved only what can be found ‘anywhere else in the physical world… blind material interactions governed by aimless physical laws’ (p. 74). In service of such a mission, in Maturana's words, ‘any attempt to characterise living systems with notions of purpose or function was doomed to fail’ (p. xiii).
A lot can change in a few decades. By 2002 – to the presumed horror of those who had once rejoiced at this naturalistic ‘destruction of teleology’ (Beer, 1980) – we find Varela declaring that there is in fact ‘a real teleology implied in the notion of autopoiesis’, that it is a source of ‘subjectivity, intentionality and meaning’, and thus that, ‘organisms are subjects having purposes according to values encountered in the making of their living’ (Weber & Varela, 2002).

This search for an alternative ‘science of meaning’ is, alongside the rejection of a ‘representation-first’ view of cognition, one of the central pillars that defines Varela et al.'s (1991) presentation of the enactive approach. Yet the term ‘enactivism’ is also used more loosely to refer to the endorsement of the second, anti-representationalist, pillar alone. Disagreement thus persists about whether autopoiesis supplies an adequate basis for an alternative ‘science of meaning’, and indeed whether any such basis is even needed (Barandiaran, 2017; Ward et al., 2017).
This broad tent of enactive cognitive science has been pitched across a fault line. On one side: cyberneticists, who hew to Maturana’s machinistic view within which mind may be continuous with life, but only to the extent that both are continuous with non-life and all can be subsumed within the mathematics of dynamical systems theory. On the other: ‘organicists’, who take living systems to constitute a genuinely new sort of organisation – one that is necessary for a system to be cognitive and which cannot be straightforwardly approached via the same modelling strategies used in ordinary physics.

Dan Bennett @comic-sans-soleil.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Genuinely inspiring guy in any case, but especially in a world where so many edgy young dudes will need to move on beyond the stupid shit they said on the internet. www.rollingstone.com/music/music-...

The Radical Life and Surprising Reinvention of Steve Albini

Friends and family remember the complex legacy of Steve Albini, the legendary engineer who died in 2024 after working with Nirvana, Pixies, and more

rollingstone.com

Brian Hughes @bmhughes.bsky.social · 8mo ago

This is actually quite brilliant, up to and including the final sentence 🔥

Dan Levenstein @dlevenstein.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Overheard at lunch: “You’re exhausting my tokens”

Dan Bennett @comic-sans-soleil.bsky.social · 3mo ago

"beautiful worlds can be mere marketing, lofty deeds can be irksome impositions, but the human bad - why should that ever be abandoned?" Ziporyn's Daodejing Ch 62

Dan Bennett @comic-sans-soleil.bsky.social · 3mo ago

RIP J.H. Prynne. Renowned for his difficulty and single-mindedness (I personally struggle with the last couple of decades) but that forgets how beautiful and lyrical much of his poetry is. "Love" is one of the few poems I could recite by heart

Noble in the sound which
marks the pale ease
of their dreams, they ride
the bel canto of our time: the patient en-
circlement of Narcissus &
as he pines I too
am wan with fever,
have fears which set
the vanished child above
reproach. Cry as you
will, take what you
need, the night is young
and limitless our greed.

—Jeremy Prynne, “Love,” from White Stones

phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Louise Glück, born on this day in 1943

TELESCOPE

There is a moment after you move your eye away
when you forget where you are
because you've been living, it seems,
somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky.

You've stopped being here in the world.
You're in a different place,
a place where human life has no meaning.

You're not a creature in a body.
You exist as the stars exist,
participating in their stillness, their immensity.

Then you're in the world again.
At night, on a cold hill,
taking the telescope apart.

You realize afterward
not that the image is false
but the relation is false.

You see again how far away
each thing is from every other thing.

Seán Clancy @seanlclancy.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Probably the best thing I’ve yet done… nmc-recordings.myshopify.com/collections/...

Seán Clancy: Where the Paths End

Where the Paths End is a new album by one of the most exciting Irish composers of his generation, Seán Clancy. Bringing together works written between 2013 and 2025, the album explores lived experienc...

nmc-recordings.myshopify.com

Seiara Imanova @seiaraimanova.bsky.social · 4mo ago

What if mental disorders aren’t just brain problems, but disruptions in how we make sense of the world? I enjoyed speaking with Professor Sanneke de Haan about her work on the enactive approach to psychiatry in the latest Behind the Stigma episode :) Listen here: www.buzzsprout.com/1402324/epis...

Simon Hammann @simonhammann.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Don't be shy to take on a little two-week side project. These five months will be the most precious three years of your academic journey.

Dan Bennett @comic-sans-soleil.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Strong Summer Palace energy

Amy Klobuchar@amyklobuchar.com · 4mo ago

While Americans are worried about health care and rising costs, the president is focused on building a $400 million ballroom. That says everything about his priorities — and they’re not the American people.