Michael Saxon

A raciolinguistic finding that has lived rent-free in my head for years is: People rate the exact same English audio as less intelligible when shown a brown person's face rather than a white face. In work led by Maya Nachesa, we see whether multimodal speech recognition models do the same 👀

Nihar Shah did a heroic experiment for TMLR: he spent 20-25 hours over two weeks interviewing authors of seemingly low-quality submissions about their own papers. He confirmed what we all suspected: people submitting these papers have *no idea* what is going on in them.

God the odyssey is a boring read lmao

found an organization for some of you all

Today in @thenation.com: a harrowing piece written from inside the Dilley ICE detention center by Maryam Tahmasebi, a green card holder who's been locked up along with her husband and son for months despite none of them committing any crime. www.thenation.com/article/soci...

Minimum qualifications: PhD OR Stanford BS OR high school diploma and 25k twitter followers

I’m saying this as a routine voluntary user of LLMs: constant questioning and re-evaluation of whether you are interacting with a human does real psychic damage.

"Claude, generate and post a promotional animation for my book about the space shuttle. Show the shuttle taking off from above"

The problem with tesla design is they made one extremely kiki car and the rest are bouba

The fool thinks technology is making the world worse The wise man knows technology is making the world better The genius acknowledges these things and still thinks technology is making the world worse

feels like a real landmark of impunity that major corporations are making federal crimes part of the interview process

Two years ago, my colleagues and I were sued by Stephen Miller's America First Legal. The Hines v Stamos case — built atop a number of false allegations — was a central element of the "censorship industrial complex" myth. Today, that case was dismissed (by a Trump judge in LA). We won.

Apologizing to the ghost of noah webster for having my name attached to a paper with br*tish english spelling

get annoyed whenever people use whenever when when is correct

Got ghosted by a VC on Hinge for sharing my honest opinions about Chalmers and consciousness research

The ban is an incredibly successful maneuver if the aim is ham up the drama surrounding supposed ‘snowballing capabilities’ without needing to demonstrate any actual advancement in performance.

problem is that language model, unlike a cannon, isn't actually dangerous

there's actually being chill about your degree or credentials, which is of course totally cool and good, and then there's the whole meta-snobbery thing some people will do where they make a show of humbebragging about how little [prestigous credential] means to them, and I really hate the latter.

This was very obviously always the plan, and anyone who believed that Meta had any qualms about maximum privacy invasion is a rube. We must deploy rigorous mockery to fully socially ostracize anyone who attempts to wear these things. We have to go full Scoble on Meta glasses.

I appreciate this tack toward the slop(like) submitters. The point is to gatekeep on whether something is contribution-shaped

Had a nightmare that arxiv links on twitter started getting indexed as citations by google scholar

Many have pointed out that the industry titans of yore used their wealth to build libraries, universities, while today's make megayachts and rockets Robber barons brought infrastructure and industrialization vs software and financialization Maybe they're connected? Builders build, buyers buy

Ethics reviewing is fun because pretty much all you have to do is remind reviewers that they did not give a legitimate reason to request an ethics review

Just watched the Michael Jackson movie. It was a bold creative decision to spend 30 minutes of runtime on a shot-for-shot remake of Captain Eo

Looking for an emergency reviewer for COLM on evaluating LMs for science/engineering. Do me a solid and I'll owe you a bite or beverage when next we meet

Is there a recognized dialectal distinction in american english for whether people pronounce the "s" in "housing" or "islam" as an /s/ or a /z/? I am a z user

Just said "no problema, es muzukash- es difícil"

So much productivityslop on YouTube

Well, they've finally struck home. #ICE has detained my former #umich student, Yousif Azizi, a PhD student in public policy at Virginia Tech w/a valid visa. He was arrested while taking his children to school in Maryland. After multiple transfers, he is in a detention center in Arizona.

New "wreck a nice beach" encountered Siri transcribed "illusion of free will" as "allusion a free whale"

Saw an interesting video claiming Dwarkesh Patel is an industry plant, to which I say duh? There is no way to have a tech podcast whose relevance revolves around getting CEOs etc to come on and NOT be an industry plant

promptologist

so basically imagine the Grant administration in the 21st century, except instead of a woke war hero putting is dumbass friends in charge, it's a craven perverted reality star

I had cautioned 3 years ago that xrisk doomerism was going to get people hurt or killed (on that other site when I was active there)

Happy tax day youtube.com/watch?v=Oc8v...

Should we be troubled that "Pentagon worship service" is a thing that exists...?

Trump lackeys, if anyone, should think twice about normalizing ignoring pardons