David Mimno

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Evaluation reasoning interpretability rl in context benchmark alignment synthetic data

COLM word cloud. Yoav says it’s the year of reasoning, but evaluation is also huge.

Interesting q: in preliterate times would the desire and ability to memorize 27k lines of Homer have been a kind of neurodiversity?

This time we finish it

Three major drifts we found:
1️⃣ Licenses: from corporate to other types. We often see use restrictions mutate to permissive or copyleft (even when counter to upstream license terms)
2️⃣ Languages: from multilingual → English-only
3️⃣ Docs: from long & detailed → short & templated

I hear such good things about Rust, and then I actually look at it and its stuff like this:

“Which model will rid me of this turbulent priest?”

Assistant Professor - Information - School of Information University of California, Berkeley is hiring. Apply now!

The UC Berkeley School of Information is hiring an assistant professor in the broad field of Information--including areas of info seeking/retrieval, digital humanities, cultural analytics, info viz, & philosophy of information (among others). Deadline Nov 1! aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05014

I was chatting with people in the audience after a job talk in Scotland and someone quietly informed me that I needed to leave because they were all about to discuss my performance.

Frankly going to implore progressives to follow better what is happening in China tech. It's not a VC bubble. It's a dozen top labs, it's most large co getting heavily into AI (at a pretraining level) and robotics, it's a deep bet on the next industrial revolution.

and for messing up my regular expressions, apparently!

A map of the Society for Creative Anachronism's Loch Soillier barony in Texas, done in a pseudo-medieval style. There are sea monsters!

Map of part of New York City. Surrounding the city are black and white drawings of various city landmarks. The drawings are in half circles that look like snow globes, and each has a number that cousins corresponds to a number on the map.

A map of a piece of property in Florida, with two ponds, a shed, a trailer, a trehouse, and a lot of trees. The map is labeled, "The Hideout" and there is an oppossum.

A map of the area around Seattle, from Tacoma in the South to Whidby Island in the north. It is done in a fantasy style, with different places represented by different icons. The border took me a long time, and is made of abstract shapes on a red background. There are mountains and forests, and the map includes Mt. Rainier in the bottom right and Mt. Backer in the top right. Neither mountain is actually there, but it's close enough.

I hate to talk about Christmas at a time like this (it being only Sept.), but if you're thinking about commissioning a gift map for Christmas...'tis the season!

I've done a number of gift maps over the last few years, and they take a while. So now's the time to get in line!

Does anyone know the purpose or typical use of the "next line" character, Unicode 0x85? How does it relate to CR and LF?

Could you send me details?

It’s not the Reichstag, it’s Horst Wessel

All of these tips are derived from the psychological protections developed for content moderators, and if you want more detail and citations, crowd.cs.vt.edu/wp-content/u... is the paper that has the best collection of citations that I've found .

There have been *some* studies on other games, but Tetris is the best-studied because it was the one in the original study. It does seem that the key elements are "fast/timed", "lots of concentration", and "lots of eye movement across the game board" if you can't do Tetris for whatever reason.

Aerial photo of UW campus with Mt. Rainier in the background

Job alert! 🌸🏔️ The UW iSchool is hiring for *two* TT faculty positions, with a focus on Artificial Intelligence, broadly defined. It's pretty here!

Applications due November 15th 2025 (priority deadline).

Link: apply.interfolio.com/171020

Remind me how bullish you are on AGI?

Exactly! I worked with an example this week where we could take ok OCR of a 16c Latin colloquium, fix it up, format speakers, and add long vowel marks. Needs to be checked, but it might be available on the web soon. Without LLMs, a two-year project of boring work, unlikely to be funded.

In the same sentence as they report the revisions for May and June! How can this be so hard to contextualize?

Not picking on Yahoo, they all seem bad

BLS revisions often correlated, so July prob revises down, right? But Yahoo finance reporting it as Fact: “In July, the economy created 73,000 new jobs, but the headline that emerged from that report was revisions to job gains in May and June, which wiped out some 258,000 previously reported gains.”

Most of the history of astronomy didn’t use telescopes, much less digital images. If a humanist has a question that doesn’t need data management, great. If they do, also great. Leading with the tech is the wrong approach, I think.

In the US people working on computational methods for humanities have been gravitating to information science programs. Similar work, but we are around different people.

Astronomy is much more like history than like chemistry! Drawing as much info as possible from faint, noisy, distorted signals from the distant past.

There’s no such thing as Digital Astronomy. Some questions benefit from data and computation.

I've never thought DH should be a discipline. The real question: does the tool get you closer to the sources or further away? OCR+cleanup, formatting, custom vocab lists let me read things I couldn't otherwise, even if not perfect. AI summaries erase details and prevent me from engaging.

Four non blondes

New rabbit-duck illusion just dropped