Victor Gijsbers

Philosopher (Leiden University) and interactive fiction writer; author of Turandot, The Baron and Kerkerkruip; Philosophy Videos @ http://bit.ly/2SFEtC2

#philosophy #InteractiveFiction #metaphysics #Kant #literature #EmilyDickinson #ttrpgs

Public Key

npub1v0nl8ekgajqgf62dulrv3ezhp8wkm6un3upphf32pdmneel4cs0spk2r6r

NIP-05 Address

[email protected]

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsx8elnumyweqyya9x703kgu3tsnhtdawfc7qsm5c4qkaeuul6ug8cpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerfw36x7tnsw43qz9thwden5te0wfjkccte9ekk7um5wgh8qatzc3eta4

Publishing to

relay.ditto.pub

relay.mostr.pub

Author Public Key

npub1v0nl8ekgajqgf62dulrv3ezhp8wkm6un3upphf32pdmneel4cs0spk2r6r

Show more details

Last Notes

2026-05-15 15:07:13 GMT

- reply

@nprofile…ryua This is precisely the kind of human-sounding post that an AI Mastodon bot would generate in order to disguise itself.

2026-04-30 19:33:06 GMT

- reply

@nprofile…5y0h With 'the Germans' I meant 'the German state apparatus'. I know full well this policy isn't universally approved. Indeed, I know it was deemed illegal by a German judge just a few days ago, but the government will continue to do it anyway ...

2026-04-30 09:40:06 GMT

Everywhere along their borders, the Germans have recently built checkpoints. Even apart from the traffic jams and fatal accidents to which this has led, I resent this betrayal of Europe.

2026-04-21 20:08:40 GMT

Today I realised that although everyone would translate English 'butterfly' as Dutch 'vlinder', this is in fact a nice case of language mismatch. In Dutch, we differentiate between 'dagvlinder' and 'nachtvlinder', day butterfly and night butterfly. But only the first are called butterflies in English, the second are called moths, and there's no lay term in English that translates 'vlinder' -- you have to go for Lepidoptera!

2026-04-19 18:54:13 GMT

It's hard to overstate how much better OpenStreetMap is than Google Maps, especially when it comes to walking/hiking. It's the difference between the unusable and the nearly perfect. (Showing Google Maps app and Organic Maps app.)
https://cdn.masto.host/mastodongamedevplace/media_attachments/files/116/432/868/762/967/484/original/d41dad4dd6c87bcf.jpg
https://cdn.masto.host/mastodongamedevplace/media_attachments/files/116/432/869/186/237/436/original/5d8f5ee1fc45bce0.jpg

2026-04-17 08:19:28 GMT

- reply

@nprofile…ryua In the Netherlands this is illegal, and every website I've seen claims that it's very dangerous for the animal if you were to get into an accident or even just need to brake suddenly. Which makes sense.

2026-04-08 11:33:01 GMT

- reply

@nprofile…ryua Jar. Talking about brain power, it took me until this reply to realise that 'paprika' in the UK is not the same as 'paprika' in the Netherlands! (Even though I should have realised that the green, red, and yellow vegetables we call paprika and you probably call 'pepper' don't come in 100g packages.)

2026-03-25 07:32:55 GMT

- reply

@nprofile…wdzu Good luck with it!

2026-02-24 12:47:15 GMT

I just sent in a paper to a very high-ranking philosophy journal. Prepare to be disappointed, I say to myself! 😅

2026-02-08 21:52:52 GMT

- reply

@nprofile…ryua Gotta say, I loved every second of it, though maybe it helped that I was sitting in the cinema where it is easier to focus.

2026-01-20 17:18:05 GMT

- reply

@nprofile…4hp5 I've heard from insider sources that this technology will need to be adopted a lot for there to be widespread adoption.

2025-12-15 08:17:37 GMT

It's Monday morning. Are we ready? Are we pumped up? Are we eager to be the best-oiled cogs in the machine that we can? Yeah!!!

2025-12-13 23:10:04 GMT

- reply

@nprofile…ekm4 Caught myself saying "I Googled it on DuckDuckGo" recently. Need to reform!

2025-10-10 16:08:31 GMT

- reply

@nprofile…32va Is een risicofactor puur een correlatie, of een oorzaak?

2025-10-09 16:37:47 GMT

I made a video on LLMs called 'Rise of the Deception Machines'! It is empathically NOT about LLMs generating false answers, or 'hallucinating'. (It's not important to my analysis, but I think no LLM has ever said something false.)
The deception I'm talking of is instead, first, the companies deceiving the users into thinking the technology is something it's not; and, second, us using LLMs to deceive ourselves about our own thinking. They are self-deception machines.
https://youtu.be/Sb3ZdFpp2Nc?si=gJXGz0hepnYuoq2W

2025-10-06 11:21:26 GMT

I finally got to the secret message that was hidden in my little paper umbrella, but now I don't know what it means! 😕 (Although Google Lens thinks it might have something to do with a roller skate center.)
https://cdn.masto.host/mastodongamedevplace/media_attachments/files/115/326/947/939/667/881/original/d7151a3cb004c20b.jpg

2025-08-15 06:29:22 GMT

In the Netherlands, the supermarkets stay open even on Christmas Day.
In France, they close for the Assumption of Mary, a Catholic holiday I didn't even know existed.
Obviously I learned this the hard way, by standing in front of a sequence of closed shops this morning. 🙈

2025-07-10 15:25:43 GMT

- reply

@nprofile…n8ju How's that book? I tried to read his chapter in Conant's The Logical Alien, and I found it long, badly written, and to be honest too boring to get through. 😅 (Though maybe it's more fun for people who are already Frege experts and I just wasn't the intended audience!)

2025-07-10 10:09:21 GMT

- reply

@nprofile…0tj7 @nprofile…fa4k But that's biomass. I suspect that the *number* of mice, rats, and other small rodents might equal or surpass that of humans and livestock? Not sure, but it doesn't seem unlikely.

2025-06-26 13:44:32 GMT

I'm really enjoying @nprofile…ypzn as an app with unlimited OpenStreetMap usage and great GPX import of hiking routes. But I can't find a manual! So just in case there are any users here who can help me out:
1. When you are recording a route, is there a way to show how many kilometers you have already walked? This would be very useful.
2. Does anybody understand how to order tracks into lists? Every imported route becomes a list, but I don't know how to order several of them in a single list.

2025-06-11 17:11:49 GMT

- reply

@nprofile…lpzz Chess is a great example to explain LLMs though. Recently, I played ChatGPT -- it produced plausible, even very good, moves for 30 moves, and after that point it no longer understood the most basic rules about piece movement. I've found that recounting this episode helps me explain the nature of such AI systems to people.

2025-04-07 08:59:12 GMT

In protestant doctrine, life on Earth seems like a meaningless charade. Its value is infinitesimal compared to that of the afterlife, and whether we end up in Heaven or Hell is already predestined. So why doesn't God just immediately create us in the afterlife?
This question *must* be a commonly discussed one in #theology, but I'm not a theologian and I don't know where to look. Any ideas?

2025-04-01 20:07:38 GMT

- reply

@nprofile…n8ju Not really! This semester, my usual teaching schedule on Thursday is philosophy of science from 13 to 15, then philosophy of the infinite from 15 to 18. 😅 (A bit much, but I prefer it to having my teaching more spread out.)

2025-04-01 20:00:06 GMT

- reply

@nprofile…n8ju Your Amsterdam talk sounds very interesting, but unfortunately I'll be teaching that afternoon until quite late!

2025-03-29 21:13:53 GMT

- reply

@nprofile…lwgl At 49%, you'd be thinking about charging your phone, right? 😄

2025-03-18 07:50:14 GMT

3:40 am: pear lies chilling in the fruit bowl, hard as stone
3:46 am: pear becomes ripe
3:53 am: pear becomes mushy and brown

2025-03-15 22:47:14 GMT

- reply

@nprofile…eznj English is not my first language, but isn't 'hustle' a word for prostitution? 🧐

2025-03-05 06:16:50 GMT

Well, that's fast. (Source: 538.)
https://cdn.masto.host/mastodongamedevplace/media_attachments/files/114/108/356/825/490/411/original/a58e46cc2b40c6c8.jpg

2025-03-02 17:48:25 GMT

Ik leef nu nog heel even in de hoop dat Schoof straks voor de camera's staat en zegt: "Wij gaan ook militairen naar Oekraïne sturen om de vrede te bewaken." Dat hij gewoon lef toont en Geert uitdaagt om het kabinet daarop te laten vallen. Dat hij op het cruciale moment tóch moed blijkt te hebben.

2024-11-05 09:06:03 GMT

I was in the train just now with a group of young women studying to be apothecary assistants. They were confused about their exam on calculating medicine doses. What did they use to inform themselves about the right calculations? ChatGPT. 🤐
Forget about AGI. *This* is how AI is gonna kill you: in small, stupid, absurd ways.

2024-10-09 17:06:10 GMT

- reply

@npub1y5h…7m3c Okay! 🙂

2024-10-09 16:42:43 GMT

- reply

@npub1y5h…7m3c Maybe giving voting advice isn't entirely in the spirit of the competition? (I agree with the recommendation to play this game, of course!)

2024-08-15 09:43:55 GMT

Okay, grammar people. "He does not have an epistemic relation to the theory at all, and does not nor cannot assess it in the light of the evidence."
Is "does not nor cannot" a grammatically admissible construction in English?

2024-06-10 07:23:27 GMT

I feel a disconnect from 'fandom'. Like, I just don't get it.
I understand loving a particular book or movie. But I find it extremely hard to understand why, if one loves a particular book/movie, one would want more stories (even by other authors or in totally diferent media) set in 'the same universe', or why one would want to set one's own creative writing in that 'universe', and so on.
I'm re-reading and loving Le Guin's Earthsea series, but I'm not eager for an Earthsea game/movie etc.

2024-04-28 19:22:24 GMT

According to YouTube, a whopping 92% of my viewers are male. That's pretty disconcerting to me, although I wonder:
(1) How accurate these statistics are, given that surely almost nobody tells Google their gender.
(2) What the overall gender distribution on YouTube is.
I could certainly do more videos about women philosophers (although the epistemology course I'm currently making features a good number of contemporary female philosophers), but it seems unlikely to remove this massive gap.

2024-04-25 16:51:27 GMT

- reply

@npub12dg…vvxd I'm extremely sceptical about that bullshit detection system...

2024-04-25 14:51:07 GMT

I'm preparing a lecture about whether AI has scientific understanding. What can I say.
Me: "When Archimedes jumped out of the bath, shouting Eureka, what happened to the level of the bath water?"
ChatGPT (representative part of longer answer): "When he jumped out of the bath, the volume of water that his body displaced was no longer present in the bath. Therefore, the level of the bathwater would have risen temporarily to fill the space left by Archimedes' body."

2024-03-30 08:52:59 GMT

I asked the 5yo what you need to do to be a good human. Her three rules:
1. Eat well
2. Drink well
3. Don't come from an egg

2024-03-19 19:17:10 GMT

I'm reading a book about a boy who has magic powers and goes to a special school for wizards where everything is not what it seems and... yes of course the book is A Wizard of Earthsea, why do you ask?

2024-03-14 19:01:10 GMT

- reply

@npub1x0f…xzau Isn't he just using the phrase to emphatically deny the traditional theory according to which we ought to subject our passions to reason?

2024-03-09 23:20:28 GMT

Notker has a fun anecdote about an envoy who unwittingly breaks a local taboo when in Greece. The noblemen present are outraged and ask Charlemagne to put the envoy to death. Charlemagne agrees that that is what the law demands, but tells the envoy that he'll grant him one wish, as long as he doesn't ask for his life.
"Then the boon I ask is that the eyes of every man who saw me break the taboo are put out."
Everyone denies having witnessed it, and the envoy goes free.

2024-01-22 06:58:18 GMT

These days, whenever the 5yo falls ill with a fever she picked up at school, I also fall ill; and, what's worse, every single time it takes me not the three days or so that seem normal to me, but a full *week* or more of fever symptoms before I recover. Is this normal? Am I just getting old? Has COVID harmed my immune system?
It's certainly irritating. 🙄

2024-01-15 17:28:58 GMT

The kids were guessing the ingredients of my stroganoff sauce.
Thinking about salt, I gave them a hint: "It's very small, you can't see it, but it's present in almost all food."
Said the 7yo: "Microplastics!"

2024-01-15 13:26:01 GMT

- reply

@npub18r2…px49 They can be easily trained to produce false and misleading sentences. Surely they cannot lie. I think this distinction is absolutely not a nitpick, but something we should keep in mind every time we talk about LLMs.

2024-01-15 07:19:05 GMT

- reply

@npub199d…rm9p It's 200 years late for a Descartridge.

2024-01-09 08:52:54 GMT

Is there a license I could put on my future software and prose projects that is the equivalent of GPL (for software) or Creative Commons (for prose) except that it specifically disallows using my stuff for training AI? Is this even necessary & possible & a good idea?

2024-01-02 20:58:06 GMT

Next stop in the early 16th century chivalric epic Orlando Furioso? The moon, obviously, and specifically the valley of lost things, where everything can be found that is lost on earth. Lost wealth, lost reputations, broken promises, the hours that we lost playing meaningless games, lost loves, all charity ("which is forgotten as soon as the giver dies"). And especially Reason, which people lose more than anything else, even though they never notice it.
https://cdn.masto.host/mastodongamedevplace/media_attachments/files/111/688/341/479/049/644/original/a926fc51eb89290b.jpg

2023-12-25 12:08:26 GMT

There's lies, damned lies, and the preparation times in recipes.

2023-12-21 07:59:31 GMT

The 7yo filled a glass with dried split peas and water, and the end result is quite amazing. He added some more water, and it's still growing.
https://cdn.masto.host/mastodongamedevplace/media_attachments/files/111/617/341/840/304/347/original/f2089d6dab0ae94b.jpg

2023-12-18 20:16:26 GMT

- reply

@npub18r2…px49 I'd believe this if I'd read it in a book.

2023-12-01 18:36:51 GMT

"How did Gandalf live to be so old," the 7yo asked, "if he's smoking a pipe all the time?"

2023-11-28 21:42:28 GMT

- reply

@npub18r2…px49 Wait, doesn't modal realism mean that possible worlds are real, without saying anything about their content; and isn't it only the Principle of Recombination + some dubious ideas about the essence of donkeys that lead to the claim that there are talking donkeys?

2023-11-10 13:05:30 GMT

- reply

@npub18r2…px49 What did you read with them?

2023-10-17 07:18:53 GMT

- reply

@npub1tx3…kxnn I've taken a look at it in the past, and it seems like a place where I'd want to mirror my YouTube philosophy channel, but I'm extremely unsure about how to find a good server. (And it seems to me that hosting costs for servers must be substantial, given how big videos are.)

2023-08-12 21:20:30 GMT

I have a friend who is a minister and interested in #ttrpgs that engage with Christianity or Christian themes. (Not preachy stuff, he's very liberal and open-minded, but games that allow you to explore questions that might come up in thinking about Christianity.) Any tips? #ttrpg

2023-08-09 20:19:23 GMT

Please participate in the 2023 edition of the Interactive Fiction Top 50! Full rules in the forum post, but the basic idea is:
* Make a list of what you consider the best pieces of interactive fiction (parser, choice, whatever).
* Between one and twenty titles.
* Order doesn't matter: one title = one vote.
* Post it in the forum or e-mail me, [email protected]
* Optional: share your list on Mastodon!
* Deadline: September 3.
Please share widely!
#InteractiveFiction
https://intfiction.org/t/participate-in-the-2023-interactive-fiction-top-50/63769

2023-07-08 11:18:29 GMT

- reply

@npub13dl…qfg2 @npub1cw4…7e5q Hier had wel een content warning op gemogen van mij.