I don't see this said enough: the widespread use of generative AI is not only making our jobs as educators harder logistically, but also emotionally. It is genuinely sad to be suspicious of students when you have spent so much time building a pedagogy based on trust and not being a cop. It sucks.

Hey @aflcio.org ask Tegmark how he feels about replacing human workers. Then ask him (after he says he feels positively/that it’s inevitable) whether he supports union members opting not to use tech that employers use to justify paying them less. Go ahead. Corporate sell outs.

I keep getting notifications about courses on AI for my adjunct job, put on by my school. Mother f*cker, I don’t want your AI courses. If I thought I had a use for it, I’d do it myself. As someone who does AI research, I know more about it than the marketing goons teaching your “training” course. 🧵

i need the “llms are might be conscious” folx to read this

My thoughts every time Sam Altman speaks: f*ck you Sam. No one needs more SAS bloatware. Least of all from you. Because if you know how these systems work under the hood all the woo woo business-idiot slop just disappears. Heck, here are all the papers that went into developing them.

This is gross on so many levels, and turning it off for good probably means putting pressure on Grammarly and whatever journal publisher Grammarly bought publication rights from to build this.

Made it up until 1300 without having to relive learning Old English in college. And my OE brain is clearly toast past 1100. Super, super cool!

I'm gonna be in Tucson for #ICLASP19 and if folks know cool hikes out there while I'm in town please show me!

I’d never thought of it like this but oh my god now I can’t unsee it.

I actually think exams might be dead. I'm grading about 150 bluebook exams right now. And it's striking to me that the reason I'm doing this is because we're now afraid of folks cheating via AI in any other medium. And... y'all class sizes are only increasing. This quarter its 150 exams. Next 🧵

"Model to Meaning" just received a super generous review in JASA. Check it out! (I'm blushing 😊) Reminder: You can get the paper copy from CRC, and the full **free** version will remain online forever at marginaleffects.com www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Chip Berlet, who worked to take on everything from COINTELPRO to neo-Nazis, will be remembered for helping to inform, inspire, challenge and strengthen generations of anti-racist movements on the Left. We were lucky to speak with him in 2020. itsgoingdown.org/from-souther...

Science is currently deciphering whale language, once we learn enough of it the first words out of our mouths should be something along the lines of; "we're sorry".

Washington Post is shuttering its book section, part of the ongoing war against literacy & knowledge. We at Current Affairs want to pick up the slack by expanding book reviews. Writers: pitch us anytime! And if you subscribe/donate we'll use the funding to commission book coverage.

Gonna do the exact opposite. @kirbyconrod.bsky.social is a fucking badass linguist and if you want to read some cool work on pronoun usage and gender you should go grab any one of these articles and give 'em a read. scholar.google.com/citations?us...

I defended my prospectus yesterday and am now officially ABD :). I don't deserve that karma I have, but I recognize that I am extremely lucky to have advisors and collaborators who are incredibly supportive. Not every PhD student has that, and it's not lost on me at all that I'm

Nullius addictus iurare in verba magistri ~ Horace Seems pertinent to remember (and rally around) at this point in time.

Small things I’m stoked on: I shoot traditional #archery. Mostly because I have zero coordination and suck at any sport that has a “don’t trip on your own feet” requirement. But today I was shooting a target at 40yds WELL. It’s just been a lot of practice and it’s something I’m actually proud of.

Sidebar and bringing this up for folks: Check out the Libby app if you haven’t already, because if you’ve got an ebook reader or drive in traffic like I do (and thus burn through audiobooks) it allows you to borrow media from your local library! :)

Barnes and Noble was the second job I ever had. And while it wasn't perfect, I loved being able to stop and talk with folks about books I'd read, what they'd read, and use that as a moment to engage with my community on ground that I was actually comfortable with. More of this!

So this next semester I’m going to radically change my illustrative activities for the concepts I teach. Rather than having students just write about their experiences I’m going to have them do a fleet of social experiments on their peers. Old school early 2000s style see how ppl react.

People should apply for it. OpenAI is going to waste that money otherwise. That also doesn’t mean they have to kiss Sam Altman’s huckster a** with the outcomes of their work. Take the money AND THEN STILL STICK IT TO ALTMAN. The grant is absolutely insincere and folks should exploit it bc of that.

a good and necessary read for many

Shehecheyanu, people.

you do not need a good guy with a gun to stop a bad guy with a gun. you just need very restrictive gun laws and proper enforcement to get rid of the guns.

Do not go and harass the OP. But there will 100% be more posts like the one the not OP (the person I’m quoting) is commenting on. Bc one of the functions of antisemitic hate speech is to manipulate/consolidate the speech of folks’ ingroup and you can do that easily on social media.

History majors have lower unemployment than computer science majors. Folks with humanities graduate degrees are more sought after by corporate recruiters than those with MBAs. Study history! Get a job!

There isn't a single problem "solved" by edtech that couldn't be fixed with smaller classes led by well-paid teachers given real academic freedom

this

This.

I'm just gonna say, if folks want to keep sending me cool corpora that make them happy (and especially corpora that include task-based dialog . . . for a friend . . .) I just might squee. #linguistics research is my happy place.

Super cool!

My feed on LinkedIn reads like an endless stream of AI company pitches. I know the site was always more marketing-talk oriented than I liked, but it's practically intolerable now.

😭

evergreen

“AI workers said they distrust the models they work on because of a consistent emphasis on rapid turnaround time at the expense of quality.”

It's kinda a joke amongst my friends and family that I can ruin everything by talking about the scary privacy implications of most of the tech folks are adopting these days. I've managed to steer them all clear of Alexas at least. Working on the Rings.

As of this morning, Starbucks workers across the country are officially ON STRIKE. And we're prepared for this to become the biggest and longest ULP strike in Starbucks history. Say #NoContractNoCoffee with us: DON'T BUY STARBUCKS for the duration of our open-ended ULP strike! $SBUX

There are a lot of critiques of unregulated capitalism out there. But another one ought to be “if someone can do this to your country’s economy—twice—then that’s a bad system.”

This stresses me out so much. I already do my best to avoid places in stores where foot traffic is likely because that level of sustained social prediction is incredibly stressful and draining. Just let me be the cryptid I was born to be… I’m not going to Target anytime soon…

🚨🚨🚨LOS ANGELES- This is a call for ALL HANDS ON DECK! Organize your neighborhood, patrol your block, & defend your neighbors! Feds are targeting LA more aggressively than ever. THREAD with updates from @latenantsunion.bsky.social on feds escalating + changing tactics & how we fight back:

Y'all. Me, my advisor, and some of my lab mates took a very big swing and submitted a paper to Science. And we made it past the desk reject phase, and made it to "to review" in their CTS!! I cannot stress how over the moon I am that there's any interest at all in our research 🤗 Wish us luck!

Text from a friend:

For folks who haven’t voted yet in CA: prop 50? The text says it sunsets in 2031. So if you were convinced that this change is going to permanently override our system of districting, some wonk already made sure it won’t. All it does is give us a temporary chance to fight bad fed policy. #vote

Patrick Bet-David’s app Minnect is profiting from hate, selling “expert” advice from extremists like Nick Fuentes, Tommy Robinson, Richard Spencer, and Martin Sellner alongside public figures such as Chris Cuomo—normalizing far-right ideology as legitimate expertise.

Answer: no. ChatGPT has no understanding of what words mean. Collocation frequencies of words can’t bring you understanding of what those words mean, even though it might help you predict which words go together. See:

“Grocery stores throw out far more food than is shoplifted. Why don't shoplifters just take the food from the dumpster then. Because they have cameras on the dumpsters and security will be sent out when they see them on the monitors.” ~ mastodon.social/@AlSweigart/... Grapes of Wrath 1939:

Gonna keep screaming about this, but see last post… Nick Nazi and friends do this because, like the Nazis of old, they can (and do) lean on hate speech to consolidate influence. Thats (one of) HS’ actual #linguistic functions … bsky.app/profile/zaqd... Gonna go fume and weep over all this again BRB

So a socio- #linguistics paper I wrote with Joe Walther (UCSB) just went live in Social Media + Society on how different social feedback signals feed subsequent #hatespeech on #Twitter. I wanted to take a moment and write about what that paper, and the older paper Rick Dale and I worked on, show 🧵