Rob Malouf

Don't forget Sinclair! Everyone forgets Sinclair. He's the one that put Firth's ideas into practice.

Dinsdag verschijnt mijn boek 'Woord voor woord: de verleden tijd van taal'. Daarin vind je onder andere 70 grote infographics.

Vandaag is het tijd voor preview nr. 2: 'Een suikerreis':

"What's the part number for the plastic plug thing on the thermostat housing of a 3.2l VR6 (Audi 8p)". It instantly came back WITH THE RIGHT ANSWER.

I, for one, welcome our new part-number-knowing overlords.

Now I'm convinced. I'm replacing the thermostat housing on my ancient Audi. Of course, a little plastic doohickey broke off when I took it apart. And of course I can't find it on any parts diagrams. I have no idea what it's called so I can't look it up in the usual way. So I asked chatgpt. 1/2

Really? I was still chalk+blackboard back then. i1.wp.com/www.lisarive...

Before you scrape and before you train… - UC Berkeley Library Update Using AI and Text Mining with Library Resources: What Every UC Berkeley Researcher Needs to Know Planning to scrape a website or database? Train an AI tool? Before you scrape and before you train, the...

great resource here from @ucbscholcomm.bsky.social: "Before you scrape and before you train…" update.lib.berkeley.edu/2025/09/02/b...

What is emergence? This is one of the most central ingredients of complexity, and a challenging one to formalize. Here's a paper by @seanmcarroll.bsky.social & Achyth Parola that attempts to classify different forms of emergence. @manlius.bsky.social @sfiscience.bsky.social arxiv.org/pdf/2410.15468

I can cover matrix-vector notation in a week, with implementations in plain python and numpy (we get to pytorch later in term). It's not hard,. No reason for students to think they need a whole semester of linalg to do a comp ling class.

60,000+!

"Criminal federal search warrant"? I don't think that's a thing.

YouTube video by Declan Fleming ICE raid at Buona Forchetta in South Park

In my neighborhood yesterday #FuckICE

I warned about the Homework Apocalypse in 2023.

It happened roughly as expected. There is a world where AI & traditional education get along very well (mixes of active in-class learning, AI-assisted assignments & tutors, blue books), but it needs to be built. www.oneusefulthing.org/p/the-homewo...

It's not even really true that the LLMs people interact with now are just reproducing statistical distributions. It's all the stuff around the next-word-predicting component that makes them so useful.

Greenspun's revenge

As chair of a humanities department at a working class university, I feel this so hard...

I would gladly provide PhD-level services for $19,995/mo.

Of course it is not the most elite institutions with the most resources fighting back. It is those with the fewest resources who serve the most marginalized populations. For these institutions DEI is not an optional add-on but their entire mission.

Whatever happens, we can be sure the faculty won't have any say in it. I hope you'd agree that, whatever the benefits AI might have for high ed, it can't be something that's imposed on us by an admin whose primary goal seems to be attracting good press.

What's missing from the commentary is that this "deal" was worked out with no consultation from the faculty and we still have no idea what it entails. Is it just a system-wide site license for ChatGPT? Are we all being fired and replaced with robots? I guess we'll find out!

If my math is right, the overhead collected JUST BY HARVARD would be enough to make up this year's cuts for the entire CSU.

Speaking of which: the largest public uni system in the US is facing collapse due to devastating (extremely blue) state budget cuts. Wish this got the same attention among fellow academics as how much Harvard skims off its $700 million in federal research funding. calmatters.org/education/hi...

We've had in-person meetings but no emails. They're trying to avoid communicating over channels that are subject to public records requests.

Acting on Trump's order, federal officials opened up two California dams The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers just opened up two California dams. A spokesperson says the flows are 'controlled' and being coordinated with local officials.

Here's how stupid Trump thinks we are: he just dumped a bunch of valuable water from 2 federal flood control dams, wasting it into the Tulare Lake bed where it evaporates. None goes to LA, but he claims he's saving LA. Pissing on us and telling us it's raining.

SSU announces deep cuts: Layoffs, program eliminations, end of athletics to address $23.9 million deficit In a message to the campus community, Interim President Emily Cutrer said prior reductions had proven insufficient to resolve the university’s financial challenges.

Please share: Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, California (CSU): "The Economics, Art History, Geology, Philosophy, Theater and Dance, Women and Gender Studies departments are slated for closure."
www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news...

Welcome to Bunch Your new favorite way to automate macOS. Bunch uses plain text files to launch applications, perform system tasks, run scripts, and automate everything.

bunchapp.co

People opining on LLMs, both pro and con, really need to go back and read some Malinowski.

Good news: I'm giving two talks at #LSA2025 in January!
Bad news: they've scheduled them back-to-back in two different sessions 😶

Anyone know how to get in touch with the organizers?

Surprising that the Academic/Teaching slice is so small, given that there are way more teaching-focused universities (and therefore jobs) in the world. I wonder if you would get different results if you interviewed people with PhDs from a different range of schools.

It isn't a problem. You're doing really interesting work that Prof. Bender clearly doesn't know anything about. She's merely reacting to the mention of LLMs. People have been using taggers, parsers, etc for decades with only a vague sense of what's in the training data.