Margarita Nafpaktitis

@nafpaktitism

Librarian by day. Even more maladroit in person! Sundry book and textile arts, cross-cultural gastronomica, and ever taller piles of things on every available surface. Always hoping for funny, but ending up at earnest. she/вона/она/ona/αυτή ❌👑 ❌🤖 ✅🗳️ ✅📖📝

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Margarita Nafpaktitis@nafpaktitism· 25d

We saw you from across the bar and we liked your vibe.

Jitka Cerhová and Ivana Karbanová in Věra Chytilová’s “Daisies” (cz: Sedmikrásky) sitting on a red banquette behind a small table, each with a large bottle of Pilsner Urquell in front of them.

Margarita Nafpaktitis@nafpaktitism· 26d

Borrowed some drawers of hand-written catalog cards from the education library for the workshop. Dewey would’ve disapproved of this one, though. Too many “flourishes”!

Close-up of a hand-written catalog card in a drawer — for Progressive Practical Arithmetic for Common Schools & Academies, by Horatio N. Robinson.

Margarita Nafpaktitis@nafpaktitism· 26d

Led a workshop today on Dewey-approved “library hand.” All about friction and silent concentration! Delightful! (Great background article from @atlasobscura.com : www.atlasobscura.com/articles/lib...)

Margarita Nafpaktitis@nafpaktitism· Jul 9

@cantorsdust.bsky.social beat me to it, but here's a pic! Love that little bridge between the two.

Margarita Nafpaktitis@nafpaktitism· Jun 29

Thank you @emilymbender.bsky.social and Nanna Inie! So many great alts to anthropomorphism in this piece! buttondown.com/maiht3k/arch...

artificial intelligence → probabilistic automation
hybrid intelligence → augmented human intelligence
image recognition → image labeling
speech recognition → automatic transcription
the model shows bias → the model reflects bias
model mistakes → model errors
chatbots are good at … → chatbots are good for …
hallucination → undesirable output

Margarita Nafpaktitis@nafpaktitism· Jun 25

My first thought, when I saw this, was, "How on earth could entrees cost the same in 1901 as they do now?" But those are cents, aren't they?

Detail from a menu in the NYPL Buttolph Collection, dated 1900-01.
Fish: Fried Brook Trout, anchovy butter 50; Boiled Haddock, lobster sauce 35.
Entrees: Beef a la Mode, with noodles 35; Fricasee of Turkey Wings, with oysters 40; Pork Chops Saute, sauce Robert 35; Haricot of Lamb a la Francaise 35; Ham Cutlet, with puree of spinach 35.
Roasts: Goose Stuffed, with apples 50; Leg of Mutton, currant jelly 35; Prime Ribs of Beef, au jus 35: extra cut 50.

Margarita Nafpaktitis@nafpaktitism· Jun 14

The most incredible scent of full-blown roses…and nearby barbecue. Mile-End, Montreal.

Margarita Nafpaktitis@nafpaktitism· Jun 14

Book return conveyor belt at the Grande Bibliotheque. www.banq.qc.ca/grande-bibli...

Margarita Nafpaktitis@nafpaktitism· Jun 12

Canada v Bosnia Herzegovina en plein air, Mile-End, Montreal.

A large crowd gathered on the sidewalk around a restaurant with a tv on the outside wall showing a world cup match.

Margarita Nafpaktitis@nafpaktitism· Jun 12

And this sign suggests that there may occasionally be other flies. But I did not see ANY menacer’ing, frapper’ing, and DEFINITELY no cracher’ing in my week of bus riding.

Sign at the front of the 51 bus (my favorite line!) in Montreal that has MENACER, FRAPPER, and CRACHER inside of a circle-with-a-slash prohibition sign, and underneath it: Aggresser un chauffeur c’est criminel.”

Margarita Nafpaktitis@nafpaktitism· Jun 11

Looks like Montreal also (I’ve seen it in Russia and Poland ) has a season of flying poplar floof.

Margarita Nafpaktitis@nafpaktitism· Jun 9

When I am lying in bed at my Montreal airbnb this week, this is what is looking at me. A jigsaw puzzle. Of pensive Dobby. Extremely firmly glued to the wall. Pelting it with socks had no effect.

Margarita Nafpaktitis@nafpaktitism· May 28

@wikimediafoundation.org, do better! Stop union busting! „Your authority to host the encyclopedia is exactly as strong as the trust you maintain & that trust is being burned through at a rate that should alarm whoever is keeping the books.” @jakeorlowitz.bsky.social medium.com/@jakeorlowit...

Wikipedia is not a website. It is the largest reference work humanity has ever produced. It is the corpus that trains the AI models you use every day. It is the first citation when a high schooler looks up an unfamiliar term, and what a journalist reads before calling a source.
The content is free. The labor is not. The gift economy of the encyclopedia rests on a small wage economy underneath it, and when the wage economy starts behaving like every other tech company, treating the workers who serve volunteers as costs to optimize, the whole thing frays.

Margarita Nafpaktitis@nafpaktitism· May 22

The absolute evil of this is just… www.sfgate.com/tech/article... @arianabindman.bsky.social

According to a 2024 survey from MyPerfectResume, 81% of recruiters admitted to posting ads for positions that were fake or already filled. While some respondents said employers did it to maintain a presence on job boards and build a talent pool, it’s also used to commit psychological warfare: 25% said ghost jobs helped companies gauge how replaceable their employees were, while 23% said it helped make the company appear more stable during a hiring freeze. Another damning 2024 report from Resume Builder said that 62% companies posted them specifically to make their employees feel replaceable. They also made ads to “trick overworked employees” into believing that more people would be brought on to alleviate their overwhelming workload.

Margarita Nafpaktitis@nafpaktitism· May 20

Oscar Isaac should’ve been cast as Odysseus. Period. I don’t hate Matt Damon, but why this role? The rest of the cast I’m ok with!

Margarita Nafpaktitis@nafpaktitism· May 15

Instead of broadcasting the world’s largest live music event, Slovenia will show a series of films about Palestine. #Eurovision2026 www.euronews.com/culture/2026...

Nerdy crone with gray hair and red glasses pointing at her own light blue tshirt that says „SLOVENIJA DVANAJST TOČK” [„Slovenia Twelve Points”] and EUROVANGELISTS.

Margarita Nafpaktitis@nafpaktitism· May 15

This year's #Eurovision2026 bingo cards are ready to go! bit.ly/ESC2026BINGO

A bingo card for Eurovision 2026 with 25 squares (5x5). The middle square is a heart. Row 1: traditional dress, singer wearing mask, jalla! jalla!, audible audience clapping to beat, mid-song costume change; Row 2: so many rhinestones, subtitles, 12 points to neighbor, this is disco, singer lies down on stage; Row 3: oh no! politics!, multi-part harmony, (heart), dance break!, giant nature imagery; Row 4: wind machine, just give us the points already!, flag facepaint in audience, faux fur, presenter joke is not funny; Row 5: folk instrument, something goes a little wrong, presenter costume change, this country isn't europe, awkward time delay.

Margarita Nafpaktitis@nafpaktitism· May 9

The aroma was heavenly… Happy bees.

Margarita Nafpaktitis@nafpaktitism· May 8

🔥🔥🔥 Cruz, N. Illusions of Understanding from Outsourcing Thinking to LLMs. Computational Brain & Behavior (2026). doi.org/10.1007/s421...

Abstract: Some illusions of understanding are an inevitable part of the research process, while others can be avoided or overcome by careful critical thinking and observation. We are facing an increased risk of avoidable illusions as more research activities are delegated to large language models (LMM). LLMs can be useful but they cannot think, and their use can undermine our thinking and understanding. Thinking for ourselves is hard and error prone but worthwhile - and there are no shortcuts to understanding.

Margarita Nafpaktitis@nafpaktitism· May 6

Why do mobile app users get hired 30% faster, Indeed?

Margarita Nafpaktitis@nafpaktitism· May 5

Without downloading anything new, where are you, mentally?

A silkscreen full-page image from Mike Taylor’s hand-sewn artist book, „Love Song” (Booklyn 2016): head and shoulders of a person with shoulder-length hair and manicured right hand raised is speaking/singing/shouting into a microphone, and a white, wedge-shaped speech bubble with handwritten text „ANTIDEPRESSANTSSS” (sic) is aimed into the person’s right ear. There is a dynamic background of rays of cyan, magenta, and yellow radiating spikily out from the person’s head.

Margarita Nafpaktitis@nafpaktitism· Apr 24

The typographical chaos (baseline?!?!?! kerning?!?!? wtf “m” in “imaging” altogether?!?!) when I was checking in made me legit trepidatious about the services I was there to receive.

Lettering on the wall of a reception area that says “Hospital & Clinics” on the top in san serif all capitals, and below in italics “Imaging Services Reception.” The baselines and kerning for all of the letters (which appears to have been affixed to the wall one-by-one) are chaotically inconsistent, but the italics are especially disturbing. Plus, the “m” in imaging looks like it’s been aggressively mangled. Whew.

Margarita Nafpaktitis@nafpaktitism· Mar 24

Reading this article made me feel physically ill. nymag.com/intelligence...

"There is an underlying tension between the predictions of generally intelligent systems that can replace much of human cognitive labor and the money AI labs are actually spending on data to automate one task at a time. It is the difference between a future of abrupt mass unemployment and something more subtle but potentially just as disruptive: a future in which a growing number of people find work teaching AI to do the work they once did. The first wave of these workers consists of software engineers, graphic designers, writers, and other professionals in fields where the new training techniques are proving effective. They find themselves in a surreal situation, competing for precarious gigs pantomiming the careers they’d hoped to have."

Margarita Nafpaktitis@nafpaktitism· Mar 21

When Polish and English share a keyboard, Part Deux.

Screen cap of text where I have typed the word “but” and the suggested emoji are a hiking boot, a women’s flat shoe, and a men’s dress shoe.

Margarita Nafpaktitis@nafpaktitism· Mar 20

Whew. This piece by Kate Gilbertson (who has a comp lit degree from UC Berkeley) is eye-opening and deeply, deeply bleak. (I wish Slate did gift links!) "I “Humanize” Chatbot-Written College Application Essays for a Living. I Have a Warning for Everyone." + slate.com/technology/2...

So, despite the seemingly simple nature of my task (switching out synonyms, cutting clichéd metaphors), I often find myself reaching the end of my edits and confronting this larger problem. What I am wrestling with is an essay not just written by A.I. but poorly imagined by A.I. It is these clients, who rely on this technology for not only words but ideas themselves, who turn my job from trivial to impossible. Oftentimes, I will rewrite an entire essay from scratch, but if I do not change it “enough” (just how much is enough I have never been able to calculate), the A.I.-checker—which is, of course, itself a bot—will tell me that the essay is still 100 percent A.I.-generated. Sometimes, my revisions end up with an even higher score for A.I. generation than the original, simply because I have already run the essay through an A.I.-checker multiple times by the point I reach my final draft, making the technology more familiar with the material. In these situations, I am left with no other option than to rip apart the structure of an essay to tell a new story that the A.I. doesn’t own. To these students, who perceive A.I.’s banal flatness as a hallmark of good style, my new essays are not acceptable. They “sound too weird.” In these moments, all I want to say is, “It should.” Instead, I find myself fighting to get paid at all.

Margarita Nafpaktitis@nafpaktitism· Mar 20

Looked at new books today, and I’ve never seen such a massive reader advisory on the front of an NLO book before: “18+ THIS MATERIAL (INFORMATION) WAS PRODUCED BY FOREIGN AGENT GORALIK LINOR DZHULIIA,+

The front of a book jacket, blue background, text at top left in white: Biblioteka zhurnala “Teoriia mody” [Library of the “Theory of Fashion” magazine]; SHLIAPU MOZHESH’ NE SNIMAT’: ESSE O KOSTIUME I KUL’TURE [YOU CAN LEAVE YOUR HAT ON: ESSAYS ON COSTUME AND CULTURE]. The black silhouette of a leg raised in the air, wearing a pointed-toe, stiletto-heeled boot, is almost completely obscured by a large (it covers the entire bottom half of the book jacket), black warning label with white, block text designating the book for readers 18 years and older, and stating, in Russian, THIS MATERIAL (INFORMATION) WAS PRODUCED BY FOREIGN AGENT GORALIK LINOR DZHULIIA OR REGARDS THE ACTIVITY OF FOREIGN AGENT GORALIK LINOR DZHULIIA.

Margarita Nafpaktitis@nafpaktitism· Mar 18

“Be curious. Be skeptical. In equal measure. That is how you spot the bullshit.” www.rawsignal.ca/newsletter-a...

Should you really put that in front of your customers, clients, and community? Is it right to pressure your employees to use more and more and more of it, to give it more and more access, just to see what happens? It’s possible to talk about those risks thoughtfully, to offer guidance and safeguards where you need to, and even to conclude that this or that application is appropriate and well-mitigated. But most of the AI froth we’re seeing shows no sign of having even thought about it.

Margarita Nafpaktitis@nafpaktitism· Mar 17

This is a random shot in the dark, but if there are any cognoscenti of midcentury Czech casual footwear out there who can ID the make/model of these very well-worn-by-Allen-Ginsberg shoes (my POW is mounting an exhibit of items from his archive this summer), I will be forever grateful!

Margarita Nafpaktitis@nafpaktitism· Mar 16

Search your camera roll for “hell”:

From a 2018 exhibit at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library on student humor magazines: a double-page spread titled “Dwinelle Hell” which tells a story, with a series of photographs, of a student lost inside of Dwinelle Hall when he’s just trying to get to class. As an erstwhile undergraduate Slavic major at Cal who tried to take a “shortcut” to a Russian lit class, I can confirm that this is barely fictional/satire.

Margarita Nafpaktitis@nafpaktitism· Mar 15

The @letterformarchive.org 10th anniversary party seemed like the perfect venue for the maiden voyage of my @studiocult.bsky.social binder clip purse.