Marcel Bollmann

New blog post: AI Allergy.

On my increasing disgust with the AI discourse, even though I still like the technical and philosophical. And how I wish I could be excited about AI again.

togelius.blogspot.com/2025/08/ai-a...

"Hang on a moment while we sign you out." - sign me in, outlook, IN!

Writing on any kind of social network always feels like approaching strangers in the Wild West – they always react like you might pull a gun at them any second. I'm so tired of it.

Making changes—meaningless or not—with the sole intent of gaming the peer-review system sounds like a better way of defining misconduct here. But the hard problem in practice is of course proving the author’s intent.

My point is that “changes to a paper not made with the intention to improve it” is not a good criterion for misconduct IMO, as we make changes for other reasons all the time (including what Emile said about appeasing reviewers).

A screenshot from the DeepL translator, showing a Swedish translation with “Alternatives” underneath it, which contains entirely Japanese text.

DeepL when translating to Swedish: Have you considered writing in Japanese?

We make meaningless changes all the time e.g. to fit within page limits, those also often don't make the paper better in the eyes of the authors...

🎓 Looking for PhD opportunities in #NLProc for a start in Spring 2026?

🗒️ Add your expression of interest to join @copenlu.bsky.social here by 20 July: forms.office.com/e/HZSmgR9nXB

Selected candidates will be invited to submit a DARA fellowship application with me: daracademy.dk/fellowship/f...

a man throws a glass apple at a concrete egg, causing it to shatter

ICYMI – still a few days left to apply! ⤵️

LEGO website in 1996

MTV Online website in 1996

Pepsi website in 1996

WinZip website in 1996

Web design trends in 1996

– LEGO
– MTV Online
– Pepsi
– WinZip

#WebDesignHistory

Same here, same here

#NAACL2025 ended more than a week ago & @ufal-cuni.bsky.social folks were there:
Main conf: @kathaem.bsky.social presented joint work w/ @tomlim.bsky.social, @jlibovicky.bsky.social and Alex Fraser: Beyond Literal Token Overlap: Token Alignability for Multilinguality aclanthology.org/2025.naacl-s...

Interested in multilingual tokenization in #NLP? Lisa Beinborn and I are hiring!

PhD candidate position in Göttingen, Germany: www.uni-goettingen.de/de/644546.ht...

PostDoc position in Leuven, Belgium:
www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jo...

Deadline 6th of June

Postdoc in Computational Social Science

📣 We’re looking for postdocs in computational social science at Linköping University, Sweden!

Positions can be based at the LiU NLP group (though the call is not limited to NLP). Two years full-time, with possibility of a third year. Deadline is June 3, 2025.

More info here: liu.se/en/work-at-l...

5 minutes with Marshall Taylor Meet Marshall A. Taylor from New Mexico State University, a computational sociologist studying how cultural knowledge changes across populations using language and survey data.

✨ Please join us in welcoming Marshall A. Taylor to the Swedish Excellence Center for Computational Social Science (SweCSS) as our new Senior Visiting Fellow: liu.se/en/news-item...

Norrköping campus at sunset

We are hiring postdocs in Computational Social Science
📍SweCSS, Norrköping, Sweden
⏰Deadline June 3
🔗https://liu.se/en/work-at-liu/vacancies/26854
Please apply // help us spread the word

Eveyone & their brother is using ChatGPT to avoid doing the reading/homework & we’re all going to suffer bc of it.

PhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081

Do you have any favorite resources for “how to write feedback to students”?

In my courses, it’s often several TAs that assess student papers, and I notice that the style and substance of the feedback differs wildly. I wanted to compile some guidelines, but was wondering what’s already out there.

I just attended a conference in the US. We had one speaker detained and two others turned away at the border.

First vs. second syllable stress: /məˈnaɪəkli/

I also noticed a pattern: for me it’s often those where the stressed syllable changes from the more common word — maniac/maniacally, demonstrate/demonstrable, carnivore/carnivorous, admire/admirable, ...

Strong accent is also often perceived as low language proficiency/understanding, I think.

Today’s word is “maniacally”.

Back on X, I had an ongoing thread about English words of which I had *just* discovered the correct pronunciation.

It contained words like conscientious, demonstrable, carnivorous. The last one I posted in 11/2021: epitome.

I thought by now I wouldn't discover any new ones anymore. I was wrong. >

Biträdande universitetslektor i datorlingvistik Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för lingvistik och filologi Institutionen för lingvistik och filologi bedriver forskning och utbildning inom språkvetenskap och textstudier med fokus på Asiens s

We just announced a new position as assistant professor / biträdande universitetslektor (BUL).
For more information visit:
uu.varbi.com/se/what:job/...

I think you are misunderstanding what this tech demo actually is, but I will engage with what I think your gripe is — AI tooling trivializing the skillsets of programmers, artists, and designers. My first games involved hand assembling machine code and turning graph paper characters into hex digits. Software progress has made that work as irrelevant as chariot wheel maintenance. Building power tools is central to all the progress in computers. Game engines have radically expanded the range of people involved in game dev, even as they deemphasized the importance of much of my beloved system engineering. AI tools will allow the best to reach even greater heights, while enabling smaller teams to accomplish more, and bring in some completely new creator demographics. Yes, we will get to a world where you can get an interactive game (or novel, or movie) out of a prompt, but there will be far better exemplars of the medium still created by dedicated teams of passionate developers. The world will be vastly wealthier in terms of the content available at any given cost. Will there be more or less game developer jobs? That is an open question. It could go the way of farming, where labor saving technology allow a tiny fraction of the previous workforce to satisfy everyone, or it could be like social media, where creative entrepreneurship has flourished at many different scales. Regardless, “don’t use power tools because they take people’s jobs” is not a winning strategy.

John Carmack on the AI Quake-hallucinator.

🫠

I’m currently forced to prepare a document in a given MS Word template, and words can’t describe how hilariously terrible the experience is. Completely impossible to paste text and tables from another document without the styling being all over the place, and no obvious way to fix it.