tedunderwood.me - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

tedunderwood.me

Uses machine learning to study literary imagination, and vice-versa. Likely to share news about AI & computational social science / Sozialwissenschaft / 社会科学 Information Sciences and English, UIUC. Author of Distant Horizons (Chicago, 2019). Pluviophile.

14,791 posts 18,605 followers 5,160 following

Posts 19 Comments 31

This is good. I’ve been willing to ignore “AI gives people religious mania” just because it sounds like the classic satanic panic sparked by every trend from the Beatles to D&D. But Andy runs the numbers and confirms.

submitted 1 hour ago • 4 comments

You know what has been a slight positive surprise? Higher ed (outside of red states and Columbia) has been fairly willing to take a financial hit on principle. I’m not sure I would have predicted that, looking at our embarrassing willingness to suppress Gaza protest in 2024. +

submitted 2 hours ago • 1 comment

Look AI is amazing but these people are snake oil salesmen. Markets and competition work — if there was a small misalignment that caused issues, it would create huge reputational issues that would cause shifts to competitors. They provide a service not a hotline to God.

submitted 3 hours ago • 2 comments

I get why Altman and Amodei feel compelled to write big-think posts. But they’re in a position where it can’t be done well. They’ve promised investors a pace of change that would imply massive disruption and conflict, if true. But they have to tell us it will be smooth. So it comes off v insincere.

submitted 4 hours ago • 9 comments

Pro tip, folks: if you make a figure for a publication, don’t just hand the copyright over to the publisher. Post it on OSF first and then give yourself permission to use it in the first publication and then all future publications. That way, no permissions issues.

submitted 8 hours ago • 13 comments

Been playing with o3-pro for a bit before it launched. It is pretty "smart." One problem it solved where every other model has failed is making word ladder from SPACE to EARTH. (Probably not contamination: the answer is different than the only online answer, which is for EARTH to SPACE in any case)

submitted 7 hours ago • 3 comments

What do Elon Musk, Joyce Carol Oates, Adam Schiff & Ezra Pound have in common? They all remixed T.S. Eliot lines: "This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper" Why have these lines become a meme—used across the political spectrum? Find out in our new book chapter!

submitted 8 hours ago • 2 comments

Whale vocalizations not only resemble human vowels, but also behave like ones! We previously discovered that sperm whales have analogues to human vowels. In a new preprint, we analyze linguistic behavior of whale vowels.

submitted 8 hours ago • 1 comment

You know, in SF novels, when characters are getting hourly updates about dystopian politics and destabilizing technical change, the protagonist usually also gets a cool new drug that makes it all tolerable.

submitted 9 hours ago • 5 comments

So you're telling me all of the billions of weight parameters underlying a seemingly uninterpretable generative model of language and culture can be ternary

submitted 468 days ago • 0 comments

My career would not exist without a 2010 @neh-odh.bsky.social-funded institute, which introduced me to the community I eventually called home. NEH staff I met there (+ at later events / online) encouraged me to stay when I considered leaving. Their generosity & care helped shape my academic values.

submitted 10 hours ago • 2 comments

"Simulating human society requires more than generating plausible conversations. It requires simulating the structure of human reasoning." Debatable claim, because e.g. it's not clear we have great access to human reasoning. But this interesting position paper does try to address those objections.

submitted 11 hours ago • 4 comments

Eigenvalue density plot of 15 million 6×6 companion matrices, where the last column is filled with complex numbers of the form 2 * r * exp(iθ) - 1, with r drawn from a Beta(0.01, 0.01) distribution and fixed angle θ = 0. #Python #MathArt #SciArt #CreativeCoding #Mathematics

submitted 3 days ago • 1 comment

Today is the last day at the NEH for me and many of my amazingly dedicated colleagues. We did our best to represent & serve the American people. To champion humanities research, teaching, public engagement, cultural heritage, infrastructure, and innovation.

submitted 13 hours ago • 46 comments

Suskunluğumda saklısın

submitted 1 day ago • 2 comments

Okay these youngins with paint buckets just destroyed me 😭😭🥹✊🌹😭😭 #boston #revolution

submitted 1 day ago • 5 comments

What is happening right now? ChatGPT/OpenAI outage for 3 hours Heroku down for 4 hours (even their status page is down!) NVIDIA dev docs as well (runs on Heroku) Pipedrive (CRM) issues for 4 hours What else is down… and are these connected? Something started 4 hours ago…

submitted 17 hours ago • 16 comments

why is the president the only person testing the limits of his power? everyone should see what they can get away with. what if zookeepers gave helicopters to gorillas? nobody has tried this

submitted 1 day ago • 376 comments

My take on “AGI” is not that it’s a hard goal to achieve, but that it’s insufficiently imaginative. Surely there are more interesting and useful things to do with models than “replicate what people do.”

submitted 23 hours ago • 10 comments