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.

Worth remembering we accept ambiguity and misunderstanding as an integral element of human speech and writing, indeed (as opposed to perfect transmission) a fundamental element of what makes communication (or art) possible. Yes, this is different. But I don’t think we know where the tolerances lie.

“why some people be mad at me sometimes” they ask me to remember but they want me to remember their memories and i keep remembering mine - Lucille Clifton [writing the most Black woman poem of all time]

Death cult behavior

🇬🇧

I am pleased to report that Hawaii Supreme Court Justice Todd Eddins has dropped another total evisceration of the Supreme Court. He says originalism is a fraud—and the Republican justices are shamelessly making up facts and history to impose radical Christian nationalism: slate.com/news-and-pol...

The media is doing a bad job of covering this $100k H1-B “fee” (actually tax, since it is not implemented by an agency to cover processing costs). Taxing via EO looks extremely vulnerable to legal challenge, and should be treated as stochastic disruption not durable change.

Pause your doomscrolling and listen to this story.

Dutch late night TV has its take

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!

Make time for making #DHmakes

When y’all cancel your Disney+ subs, please consider giving some of that money to your local NPR or PBS station, or other independent media like @boltsmag.org or @propublica.org

Trying to keep my professional chill but I’m SO excited Carnegie Mellon is launching a cluster hire in computational humanities—MULTIPLE JOBS! 1. Asst Teaching Track Prof in Computational Humanities - apply.interfolio.com/173622 2. Asst Tenure Track Prof in CH - apply.interfolio.com/173626

I'll say it: against all expectations, the media are covering the Trump censorship story right. They're not pretending it's about Kirk, they're covering Trump as a broad threat to free press and speech, and they're speaking broadly about the stakes. It can be done!

If you’re on academia dot edu, let me suggest that you strongly consider deleting your account.

Call me radical, but I think we *don't* need to have polite chats with racists who are spewing conspiracy theories that keep motivating white supremacists to massacre our fellow citizens, and we *don't* need to have bipartisan deals with fascists trying to destroy our democracy and our government.

In our forthcoming paper, John Hummel and I ask what it would mean for a neural computing architecture such as a brain to implement a symbol system, and the related question of what makes it difficult for them to do so, with an eye toward the differences between humans, animals, and ANNs.

The answer is "no," because "simply making LLMs larger leads to a closer match with the human brain than fine-tuning them with instructions." But in this case "no" might be a more interesting answer than "yes"?

Education is the enemy of fascism.

Paying attention yet?

Cool new codex behavior -- it uses a preview software to take screenshots of the front end it's writing, to debug visually instead of just code. Then deletes the screenshots and makes changes or wrapping up.

This comes from a recent talk I gave at the SkAI institute conference titled: "Structured Creativity in Science: AI for Hypothesis Generation and Research Ideation." Learn more here: drive.google.com/file/d/1_dLd...

🚀 Introducing Fluid Benchmarking—an adaptive way to evaluate LLMs. Inspired by psychometrics, it tailors which questions to ask based on each model’s capability, making evals more efficient & reliable. 🧵

I hope you keep writing and researching and publishing, even if it’s about distant and abstruse topics. It’s not stupid, it’s beautiful, because it’s a testament to the curiosity and care they’re trying to eradicate.

As AI becomes increasingly capable of conducting analyses and following instructions, my prediction is that the role of scientists will increasingly focus on identifying and selecting important problems to work on ("selector"), and effectively evaluating analyses performed by AI ("evaluator").

reposting with alt text because this feels incredibly significant. the right-wing disinfo machine means a lot of the people grieving Charlie Kirk never heard any of the things he said that would have tarnished his brand as Guy Who Just Wants to Have Dialogue Across the Aisle

Victor Mair's fine obituary for Michael Carr (1947-2025), whose rambling articles on Chinese etymology I always enjoyed: languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=71029 Still my favorite. "Personation of the Dead in Ancient China," Computational Analysis of Asian & African Languages 24 (1985):1–107. R.i.p.!

We're officially launching the new PSL CultureLab in 10 days ! If you're interested in the research of a collective bridging Computational Humanities, Social Sciences and Cultural Evolution, you can check our programme (and come to our event, if you're in Paris 22 September): psl.eu/agenda/collo...

In all seriousness, I'd love to see a reporter try to get comments from all of these people about their initial impulse to declare a literal war on half of their fellow citizens and to see if any of them regret it, apologized for it or learned anything at all from it.

On the eve of his retirement: "John Unsworth on Libraries, Higher Education, and Anti-Facism" I've been grateful for John's leadership over these eventful years, and hope we can keep this spirit going.

Q. Who aligns the aligners? A. alignmentalignment.ai Today I’m humbled to announce an epoch-defining event: the launch of the 𝗖𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗔𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝗔𝗜 𝗔𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗖𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀.

MAGA 3 days ago: Chicago is about to find out the meaning of WAR MAGA today: the left needs to stop condoning violence

As I like to point out, they're not going to send us to different camps.

As a bookish kid, I admired the Supreme Court for having the character to unanimously come out against segregation in the 1950s, when no other branch of our government would have had that courage. So it saddens me to see it lose its way and endorse judging people for the color of their skin today.

Never forget that your probability of seeing an opinion is directly proportional to the poster's average screen time.

Thanks, @ellecordova.bsky.social. We’re trying. 🧪

JD Vance said he doesn’t care if the US commits war crimes. Did it make the news? Donald Trump said he’s declaring war on Chicago. Did it make the news? Executive agencies keep posting Nazi blood-and-soil propaganda. Did it make the news?

this-new-framework-lets-llm-agents-learn-from-experience-no-fine-tuning https://venturebeat.com/ai/this-new-framework-lets-llm-agents-learn-from-experience-no-fine-tuning #AI #memory

At long last, I can post my team's summer project: applied modules to teach how ML/AI tools are changing social science and humanities research: ubcecon.github.io/praxis-ubc/ Highlights: LegalBERT to analyze anti/pro-immigrant sentiment in 19th c. BC law: ubcecon.github.io/praxis-ubc/d... 🧵1

If LLMs can do everything, then there's nothing much to do. So you might as well do what you planned on doing anyways in the meantime. A Pascal's wager for AGI fears.

Unfortunately, I expect that the fact they won a pretty resounding fair use victory is going to be lost in much of the coverage. They lost on downloading & storing the LibGen dataset (straight infringement!), but the act of training on copyrighted material (+ making their own ebooks) was a win.

Today is the deadline! But we don't mind if you submit through the weekend, no one is checking ;)

How does the brain🧠 make causal inferences and use memories to understand narratives🎬? We built an RNN🤖 with key-value episodic memory that learns causal relationships between events and retrieves memories like humans do! Preprint www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... w/ @qlu.bsky.social, Tan Nguyen &👇

This week the @dracor.org summit was celebrated in Berlin. Though I couldn't attend in person our Argentinian Corpus was presented (staging): staging.dracor.org/ar So proud to show our Teatro Argentino in such a great, open and collaborative DH initiative!

That Pritzker press conference was... surreal, and I think marks a significant moment of escalation in the constitutional omni-crisis. This was the governor of a state saying plainly the Union itself is being torn apart and his state is being militarily invaded by an authoritarian regime.

Fantastic interview with Mar Hicks @histoftech.bsky.social . So many excellent insights. "Saying a technology is inevitable and that it is going to determine how things historically develop puts so much power in the hands of the people who make the technology."

That we would end up with Trump setting himself up as a dictator for life with the blessing of conservatives was clear as far back as 2021.

Introducing Asta—our bold initiative to accelerate science with trustworthy, capable agents, benchmarks, & developer resources that bring clarity to the landscape of scientific AI + agents. 🧵

Now that school is starting for lots of folks, it's time for a new release of Speech and Language Processing! Jim and I added all sorts of material for the August 2025 release! With slides to match! Check it out here: web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/sl...

I love everything this weird lab does