I swear the sealion meme and the attitude it represents is one of the worst things that happened to progressive internet discourse.

disinfectant of sunshine trope again (doesn't work, is mostly dogwhistle now)

Currently attending a conference & our field is quite a bit into fancy modeling, so it’s time to repost this blog post. Don’t try to squeeze your research question into whatever model is fashionable right now; try to build the right model for your research question. www.the100.ci/2024/08/27/l...

"It looks like you are trying to do literally anything. Would you like to make it worse using AI?"

Team rooves

En Cisjordanie, Israël asphyxie l’économie pour saper la légitimité de l’Autorité palestinienne Lire ⬇️

anyway I think GoT has some good parts but it’s frustrating that people take it (and GRRM) so seriously when the work is also extremely flawed and much better fantasy exists (fantasy that understands itself as literature and not as half-formed rebellion against a daddy it doesn’t understand)

Yet again, machine learning — even gussied up via the transformer architecture — encodes and reinforces societal biases. This study reveals that LLM-based peer review relies heavily on author institution in its decisions. arxiv.org/abs/2509.15122

there is a point here i want to amplify. the free speech defenders of the mainstream seem to have no awareness that actual free speech is often more fractious and destabilizing than civil and respectful. a society where speech is genuinely free isn’t the deferential space they want it to be.

“In Finland, the number of homeless people has fallen sharply. Those affected receive a small apartment & counselling with no preconditions. 4 out of 5 people affected make their way back into a stable life. And all this is CHEAPER than accepting homelessness.” It costs a lot less to house people.

A colleague of mine and I sort of vaguely brainstormed the idea of a "dogmegaphone", i.e., a dogwhistle that is so loudly and often repeated in the "true context" that actual deniability of the shameful meaning is impossible but is nevertheless constantly and vociferously denied.

In giving talks about the dogwhistle research I've been doing for the past year or three, I quip about South Korean engineers as the kind of immigrant intended by the "we want only the good immigrants" kind of dogwhistle (as opposed to Arabs) but reality has now wrecked this.

difficult to describe how disappointing Harry Potter feels to me after having grown up with Will Stanton and the Circle of Signs

Here are some nice mushrooms

remove the label

The follow-up post is the best part.

I want one year in which the only images allowed on the internet are ASCII art.

what

we need to ban home ethernet and wifi and return to 64Kbaud dialup connections so that we can have a good internet again

Tangy #dadjoke of the week!

so I've been talking up #APSA2025 but the downside of it is that it's socially really atomized by microsubfield and the social app is very bad compared to eg Whova for *ACL. So let me know if you're on this hashtag, in Vancouver, and interested in dinner or smthg.

happy to have bumped into a cousin attending #APSA2025 but also reminded that it's not an accident that among the billions of people in the world, there's a high prior that I will randomly meet an unexpected friend or relative in a professional situation

🧪Fascinating paper about an awful subject. “Research indicates that mass murderers typically tend to cluster into two main age groups: younger perpetrators, particularly school shooters, and middle-aged offenders, particularly familicidal men” link.springer.com/article/10.1...

current speaker had a fever last night but fortunately I'm at the back of the room

excellent New Yorker diareserrhea

This "Misogyny and Violent Backlash" panel at #APSA2025 is oddly the most cheerfully-vibed panel I've attended this year so far.

the one trick mods don’t want you to know

Discovering computer as an adult makes you go crazy. Discovering computer as a baby makes you go crazy. In all of human history, there will only ever be one generation to discover computer at the correct age: 13

for example, for today's 2pm session I have marked off panels on embodied cognition (at #apsa2025 mind you), masculinity and authoritarianism, Chinese foreign policy strategy, and several others. I will have to decide randomly, they all seem so good.

This is my third APSA #apsa2025 and each time I figure out how to make more of it than the previous time, but this is not my home field and I'll never be as socially plugged in as I was at eg #acl2025nlp in Vienna. Nevertheless...

pro tip for #APSA2025 goers, the drinking chocolate at the Mink Café on Hornby, like 3 mins walk from VCC, go ASAP

there's an #APSA2025 panel just titled "Corruption"

liberalism exists because last time we tried to settle the question of "who are the real Christians" without liberalism the 30 Years War killed a third of everyone living in what is now Germany

"AI has always been a marketing phrase that erodes scientific inquiry and scholarly discussion by de- sign, leaving the door open to pseudoscience, exclusion, and surveillance" philarchive.org/rec/GUEATU

for a moment I thought this guy was wearing a suit jacket hoodie, but it was just a hoodie under the jacket with the hood pulled out

Israeli prime minister signs agreement to move ahead with expanded settlement plan that would bisect occupied West Bank.

“To make AI safe, we must develop it as fast as possible without safeguards” lol

Linguistics

There's a "Critical Zionism Studies" panel at #APSA2025, I don't recall this in the past two years and don't think it would have been held until now. (most APSA panels have very low attendance and there are like 45 at a time)

The hot new trend is learning tuvan throat singing, everyone's doing it nowadays

this "feature" in code editors where you type an opening character and it immediately inserts the closing one for you as well -- why?? at the very very best case, you will have to skip over this character with an arrow. so why?

on to Vancouver and #APSA2025

did I say, sharepointless?

All I want from ChatGPT is a Shakespearean sonnet with no repeated rhyme, perfect iambic pentameter meter, and every single word beginning with the letter M, and it can't even give me that.

Slightly diminish a book The Raisins of Wrath

Slightly diminish a book 1983

proposing the concept of "Controlled Homomorphism for Event-focused Wh-questions" for the formal pragmatics literature so someone can write a paper titled "CHEWing the QUD"

if you've had your fill of Czech food at #amlap2025 may I suggest going to dinner after the conference at a malatang hotpot chain restaurant I discovered in this Old Town?

shortly to return to Chuck U campus after brief break to do something futile