Some personal news, as they say. Get your submissions ready for when our portal opens February 12. As the founding editor-in-chief of the new Springer Nature academic journal Creator and Influencer Studies, I’m thrilled to welcome them. link.springer.com/journal/44538

holding a kids’ hand while they throw up all night (like three hours) really makes a lot of other stuff feel distant also, today I am allowed UNLIMITED coffee

Home made rice krisipies are DELIGHTFUL

A hill I will die on: LLMs are not human subjects. They cannot be substituted for human subjects. I am SCREAMING.

The one thing I’ll say that AI has done: made a lot of people demonstrate their definitions of learning, most of which are wrong or not backed up by empirical evidence.

For me it’s cheeses and all I want is brie

If I ever ran a food truck, it'd be a crepe cart. Savory and sweet.

My undergrads and I were analyzing data from 2013-2020 (holy moly it’s like 30m). Anyways we started talking about 2013. they remarked they were in 4th grade. They asked me about it like. honestly, looking back over the post 2012 election data, it does feel like a different world.

Don’t let the government give OpenAI a bailout. Let it fail in 2028 when all of its bills come due.

In my social media methods class, we are doing our ethics unit. This study as an exemplar of an unethical study, even if it was deemed not applicable by the IRB. "Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks" www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Let me scream about a weirdly specific thing: Celebrate your IRB approvals!! They’re a big deal. It’s a giant amount of paperwork and it means your thought about you study quite a bit. go out to dinner. Eat a fancy dessert. buy a reasonably priced video game.

The family hid cookies in the car from me. Not even the 6 year old told me. I’m devastated for multiple reasons

Maybe this is just me, but this reads precisely like AI both textually (sentence structure) and in the restatement of an idea (optionality away implies the four points after the em dash)

Super short blog post! I’m curious what you think. Let me know either here or in the comments of the post. meresophistry.substack.com/p/on-that-st...

The evening ended with a lecture on the fascinating structure of an owl's neck (it can keep it's head still while it's body moves/rotates). Scientists can't figure out how it works at a mechanical level but they are studying it for many applications related to camera work.

David Zhou, John R. Gallagher, Sarah Sterman: Thoughtful, Confused, or Untrustworthy: How Text Presentation Influences Perceptions of AI Writing Tools https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.20365 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.20365 https://arxiv.org/html/2504.20365

The engineers I eat dinner with (two PHDs, EE and ChemE) turned circus performing into a statics problem

I think we are entering a true "coding for everyone" era with a crucial importance of breaking users away from defaults. The idea of seeing our tech interfaces differently is going to have a renaissance.

Last night, at dinner, I listened to the complexity of (I swear, I am not making this up): 1) how to put more transistors on a wafer across the temp range of -5 to 150 C 2) why we don’t understand the nature of cutting vs tearing of polymers (soft tissues)

Yes!!

Yes!!!

Yes!!!

Never mind the jobs you had, tell me five classes you took in college: 1. Introduction to Islamic Studies 2. Introduction to Rock Music 3. African Music 4. Arabic 101 5. Southern Politics

Yes!!!

Yes!!!

This all I want from bluesky right now. just fill up my feeed with these amazing classes!!

I like the democratizing nature of coding tools. I dislike their corporate power. I think a lot that 90% of people don’t touch their defaults…and how that connects to corporate power, default power. are we approaching template culture?

The coming code catastrophe

Ah, the psychic relief of writing with a little “scraps” document on the side. Don’t worry, scraps: you’re safe here. Maybe you’ll even get called up to the Big Leagues. I love all my scraps equally, and I’d never delete you.

I’ve actually stopping putting up original lectures on canvas because the platform steals my intellectual property.

when CEOs say they’re going to “use AI to reduce inefficiencies” I always hear “CEO wants a machine that doesn’t call in sick, works around the clock, never complains, or asks for a raise” But that’s just me, I suppose

Claude code is an amazing leap (try it!). I‘m on board with it for one off, non-security things. I’m worried about a coming code catastrophe of lost knowledge and that companies will make LLMs worse except for the highest paying customers or degrade the quality over time in favor of advertising.

Super short blog post! I’m curious what you think. Let me know either here or in the comments of the post. meresophistry.substack.com/p/on-that-st...

I was sitting at my kids ballet studio reading Capitalism: A Global History (2025). Person asked me what I was reading about. I replied, “The advantages of capitalism’s forged templates as opposed to fiat templates of feudalism.” SILENCIO

On the day of OpenAI's release of a chatbot for science, a pertinent repost: open.substack.com/pub/artifici...

The ratio on that Inside Higher Ed article is *off the chain*

Let’s just not use any of these corporate technologies

I keep citing this argument, and I just want to mention that it works both ways. Sure, AI can benefit from better evaluations. But the flip side is: building a benchmark forces you to concretize and operationalize concepts that existing literature may have left a bit hazy.

We are living with state terrorism

My sister is a principal for a middle school. We are both convinced that a lot of the problems currently are related to the political environment. People act like the chaos and disrespect don't filter down...but they do. They ooze in like DDT.

I am at the “are you growing a beard or in the production of a book” stage

#Adequate is finally in my hands after 3ish years from concept to print. So happy 🕺🏻 OBLA26 gets ya a discount at upcolorado.com

You ever read a magnificent book of 1,000 pages? Read Beckert’s Capitalism.

In a conversation over the weekend, I realized that a demarcation for determining whether you think AI writing is good or not is the number of times one reads the text. If you read AI written text once, it seems fine. If you read it a second time, it falls apart. Do you have this same sense?

More on this tomorrow, it's late... open.substack.com/pub/mikecaul...

This is one of the best blogs about LLMs I follow.

I sincerely believe that academia has a duty to build LLMs if only to prevent the full commodification of LLMs by oligarchs. Andress*n went on the AtoZ podcast, saying expensive products are good for the consumer (because it allows for R&D). Snarf.

New blog post! "The relentlessness of good writing" The craft of writing requires practice, repetitions if you will. Practice requires relentlessness. I do hope you'll read. meresophistry.substack.com/p/the-relent...

OpenAI is going to put ads in its system. This is the easiest behavior to predict. They will degrade the experience for all but the most expensive tiers. They will alter the quality of responses based on how much users pay.

New blog post! "The relentlessness of good writing" The craft of writing requires practice, repetitions if you will. Practice requires relentlessness. I do hope you'll read. meresophistry.substack.com/p/the-relent...