Data mixing – determining how much web text, code, math, etc., you need for LM development – is a first-order lever on model quality. Introducing Olmix: a framework for configuring mixing methods at the start of dev & efficiently updating as data changes throughout. 🧵

Knowing which questions to ask is often the hardest part of science. Today we're releasing AutoDiscovery in AstaLabs, an AI system that starts with your data and generates its own hypotheses. 🧪

What bugs me most about the enshittification of the humanities, is that so many colleagues seem hell-bound on outsourcing the one thing we singed up for to begin with to #genai and fascist techbros. Why are you still around if reading, contemplation, and writing doesn’t make you rejoice? […]

not even with them spilling it out, saying with every word and letter, will it be enough.

Americans’ health care costs are SKYROCKETING an average of 114%. That’s more than $1,000 in annual payments. You have Republicans to thank for this health care crisis. They want you to pay more for less.

Raskin: "I want the whole country to look at this. This is the attorney general of the US whose job is law enforcement. We've never had a witness who has misunderstood our rules and been unable to conform his or her conduct to our rules before. Excuse me."

Lieu plays Bondi the infamous clip of Trump & Epstein partying together & asks her if there were underaged girls at any party the two attended "This is so ridiculous," Bondi says. "There's no evidence that Donald Trump has committed a crime" "I believe you just lied under oath," Lieu replies

While some folks downstairs are still complaining about a sporting event and languages they don’t understand. Up here in Canada, the CBC is showing Olympic hockey with play-by-play in Inuktitut. It’s the Canadian experience I didn’t know I needed. ❤️🇨🇦 #olympics #inuktitut

Over on threads someone just use ai;dr and we all need to adopt that right quick

Invoking wealthy class solidarity to excuse sex crimes against children is sorta the Epstein Class in a nutshell

I wrote up the talk I gave at CESTA a couple weeks ago, on how we're overdue on changing the narrative about what digital humanities prepares students for. It's not fallback jobs in tech, it's getting involved in your community in moments of crisis. And craft helps build those skills. #DHmakes

Cool/important job alert: Principal Research Scientist at the Wikimedia Foundation's Research team for the area of knowledge integrity Job posting: job-boards.greenhouse.io/wikimedia/jo...

This pro-Trump nostalgia absolutely was confirmed over and over again by the Dems' own internal polling, in a truly horrifying way: newrepublic.com/article/1882...

An excellent thread if you're ready to break out of the monolingual world of English. You can also learn some great tricks we know in area studies, like how to get something out of a talk that's about something in a language you don't speak. Come join us! #MultilingualDH

No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition. Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I find studies that ask “is this useful?” to be more meaningful. We don’t have to paint a broad “AI” umbrella, then concern ourselves with conflating them with “humans” to analyze the utility of different technologies.

This is torture. The US is torturing children. Children whose words and whose art contain infinitely more humanity than the people keeping them detained.

Massie: "I vote with the president 91% of the time. The 9% of the time my party is taking for pedophiles, bankrupting this country, or starting another war, I don't vote with them. And they want 100% compliance. That's why they're trying to take me out."

I don't think conversational interfaces are a bad choice for interaction, but there is a dimension that's still unexploited with AI. Analogously to how people would use a whiteboard, a multimodal model could generate explanatory images or even animations on the fly complementing the conversation.

Ghost of Emily Brontë: am I remembered? Me: yes, a new Wuthering Heights is coming out now Brontë: and does it look good? Me: no, it looks like it will be an almost unbearable saga of confusingly sexy suffering for everyone involved Brontë: I love it.

Ossoff: We were told that MAGA was for working-class Americans. But this is a government of, by, and for the ultra-rich. It’s the wealthiest Cabinet ever. This is the Epstein class. They are the elites they pretend to hate.

Part 2 - the Speech “Imagine that you see the wretched strangers… their babies at their backs… plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation.” Then the turn of the blade: If you were forced from your home, would you be pleased to find “a nation of such barbarians?”

New paper on Why Slop Matters w/ great group of co authors (@hoytlong.bsky.social @eduede.bsky.social @ari-holtzman.bsky.social + others not on Bluesky) from ACM AI Letters. We try to move the debate re: AI Slop past normative, neg claims & towards parsing its social uses. dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Thiel's rap against democracy has been around for quite a while. Now it's "in the files"

In which Jeffrey Epstein, who laundered money for the Russians, explains how Donald Trump was doing exactly the same thing, and how this accounts for most of his wealth.

This is a powerfully-worded, clear call to action for (especially) middle managers from Raw Signal Group. Not all these are available to folks in academia, but things like thinking hard about what grants you seek and what donors you work with absolutely are. Read it and pass it up to your boss.

Sir Ian McKellen performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More on the Stephen Colbert show. Never have I heard this monologue performed with such a keen sense of prescience. Nor have I ever been in this exact historical moment.TY Sir Ian, for reaching us once again. #Pinks #ProudBlue

And how many missed opportunities because women are (rightly) warned away from certain prestigious people and places. I can say from my own career and observations of friends’ careers that this happens frequently but is rarely discussed.

America is outraged after ICE killed two white people in Minneapolis. I understand why folks are feeling afraid and angry right now. But I need you to understand something just as clearly: this is what Black America has been living with for generations. open.substack.com/pub/cwebbstu...

Seeing a bunch of normal ass midwestern moms and dads marching in -20 degrees knowing they might be tear gassed or worse really drives home what a cowardly lot of people the pundit class is

😩

Drop-in replacement for sklearn LDA using MCMC and hyperparameter optimization: github.com/mimno/sklear...

Of all the AI assistant auto-PR review tools out there, this ChatGPT-Codex one that 👀 then 👍 or gives very specific feedback (and collects RLHF data too) is my favorite. The feedback it gives is remarkably reliable and very, very specific.

Goldman: It’s shocking to me how much the media talked about Biden’s mental state and are not talking about Donald Trump. He can barely put a coherent sentence together. You have someone who is clearly not all there

"The very introduction of AI into the workplace appears to be disastrous for employee relations, suggests another study, which found that AI resulted in employees passing off low quality “workslop” with the expectation that someone else down the line would polish the AI’s shoddy output."

Hong Kong friends! We're delighted to announce the final schedule for the "New Horizons for AI Research in the Social Sciences and Humanities" Conference on Jan 26-27 at the UChicago Yuen Campus; please register if you would like to attend (it's free), see you all there! uchicago.hk/event/new-ho...

Latest NYT video analysis. The White House is lying. Gift link.

Academics, just use this simple LaTeX macro and you can avoid maintaining a separate CV just for 2026 federal grants.

DOGE was hustling that data OUT of federal agencies as rapidly as possible, using techniques associated with hackers and cybercriminals. People don't understand: our data IS the treasure. That's why federal agency heads tried to intervene physically to protect it. www.npr.org/2025/04/15/n...

Digital Humanities people -- positionally I feel like I could maybe write something useful/interesting here as someone who moved from running a DH program to CTO-ing an AI startup -- any questions you'd conceivably read if I answered them?

This has been the plan all along. - Foment violence and chaos in the streets of MN - Implement the Insurrection Act - Declare Martial Law - Suspend elections

The thing that really makes Minneapolis different, other than the fact that they straight up murdered someone, is that they've dropped all pretense that this is just about immigration. The state has declared war on its own people, or at least those people who live in cities.

Sometimes I wonder how there are so many people just going about living their lives like none of this is happening.

Instead of ending the constitution and murdering people, we could have high speed trains and universal health care.

Had Claude Code build a little plugin that visualizes the work Claude Code is doing as agents working in an office, with agents doing work and passing information to each other. New subagents are hired, they acquire skills, and they turn in completed work. Fun start.

For @techpolicypress.bsky.social , a quick turnaround and slightly longer version of the talk I gave at UVA last week, “Grok is an Epistemic Weapon.” Shout outs to @hbcompass.bsky.social, @eliothiggins.bsky.social, others.

We’re hiring a two-year DH postdoc for our HAVI project, to work on a new type of knowledge graph architecture for the humanities (and beyond). Deadline soon (18 Jan)! www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/researc...

Really exciting postdoc opportunity in Cambridge on AI-humanities interface working with my better half on a collaborative project called SETS funded by @schmidtsciences.bsky.social

I've put together a list of the most helpful activities/visualizations/tools I've found for introducing students to the mechanics of LLMs (which I do every year). miriamposner.com/blog/introdu...