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Week 23, 2026: June 1-7

2026-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

June 1-7, 2026

As this is my first entry of weeknotes, before writing out these actual notes, I wrote a general introductory post and posted it to my blog site.

Dissertation

Early this week I received a desk rejection for a paper that I had submitted a few months ago to a top journal. I wrote the paper several years ago now, and I no longer feel that it represents my best work. But I still broadly think that it contributes something to the discourse (about AI and capitalism), and had hoped to place it in this journal on account of the fact that last year I had had a paper rejected from the same venue, but with encouraging comments. The peer review timelines in the humanities are punishing, unfortunately, and so I now have on my hands a paper that I’m beginning to feel less excited about (it has been rejected from two journals now), but which I feel that I should still peddle, especially given my early career stage as an academic.

Part of my feeling divided about the academic mercantilism of pushing to publish papers in prestigious venues is that, in the very early years of my PhD, I ‘open sourced’ a paper after another paper came out that (I felt) stole the (almost inaudible) thunder of the point I wanted to make. Though I don’t feel at all that this paper was my best work, I do hear every now and then from folks who have found it on my website and find the writing useful or interesting one way or another. Had I published it in the non open-access venue for which it was written, I very much doubt it would have been read as much. Of course, releasing papers as ‘preprints’ on my website abandons the benefits of peer review, which are non-trivial when the process is done right. But I increasingly am beginning to feel as though the time-cycle of peer review in the humanities (6-12 months, sometimes more) also prevents a lot of good work from coming out in a timely fashion. Whether or not the essay that I have just had rejected is a part of that ‘good work’ is, of course, a question that I am not best positioned to answer, as the paper’s sole author and therefore someone with an emotional attachment to the piece that makes me want to see it as such.

On the reading front, I am still working my way through Kojin Karatani’s Kantian Marxian treatise Transcritique, a book whose argument will help structure the transition from Chapter 1 to Chapter 2 of my dissertation. (I currently have a full draft of Chapter 1, and need to complete a full draft of Chapter 2 before the summer is out.) I also churned through a number of the articles in the most recent edition of the LRB (having just purchased a subscription), and finally opened George Eliot’s Middlemarch, having purchased a hard copy of the novel last Christmas.

Digital Theory Lab

I spent 3-4 hours drafting an introduction and reviewing PRs for a paper I’m working on with colleagues at the Digital Theory Lab that we hope to place in a machine learning interpretability venue later this year. (The outlines of the idea are in this presentation by Leif Weatherby and Tyler Shoemaker from a few months ago.) I need to present a full draft of this paper to my DTL colleagues early next week.

Rheo

I refactored the Typst template from two Rheo sites (https://rheo.ohrg.org and https://book.cftw.ohrg.org/) into a sidebar component in the rheo-packages registry. (Previously, this was very similar code duplicated across both repos, as the packages feature in Rheo only landed three weeks ago, which enabled this factoring out.)

I also created a rheo-author Claude skill so that Claude Code can do a better job at working within Rheo projects without me having to provide a lot of context in every prompt.

LOLM

I spent one morning in the library firming up a Turing test entry, which was then discussed by members of the project in our weekly working group. (More information on the LOLM project, which I run with Ryan Healey, is available here.)

LIMINAL

In the coming weeks I need to finish up a frontend project for LIMINAL Lab. Several months ago, I (vibe-)coded a prototype of the application using React and zustand. There is an interactive table component in this application that has been fragile since I spun up the prototype; and I am almost unconquerably unmotivated to delve into the particulars of react-window to work out why the styling keeps going out of whack.

In an attempt to motivate myself to get steaming on the project again, I spent an evening (vibe-)porting the basics of the application to Jane Street’s Bonsai framework. Almost a decade ago now, I explored the tradeoffs between Elm and React as an undergraduate project, and in all of the serious frontend work done since I have longed for a framework that feels better than React, for a way to write web applications with more express use of types.¹

The OCaml tooling setup (opam, dune, etc.) took an hour or two to get used to, as it’s not quite as smooth-surfaced as the modern bundling tooling for JS (pnpm, vite, etc.). But I now have a basic copy of the single-page-application prototype I had in React, and am much more excited to rewrite the interactive table component while refining my OCaml and Bonsai. This will be the thrust of what I work on in this coming week.

et al.

Kohei Saito, the Japanese eco-Marxist who came to fame through his book on Marx and the Anthropocene (and the youngest ever winner of the Deutscher Prize, apparently), was in Torino for a film festival! I moved to Torino at the beginning of this year with my partner, and we are still ‘integrating’ and learning about the sociality and activities that take place here; so it was nice to feel as though a part of my academic world (anglophone ‘Marx people’) was here, if only briefly. We fangirled after the interview and got a picture with him:

Week 24, 2026: June 8-14

2026-06-14T00:00:00+00:00

1. June 8-14, 2026

This week was one of the first that I have spent almost entirely uninterrupted in Torino. Though we formally moved here in January of this year, it seems as though there has been something to flit to almost every week, either in another part of Italy/Europe, or overseas. (For almost all of April I was in the US, as I organized two conferences which ran on back-to-back weeks in Providence.) This summer should be a welcome period of respite from becoming a journeyman academic (although we have a holiday planned in Puglia the week after next.)

1.0.1. Dissertation

I only managed a few hours continuing to work through Karatani’s Transcritique this week, but they were an important few hours. I’m 200 pages in (out of some 320), but something is really starting to churn. I am purposefully moving slowly in order to more surely cover the important details in my notes (which I hand-write on a second reMarkable), as I suspect that Karatani’s argument about the isomorphic relation between Kant and Marx will be what shores up some of the conceptual turns in the last section of my dissertation’s first chapter, which is an exposition of Marx’s theory of the commodity in relation to Kant and the philosophy of cause.

I don’t yet know a lot about Karatani’s reception in Anglophone Marx studies¹, but at first glance it seems to me that Transcritique illuminates a wealth of possible developments in discussions being had currently around capitalism and its discontents. My aim for the next week is to work through the last 100 pages.

I also gave an internal presentation (on Zoom) about my dissertation in the Machine Visual Culture group based at the Bibliotheca Hertziana Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome. I’ll be starting a predoctoral fellowship with this group in September 2026, and so this was a nice opportunity to communicate to others who are active in the group what I’m working on while there. I am now happily using the Rheo slides package to annotate my dissertation repo directly with slides as ‘inserts’ in the prose. This means that I can annotate excerpts from the introduction with visuals in talks such as this one, and then more easily fold edits and augmentations back into the body of my dissertation. The preparation for this talk meant that I built out slides that run parallel to the entire first section of my introduction.

1.0.2. Rheo

Much of my week was dedicated to Rheo or Rheo-adjacent work. I added Atom feed generation to the html crate, and in the process did some refactoring to improve the quality of the codebase. I also minted a v0.3.1 release so that I could integrate this feature into the build process for my main blog and weeknotes, both of which now have Atom feeds!

Though Atom/RSS feeds are a run-of-the-mill feature for any static site generator (which is part of what Rheo is) and are not really complicated or interesting in themselves, the Atom feed implementation in Rheo highlights how it is architected as an extensible compilation toolchain for Typst.

In Rheo-adjacent news, I spent much of Wednesday writing a job application for a limited project adding PDF Forms to the Typst compiler, a freelance project that the Typst core team recently put up as a 3-month gig over the summer. I applied as, though I’ve made a few minor contributions to the open source project, it would be helpful to get some structured experience contributing. This summer is an especially good time for me to take up something like this, as I’ve just effectively extended my PhD by a year by receiving back-to-back predoctoral fellowships for the upcoming Fall and Spring.

The take-home project was an interesting exercise. It involved reading the PDF and HTML specs for interactive forms, and then designing a Typst API that integrates the two in a unified interface. As this is essentially the task of the limited project (three months of work), it quickly became clear that I wasn’t going to be able to smooth all of the sharp edges in the divergence between the two formats, so I just did my best in (the vicinity of) the 4-hour time limit. Here is the take-home assignment I submitted for the role, which is naturally typeset with Typst/Rheo. I expect to hear back about whether I’ll move to the interview stage this coming week.

1.0.3. Digital Theory Lab

As I now have a machine that has enough RAM to run some serious local models (see Section 1.0.5), I ran some preliminary experiments using a codebase that Tyler Shoemaker and I have been working on to test the limits of open source LLMs such as the qwen family of models. (I have been trying to find hardware to run these on for a while, and thought I had SSH access to a machine with enough RAM at one stage a few weeks ago: but then it turned out something was off with my login credentials, or possibly the VPN I use to access the network.) More next week on this front, I hope.

1.0.4. LIMINAL

I took some small steps to further configure the Bonsai rewrite I started last week but was largely blocked on significant progress in this project due to the excitement I talk about next in Section 1.0.5.

1.0.5. et al.

The absolute biggest news this week in relation to my research is that my new Framework Desktop arrived. I’ve known that I wanted this thing ever since it was announced in February 2025, as I have been the happy user of a Framework Laptop for a couple of years now. The old Dell laptop that I’ve been using as a substitute desktop neglected to turn on one morning, and so I greedily pulled the trigger and ordered one. This purchase took a serious chunk out of my savings: but life is short!

I’ve always wanted to be more savvy about the hardware aspect of computers since I got a bit of professional exposure to hardware and firmware as a backend engineer at Halter in 2021, but I remain embarrassingly dilettantish with respect to the knowledge domain. I know the basics that any software engineer worth their salt does—which is to say, I have a very abstract but functional understanding of how CPUs, RAM, GPUs, and hardware devices like disk and NVMe storage work, when it comes to writing performant software that runs on them—but there’s an enormity more to learn. Assembling a Framework is like the Ikea of assembling a computer: you do almost nothing because they’ve put all the ingredients in the right place for you and made it hard to screw up. But Apple and other hardware titans like Dell have made even the thought of fiddling with a RAM chip or replacing a fan all but unthinkable.

It took me less than an hour to set up my Framework Desktop, and now it’s sitting on my desk and running like the little monster that it is:

I run NixOS on all of my machines, and it’s effortless to run this operating system on a Framework machine, as all of the steps in the official NixOS install guide just work out of the box. Because this Framework Desktop is more powerful than my laptop, I also spent a few hours messing with ollama and configuring some local LLMs, which I intend to play with more seriously in the coming weeks. I follow Simon Willison’s work on llms, and I want to follow in his footsteps and play a bit more seriously with local models now that I have the beefy hardware to do so.