Fausto Carcassi

I binged @tonytula.com's two books and want more so now I'm forced to read "Remote Research: Real Users, Real Time, Real Research" as a piece of narrative in the Tulathimutte-verse

you know there is one thing everyone could have that billionaires now have: "a meaningful say over their work, their lives, and the places they live". don't think Altman will like the story of how we get that for everyone tho

TIL Fats Domino's eight children were called: Antoine III, Anatole, Andre, Antonio, Antoinette, Andrea, Anola, and Adonica.

I agree! I am more worried for students. I guess I should have said: the fear is AI will absorb anyone who *could learn* what a function application is

I think the fear might be that formal semantics will disappear because AI will absorb everyone who knows what a function application is

Sadly, as a field it's just slightly too close to the star of AI research. Whether it will orbit or fall and crash is unclear (a lot of pessimism around though afaict).

Personally in teaching it I think we should emphasise more: (1) How strangely language behaves even in apparently simple domains like Boolean connectives (2) events events events!

So I think that, much like logic, TCS lives a split but stable existence between a topic students learn to make their thinking about language a bit more precise, and a research field that connects more and more with other fields (typology, cognitive science)

The field has matured so that the intro course (usually H&K, using S at the top) is quite far removed from the standard picture in the research lit (some kind of neo-Davidsonian event semantics w/ a rich verbal spine), though there's some attempts to realign (Coppock & Champollion textbook)

(1) a tool to state typological generalisations or describe underdocumented langs, (2) a framework to formulate precise empirical predictions to test (Jacopo Romoli has great stuff here), (3) a way to study how certain kind of meanings are realized and dealt with (e.g. degrees), ...

In my experience most people aren't as committed to (/interested in?) the big foundations that motivated it in the old days (I think Davidson (?) somewhere sums it up as: a systematic account of compositionality+entailment patterns+logical form), and instead use TCS in more applied ways e.g., as:

Our large-scale interdisciplinary research initiative @unituebingen.bsky.social on "Common Ground" now has a website: uni-tuebingen.de/en/research/...

We are also hiring! Check out recent postings here and the continually added job ads here:
uni-tuebingen.de/en/universit...

#linguistics + friends

Excited to share a new CogSci paper co-led with @benpry.bsky.social!

Once a cornerstone for studying human reasoning, the think-aloud method declined in popularity as manual coding limited its scale. We introduce a method to automate analysis of verbal reports and scale think-aloud studies. (1/8)🧵

First day notes now posted: juliangrove.github.io/nasslli-2025...

I'm packing for NASSLLI 2025. The lineup is terrific! I'm looking forward to enjoying Seattle for the first time and climbing again with @shanest.bsky.social, who organized the school (kudos!). nasslli25.shane.st/schedule/

Yeah, I am in the process of metabolizing that particular shock...

If I think of the time I squandered, Battiato comes to mind:

"Se penso a come ho speso male il mio tempo
Che non tornerà, non ritornerà più"

Is it blasphemy to say that pre-WWI biology (filtered through the humanistic eyes of Thomas Mann) has a FEP vibe to it?

which could in all purity make beauty perceptible to the senses. Rather was it conveyed and shaped by the somehow awakened voluptuousness of matter, of the organic, dying-living substance itself, the reeking flesh.

and which became form, beauty, a lofty image, and yet all the time the essence of sensuality and desire. For this form and beauty were not spiritborne; nor, like the form and beauty of sculpture, conveyed by a neutral and spiritconsumed substance,

It was a pullulation, an unfolding, a form-building (made possible by the overbalancing of its instability, yet controlled by the laws of growth inherent within it), of something brewed out of water, albumen, salt and fats, which was called flesh,

It was a secret and ardent stirring in the frozen chastity of the universal; it was a stolen and voluptuous impurity of sucking and secreting; an exhalation of carbonic acid gas and material impurities of mysterious origin and composition.

a phenomenon conveyed by matter, like the rainbow on the waterfall, and like the flame. Yet why not material—it was sentient to the point of desire and disgust, the shamelessness of matter become sensible of itself, the incontinent form of being.

It was the existence of the actually impossible-to-exist, of a half-sweet, half-painful balancing, or scarcely balancing, in this restricted and feverish process of decay and renewal, upon the point of existence. It was not matter and it was not spirit, but something between the two,

What then was life? It was warmth, the warmth generated by a form-preserving instability, a fever of matter, which accompanied the process of ceaseless decay and repair of albumen molecules that were too impossibly complicated, too impossibly ingenious in structure.

This excessive busyness got me back into reading long book though. They feel like islands of calm. I've been reading The Magic Mountain (which I had been meaning to do for years) and it has some real gems, e.g.,:

Since I became an assistant professor I have followed a two-step research process:
1. Apologize for having had no time to make progress on a project but I'm going to have more time soon
2. Soon find out I in fact do not have more time

NYU LLM + cognitive science post-doc interest form Tal Linzen's group at NYU is hiring a post-doc! We're interested in creating language models that process language more like humans than mainstream LLMs do, through architectural modifications and int...

I'm hiring at least one post-doc! We're interested in creating language models that process language more like humans than mainstream LLMs do, through architectural modifications and interpretability-style steering. Express interest here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

I have a project about precisely this (kind of) question! I think one big reason it hasn't been studied so far is that it requires a slightly exotic combination of modeling tools (not obvious how to define the space of modes of composition!)

Me giving a talk

As I get older my slides get funkier