Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
VP of Information Design at Nomic building new interfaces to embeddings; former history professor/digital humanist. Bsky for humanities/dataviz-y things, @[email protected] for techy stuff, the bad place for business.
https://benschmidt.org
https://benschmidt.org
Reposted by Ben Schmidt
The debate over LLMs needs to absorb the lessons learned in the debate about internet governance 20 years ago. Yes, we are not going to uninvent linear algebra. Sorry Butlerian Jihadis. But that doesn't mean we can't set policies that influence which LLM uses are central and which are marginal
January 5, 2026 at 1:29 PM
The debate over LLMs needs to absorb the lessons learned in the debate about internet governance 20 years ago. Yes, we are not going to uninvent linear algebra. Sorry Butlerian Jihadis. But that doesn't mean we can't set policies that influence which LLM uses are central and which are marginal
Reposted by Ben Schmidt
A concept I've been meaning to float to make sense of what's happened to the US Constitution is an idea from the British constitutional tradition: "implied repeal."
It's useful because it helps us to understand that Article I, & much else of the US Constitution, has been implicitly repealed.
It's useful because it helps us to understand that Article I, & much else of the US Constitution, has been implicitly repealed.
January 3, 2026 at 7:35 PM
A concept I've been meaning to float to make sense of what's happened to the US Constitution is an idea from the British constitutional tradition: "implied repeal."
It's useful because it helps us to understand that Article I, & much else of the US Constitution, has been implicitly repealed.
It's useful because it helps us to understand that Article I, & much else of the US Constitution, has been implicitly repealed.
This holiday season, give the gift that lets your loved ones combine their affection for James Scott with their irritation that those "No Farms No Food" bumper stickers try to normalize agriculture.
December 10, 2025 at 3:21 AM
This holiday season, give the gift that lets your loved ones combine their affection for James Scott with their irritation that those "No Farms No Food" bumper stickers try to normalize agriculture.
Just watched "Death By Lightning," the James Garfield/Charles Guiteau Netflix show -- went in w/ no expectations and was pleasantly surprised. Nick Offerman is now my heart's Chester Arthur, and the sets, especially the Republican National Convention, were impressive.
December 7, 2025 at 3:51 AM
Just watched "Death By Lightning," the James Garfield/Charles Guiteau Netflix show -- went in w/ no expectations and was pleasantly surprised. Nick Offerman is now my heart's Chester Arthur, and the sets, especially the Republican National Convention, were impressive.
Reposted by Ben Schmidt
IMLS announces "upon further review" that it is reinstating all federal grants to libraries. It leaves out that it's doing this because a federal court told them a few weeks ago that the Trump admin's decision to destroy libraries was not legal.
www.imls.gov/news/stateme...
www.imls.gov/news/stateme...
Statement of Agency’s Reinstatement of Terminated IMLS Grants
Statement of Agency’s Reinstatement of Terminated IMLS Grants Washington, DC– Upon further review, the Institute of Museum and Library Services has reinstated all federal grants. This action supersede...
www.imls.gov
December 3, 2025 at 10:25 PM
IMLS announces "upon further review" that it is reinstating all federal grants to libraries. It leaves out that it's doing this because a federal court told them a few weeks ago that the Trump admin's decision to destroy libraries was not legal.
www.imls.gov/news/stateme...
www.imls.gov/news/stateme...
OK, so I just got really obsessed with a very arcane question. There are 'land' and 'water' hemispheres that maximize the amount of each (below). But can you divide the earth into two hemispheres that are each 29% land, 71% water, just like the earth as a whole? The LLMs said no… but I persisted.
December 3, 2025 at 5:25 AM
OK, so I just got really obsessed with a very arcane question. There are 'land' and 'water' hemispheres that maximize the amount of each (below). But can you divide the earth into two hemispheres that are each 29% land, 71% water, just like the earth as a whole? The LLMs said no… but I persisted.
Reposted by Ben Schmidt
Best thing Staten Island has going for it, imho, is fact that the bridge at Outerbridge Crossing is named after a dude, Eugenius Harvey Outerbridge.
November 5, 2025 at 3:25 AM
Best thing Staten Island has going for it, imho, is fact that the bridge at Outerbridge Crossing is named after a dude, Eugenius Harvey Outerbridge.
Reposted by Ben Schmidt
Cuomo spent months obsessively courting conservative voters and he drove Sliwa's vote% down to 7% but he was bleeding moderate Dem base voters with every new right wing message and Trump endorsement
and Zohran took the opportunity and ran with it
and Zohran took the opportunity and ran with it
to me this is the story of the election
there was never any way for Cuomo to win if he didn't win the Bronx, central Brooklyn and southern Queens
and he lost all three
Zohran convinced the crucial swing voters in this race that he was the Democrat and Cuomo was not, and that's why he won
there was never any way for Cuomo to win if he didn't win the Bronx, central Brooklyn and southern Queens
and he lost all three
Zohran convinced the crucial swing voters in this race that he was the Democrat and Cuomo was not, and that's why he won
November 5, 2025 at 3:07 AM
Cuomo spent months obsessively courting conservative voters and he drove Sliwa's vote% down to 7% but he was bleeding moderate Dem base voters with every new right wing message and Trump endorsement
and Zohran took the opportunity and ran with it
and Zohran took the opportunity and ran with it
Reposted by Ben Schmidt
This essay from @bschmidt.bsky.social on how history rejected computational methods, & so "quantitative history" ended up in the social sciences, & "digital humanities" in literature, with no historians doing computational work, is fascinating, & worth a read: dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/computa...
![The first is a working paper by three economists—Elliott Ash, Daniel Chen, and Suresh Naidu—from 2017. While the authors are economists, the actual contribution—summed up in a title that few historians would think debatable, “Ideas Have Consequences”—is about legal or intellectual history. It presents a powerful and discrete account of the transmission of ideas across social networks through textual analysis. The substance argues that privately funded Manne seminars in law and economics—which were attended by a substantial proportion of the federal judiciary—affected the language, decisions, and sentencing of federal justices who attended them and thus, by implication, allowed large-value conservative donors to capture the federal judiciary. The effect seems robust to a variety of covariates [...]
Reading this paper was exciting, but looking through the tools and tricks and sources also made me feel like someone in a science fiction movie encountering an artifact sent back from a few decades in the future. The extraordinary quality of data that economists can obtain is almost unimaginable to humanists. It is not just a million or so circuit court votes and 300,000 opinions but also the institutional capacity to file Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to get the exact years of attendance for every judge who went to the Manne program and the disciplinary capacity to casually use relatively new methods like word embeddings without spending pages slowly, gently analogizing them to some “simpler” concept. Humanists wandering through algorithms seem to have to justify using an algorithm by first identifying which Borges short story—whether about the Map of the Empire, the analytical language of John Wilkins, or Pierre Menard and the Quijote—it most closely resembles.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:643p6z4ydk2xnwv77maa6eec/bafkreidctt57eseamimgzctkjtu2ly2vmsugcjwcrargerohe5bljg7jie@jpeg)
November 4, 2025 at 3:34 AM
This essay from @bschmidt.bsky.social on how history rejected computational methods, & so "quantitative history" ended up in the social sciences, & "digital humanities" in literature, with no historians doing computational work, is fascinating, & worth a read: dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/computa...
Reposted by Ben Schmidt
So much good stuff in here. I'm reading @bschmidt.bsky.social's piece on computational history: "The split in American digital history shows a way to make computation focus not on making the humanities more scientific but instead making them more creative."
"Computational Humanities is far more than a collection of essays; it is a meticulously curated critical tool kit."
This is exactly what we were going for! dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/projects/com...
This is exactly what we were going for! dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/projects/com...
November 3, 2025 at 8:57 PM
So much good stuff in here. I'm reading @bschmidt.bsky.social's piece on computational history: "The split in American digital history shows a way to make computation focus not on making the humanities more scientific but instead making them more creative."
Consensus among the developers standing at the Chelsea CitiBike station is that the special code for pedal assist bikes is routed through us east 1 while non-electric bikes are unaffected.
October 20, 2025 at 10:31 PM
Consensus among the developers standing at the Chelsea CitiBike station is that the special code for pedal assist bikes is routed through us east 1 while non-electric bikes are unaffected.
Reposted by Ben Schmidt
🍩 What if climate looked like a donut? 🌍
Here’s a bunch of cities turned into a sweet dataviz experiment.
🟡 → comfy zone
🔴 → hot
🔵 → cold
Why a donut? Let me explain 👇
Here’s a bunch of cities turned into a sweet dataviz experiment.
🟡 → comfy zone
🔴 → hot
🔵 → cold
Why a donut? Let me explain 👇
September 29, 2025 at 11:29 PM
🍩 What if climate looked like a donut? 🌍
Here’s a bunch of cities turned into a sweet dataviz experiment.
🟡 → comfy zone
🔴 → hot
🔵 → cold
Why a donut? Let me explain 👇
Here’s a bunch of cities turned into a sweet dataviz experiment.
🟡 → comfy zone
🔴 → hot
🔵 → cold
Why a donut? Let me explain 👇
Despite the gutting of the National Center for Educational Statistics, the dept of Ed *did* manage to release 2024 college major counts in the usual format, so I can run it through the same code I do every year. First off, the change since peak of the largest fields -- another year of drops.
September 28, 2025 at 2:20 AM
Despite the gutting of the National Center for Educational Statistics, the dept of Ed *did* manage to release 2024 college major counts in the usual format, so I can run it through the same code I do every year. First off, the change since peak of the largest fields -- another year of drops.
Reposted by Ben Schmidt
Talking loss functions at the FOSS luncheon
September 16, 2025 at 11:32 PM
Talking loss functions at the FOSS luncheon
Reposted by Ben Schmidt
I shared some thoughts with @insidehighered.com about the first IPEDS data release since the Department of Education got DOGE-d. It's good to see the data coming out, but there are some concerns now and plenty more going forward.
www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty...
www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty...
September 25, 2025 at 9:19 AM
I shared some thoughts with @insidehighered.com about the first IPEDS data release since the Department of Education got DOGE-d. It's good to see the data coming out, but there are some concerns now and plenty more going forward.
www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty...
www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty...
Headed to Brazil for the first time next month. I've got a pretty meager frame of reference. Any reading recommendations (fiction or non-fiction)?
September 19, 2025 at 2:25 PM
Headed to Brazil for the first time next month. I've got a pretty meager frame of reference. Any reading recommendations (fiction or non-fiction)?
Reposted by Ben Schmidt
Including a requirement that hires and students be reported to the federal government by “color” - not ethnicity, “color” - is really bringing the race science all the way back to the nadir.
These are the Trump Administration’s demands on UCLA, in addition to a 1.2 billion dollar fine, as reported by the LA Times today. I must note again that the Trump Administration’s attempt to use title vi to enforce conservative agenda items is flagrantly illegal.
September 16, 2025 at 12:48 AM
Including a requirement that hires and students be reported to the federal government by “color” - not ethnicity, “color” - is really bringing the race science all the way back to the nadir.
They’re cleaning up at the Herald Square station and briefly scraped the place back into December 1979. Hard for me to imagine living in such a two-tone world.
August 22, 2025 at 2:18 PM
They’re cleaning up at the Herald Square station and briefly scraped the place back into December 1979. Hard for me to imagine living in such a two-tone world.
Reposted by Ben Schmidt
I'll admit, I was skeptical when they said Gemini was just like a bunch of PhDs. But I gotta admit they nailed it.
August 17, 2025 at 1:51 PM
I'll admit, I was skeptical when they said Gemini was just like a bunch of PhDs. But I gotta admit they nailed it.
Really excited to learn from @scaldararu.bsky.social about this new pixel-based, over-time embedding model DeepMind -- has anyone started to poke at it? There are a lot of interesting uses I can imagine, quoted in my reply-guy answer below… medium.com/google-earth...
August 15, 2025 at 1:41 PM
Really excited to learn from @scaldararu.bsky.social about this new pixel-based, over-time embedding model DeepMind -- has anyone started to poke at it? There are a lot of interesting uses I can imagine, quoted in my reply-guy answer below… medium.com/google-earth...
Reposted by Ben Schmidt
... Then they came for the Goldman Sachs economist and I did not speak out because the WSJ article was paywalled and so I wasn't sure if they were a real economist with a PhD or just some MBA faking credentials
August 12, 2025 at 10:55 PM
... Then they came for the Goldman Sachs economist and I did not speak out because the WSJ article was paywalled and so I wasn't sure if they were a real economist with a PhD or just some MBA faking credentials
I always look at college major data, but this article (with star turn from @robertkelchen.com) confirms that the layoffs at the National Center for Education Statistics included all 7 employees who work on IPEDS. (Which the Times calls only "the college dataset")…
www.nytimes.com/2025/08/09/u...
www.nytimes.com/2025/08/09/u...
Trump Wants Admissions Data on Grades and Race, but Who Will Collect It?
www.nytimes.com
August 9, 2025 at 2:56 PM
I always look at college major data, but this article (with star turn from @robertkelchen.com) confirms that the layoffs at the National Center for Education Statistics included all 7 employees who work on IPEDS. (Which the Times calls only "the college dataset")…
www.nytimes.com/2025/08/09/u...
www.nytimes.com/2025/08/09/u...
It's fun that the Fortune article saying historians are the #2 job affected by AI includes what's clearly an AI-generated stock image of a creepily female robot "teaching" (i.e., looking at a computer) while the real teacher gets fired.
August 5, 2025 at 11:33 AM
It's fun that the Fortune article saying historians are the #2 job affected by AI includes what's clearly an AI-generated stock image of a creepily female robot "teaching" (i.e., looking at a computer) while the real teacher gets fired.
Reposted by Ben Schmidt
Wow.
“Garber, in a conversation with one faculty member, said that the suggestion that Harvard was open to paying $500 million is ‘false’ and claimed that the figure was apparently leaked to the press by White House officials...”
www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...
www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...
Harvard President Garber Tells Faculty He Is Not Considering a $500 Million Deal With Trump | News | The Harvard Crimson
Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 has told faculty that a deal with the Trump administration is not imminent and denied that the University is considering a $500 million settlement, according to th...
www.thecrimson.com
August 4, 2025 at 12:33 AM
Wow.