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Reposted by Aaron Steven White

Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 19h

The palpable relief of reading a syntactically awkward student paper nevertheless brimming with ideas they’re trying on after having to consume the stale cardboard generalities of a Chat GPT essay.

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Reposted by Aaron Steven White

Mark Riedl @markriedl.bsky.social · 14h

A company that believed it was in the verge of AGI or ASI wouldn’t capitulate to the government because it wouldn’t care about government contracts. They would soon BE the economy and the government would soon be capitulating to them.

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 23h

The administration “is currently pressuring OpenAI and other AI companies to make their models more conservative-friendly.”

OpenAI is trying to clamp down on ‘bias’ in ChatGPT

GPT-5 is better at resisting liberal ‘pressure,’ the company says.

www.theverge.com

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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 1d

I like to read this as habitual rather than episodic, with the corresponding change in word sense.

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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 3d

I’m going to be in Oxford Sunday afternoon through Tuesday morning of next week, London on Sunday morning and Tuesday night. DM me if you’re in either place and interested in grabbing a coffee or cocktail.

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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 3d

Also get to introduce them to the logit-normal, which I sort of love as a prior. So much nicer to work with than betas.

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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 3d

Doing this today. Going to be so sick. I sort of miss writing bespoke samplers by hand.

Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · Aug 23

Some things I'm looking forward to:
1. Building an MH sampler from the ground up in the statistical inference module and using it to characterize uncertainty about the distribution of pronominal case in different corpora.

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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 3d

There was a whole thing on r/rochester a while back where people pointed out how laughable it is to bundle WNY into the same cultural region as the Adirondacks. It's a bit like drawing a straight line across CA at Santa Barbara and calling it all "socal". The creator ended up updating the map.

Reddit - https://preview.redd.it/cultural-map-of-the-us-which-number-are-you-im-from-the-v0-6qni1uq553of1.png?width=4501&auto=webp&s=38a1e7be2962abca329e74698e84a9191d060518

www.reddit.com

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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 4d

@reilly-coglab.com's giving this week's LS2 talk in about 20 minutes! Join by zoom here: rochester.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

Executive Decline v. Vocab Growth: In Aging, Who Wins?
Jamie Reilly (Temple University)

Aging is associated with a paradoxical combination of vocabulary growth and declining executive functions. It is unclear how the interaction between vocabulary knowledge and reduced processing manifests in a naturalistic language task such as conversation. We analyzed >1500 unscripted conversations (>8 million words) between speakers of different ages (18-66) using a newly developed software application, ConversationAlign. We specifically focused on concrete versus abstract word retrieval and lexical alignment as functions of age differences between conversation partners. Aging was robustly associated with abstract word dropout, and age differences between interlocutors were associated with growing misalignment on word concreteness. We will discuss how these observed patterns inform our understanding of patterns of age-based lexical retrieval during naturalistic communication.

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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 4d

The only Halloween movie you need.

A movie poster in French for Last Year at Marienbad.

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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 6d

Easy Sailor!

Easy Sailor Tiki

Hic Sunt Dracones. Anchors Aweigh. Now Open.

www.easysailortiki.com

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Reposted by Aaron Steven White

Shravan Vasishth @shravanvasishth.bsky.social · Mar 20

Computational Psycholinguistics Meeting 2025

cpl2025.sites.uu.nl

When: December 18–19, 2025

Where: Utrecht, the Netherlands

Abstract submission deadline: June 15, 2025

Organizers: Jakub Dotlačil, Lena Jäger, Bruno Nicenboim, Ece Takmaz

Computational Psycholinguistics Meeting 2025 | Universiteit Utrecht

Universiteit Utrecht

cpl2025.sites.uu.nl

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Reposted by Aaron Steven White

Carlos Muñoz Pérez @cmunozperez.bsky.social · 10d

SALT 36 will be held at my alma mater, the University of Buenos Aires, on July 29-31 2026. This will be the first time the conference takes place in South America.

Abstract deadline: Dec 15, 2025
Link: saltconf.github.io/salt36/

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Reposted by Aaron Steven White

The Daily Show @thedailyshow.com · 11d

Excited to introduce Vibes from Meta. Eat your slop, piggies!

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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 11d

Happening in one hour! Join by zoom here: rochester.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

Surgery on LLMs: Editing, Unlearning, and Securing Knowledge
Wengpeng Yin
Pennsylvania State University

LLMs are rapidly being deployed in high-stakes settings, from scientific discovery to legal assistance to personal health, where we can no longer treat them as static black boxes. We need ways to update, correct, and safeguard their knowledge as the world changes and as privacy risks grow. This talk will present a vision for LLM surgery: systematic ways to make models learn, forget, and protect in a controlled manner. We will explore how to edit models so they gain new knowledge without losing old capabilities, how to make them forget harmful or outdated information without collapsing, and how to truly safeguard private data rather than relying on superficial protections. Along the way, I will share surprising failure cases, new evaluation tools, and early solutions that point toward a future where LLMs can safely and reliably evolve with human needs.

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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 12d

I mean. Obviously the only way to listen.

The sleeve of Cate Le Bon’s Michelangelo Dying on top of a record player with a pink record playing.

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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 12d

So fucking sick.

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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 14d

I've found it kind of a pain to work with resources like VerbNet, FrameNet, PropBank (frame files), and WordNet using existing tools. Maybe you have too. Here's a little package that handles data management, loading, and cross-referencing via either a CLI or a python API.

GitHub - aaronstevenwhite/glazing: Unified data models and interfaces for syntactic and semantic frame ontologies.

Unified data models and interfaces for syntactic and semantic frame ontologies. - aaronstevenwhite/glazing

github.com

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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 14d

But absolutely do not listen on Apple Music. I am convinced they pushed the wrong master. It sounds terrible.

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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 14d

This was never not going to be a banger.

Michelangelo Dying, by Cate Le Bon

10 track album

catelebon.bandcamp.com

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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 15d

Very poignant for this to be outside of Tehachapi in particular. Probably partly a function of the fact that that‘s where my dad moved out when I was a teenager, but I find that place so bleak.

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Reposted by Aaron Steven White

Julian @juliangrove.bsky.social · 15d

🚨The text has several code snippets, which are taken from the Haskell project under active development here:

github.com/probabilisti...

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Reposted by Aaron Steven White

Julian @juliangrove.bsky.social · 15d

Brand new version of this paper (now a short book!) available at lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/008...!

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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 16d

Nothing quite like Cocteau Twins’ Blue Bell Knoll on a foggy fall evening.

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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 17d

This does seem to be correct (for the exterior scenes), but what a journey.

Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 17d

A Google AI overview: The question "where was Kris by Bergman filmed?" is ambiguous because there are two famous individuals with that name, and the word "kris" can refer to a Swedish word or a type of sword. If you're referring to the 1946 film Crisis (Kris), it was filmed in Hedemora, Dalarnas län, Sweden. If you mean the 2021 film Bergman Island, which features Ingmar Bergman and was filmed on his home island, it was shot on Fårö, Sweden.

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