Rob Malouf

Tenure track job in Computational Linguistics @ San Diego State University: careers.sdsu.edu/en-us/job/56...

I’m not a political journalist, so was gladly surprised at the community I found here last night. To Americans anxious about the upcoming elections, a key thing we learned in Brazil that might help you: DO NOT engage with the far-right online. Don’t share rage bait. Amplify your people. Ignore them.

Short thread asking @nytimes.com and other MSM to stop interviewing the same small handful of people every time something math-related comes up. Mathematicians are dismayed when AI scoops them on the results? How about look for advice from someone familiar with getting scooped and outpowered.

Sounds like what Don Swanson called "undiscovered public knowledge" back in the 80s. It's there in the library but no one has read the right combination of sources and likely no one will. Maybe LLMs will do the reading for us and we humans can get back to answering genuinely unanswered questions.

Thinking about this old quote in the context of certain people - professors, nyt contributors, etc - who see casual misgendering as a reasonable response to a lack of respect for their claimed epistemic authority

It's possible for Jev/Laya/Decision Models to be not that big a deal as tech and massive as a new paradigm. Here's why I'm really excited from an NLP history perspective (thread)

It is with great sadness that we announce the recent loss of a dear GroNLP group member. Gosse Bouma will always remain in our hearts! If you would like to write down memories or your condolences, you are welcome to do so via this www.condoleance.nl/19800.

This topic is on fire rn, but this is correct. And for those concerned with bias, here's the thing: you can intentionally push AI-based search around in ways you can't possibly do with web search. If you want more minority voices in your search results, AI search is far, far superior to web search.

AI is proving remarkably effective at separating the foxes from the hedgehogs.

To add to the discourse fire: I just dropped a 100% handmade artisanal paper into Claude and asked to check for errors. It dutifully looked up all my references and found and corrected a half dozen significant mistakes. Good thing I used AI, otherwise it would have gotten desk rejected!

I know people who do a shitload of web scraping without the consent of the people whose servers and personal data are being scraped. And do you know why they do it? To document human rights violations and preserve access to knowledge against repressive governments. Amnesty knew this once.

Can't wait for this conference! Register now! iccg14.oa-event.com

Most tragic things about AI: the folks who should push for democratization of AI tools, which is the real battle, are too focused on denying AI itself to do that. There are many potential issues (and wins), but frontier models available only to the rich is one of the worst.

Andy Weir sees the world as a series of puzzles that can be solved with nothing but duct tape and a STEM degree. Why are people surprised?

A few people have asked for the syllabus from my grad seminar on Generative AI for social science -- just posted it here: statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/03/10/n...

New essay on LLMs and brain rot: "LLMs do not inevitably corrode thinking. They amplify whatever epistemic posture you bring..." sbgeoaiphd.github.io/rotating_the...

lots of good points have already been made on using AI Agents for cheating (e.g. the latest Canvas-bot), it degrades learning, etc. One additional thing I'd like to point out: if you use this stuff, you're not being clever, you're just an asshole. to explain:

Hmm. I see this from the opposite direction - working with these tools well for research is a form of natural language programming. I can bring my students closer to understanding that part of the code than I ever could in the one semester Python, one semester JavaScript constraints I had before.

Trying to figure out what univ admin must believe in order to think the sector can survive paying for access to ChatGPT I guess if you thought • inference will rapidly commoditize • new products will not emerge • human guidance will remain the differentiator it wouldn’t be self-destructive?

I'm hiring! 2 x PhD positions to work at Uni Zurich with me on "Evolutionary Semantics" for an ERC-funded project. semantically curious MA grads from linguistics, cog psych, anthro encouraged to apply evolvinglanguage.ch/studying-the...

don't worry guys I'm sure everything will be fine

This is my experience too - LLMs are often wrong, but thinking through their wrongness can be very clarifying

I've completed "Christmas Tree Farm" - Day 12 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode adventofcode.com/2025/day/12

Dinsdag verschijnt mijn boek 'Woord voor woord: de verleden tijd van taal'. Daarin vind je onder andere 70 grote infographics. Vandaag is het tijd voor preview nr. 2: 'Een suikerreis':

What is emergence? This is one of the most central ingredients of complexity, and a challenging one to formalize. Here's a paper by @seanmcarroll.bsky.social & Achyth Parola that attempts to classify different forms of emergence. @manlius.bsky.social @sfiscience.bsky.social arxiv.org/pdf/2410.15468

60,000+!

In my neighborhood yesterday #FuckICE

I warned about the Homework Apocalypse in 2023. It happened roughly as expected. There is a world where AI & traditional education get along very well (mixes of active in-class learning, AI-assisted assignments & tutors, blue books), but it needs to be built. www.oneusefulthing.org/p/the-homewo...

As chair of a humanities department at a working class university, I feel this so hard...

I would gladly provide PhD-level services for $19,995/mo.

Of course it is not the most elite institutions with the most resources fighting back. It is those with the fewest resources who serve the most marginalized populations. For these institutions DEI is not an optional add-on but their entire mission.