Dez Miller
@dezmiller.bsky.social
~ PhD candidate at Emory doing a dissertation on urban rivers, using NLP and literary criticism in combo
dezmmiller.com
dezmmiller.com
English is ideas French is feelings German is things
November 27, 2025 at 10:25 AM
English is ideas French is feelings German is things
Is good writing like 85% good structure?
November 25, 2025 at 2:28 PM
Is good writing like 85% good structure?
Was just thinking today that I would love a new Kelly Reichardt movie and then found out about the Mastermind. Maybe my 7yo self was right, maybe I do have powers.
November 11, 2025 at 9:37 PM
Was just thinking today that I would love a new Kelly Reichardt movie and then found out about the Mastermind. Maybe my 7yo self was right, maybe I do have powers.
Where are all my other unparented sixth children at? I remind myself of this whenever I find someone much more accomplished than me in my (finally) chosen field is a near decade younger. We take our time us feral ones but I gotta believe we bring a lil something else to the table because of it.
November 8, 2025 at 4:31 PM
Where are all my other unparented sixth children at? I remind myself of this whenever I find someone much more accomplished than me in my (finally) chosen field is a near decade younger. We take our time us feral ones but I gotta believe we bring a lil something else to the table because of it.
Reposted by Dez Miller
Cheating with an LLM is the easiest thing in the world for a student to do, but it creates a massive, laborious headache for a prof, if you intend to take it seriously. There’s meetings, emails, discussions, moral dilemmas. It’s just incredibly burdensome, on top of everything else right now.
I had 9 meetings about students using Chat GPT/LLMs on their papers today.
If you want to know why professors burn out, ask anyone trying to teach critical thinking and writing skills to Freshmen....
If you want to know why professors burn out, ask anyone trying to teach critical thinking and writing skills to Freshmen....
October 28, 2025 at 12:55 PM
Cheating with an LLM is the easiest thing in the world for a student to do, but it creates a massive, laborious headache for a prof, if you intend to take it seriously. There’s meetings, emails, discussions, moral dilemmas. It’s just incredibly burdensome, on top of everything else right now.
Found a new experience that rivals childbirth for pain level—getting stung by a yellow jacket several times in the tongue. Poor guy just wanted some of my PB&J
October 15, 2025 at 12:07 AM
Found a new experience that rivals childbirth for pain level—getting stung by a yellow jacket several times in the tongue. Poor guy just wanted some of my PB&J
Reposted by Dez Miller
Update of a paper first submitted in June. Still worth thinking about!
MIT researchers unveil Generative Minds, a framework to improve how large language models simulate social behavior. By emphasizing cognitively grounded reasoning and belief traceability, they aim for reliable simulations that authentically capture human thought. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06958
Position: Simulating Society Requires Simulating Thought
ArXiv link for Position: Simulating Society Requires Simulating Thought
arxiv.org
September 29, 2025 at 3:31 PM
Update of a paper first submitted in June. Still worth thinking about!
Reposted by Dez Miller
One of the reasons this will be valuable for academics is that it provides a very clear recipe for pretraining ~3B-scale models on custom corpora.
And new paper out: Pleias 1.0: the First Family of Language Models Trained on Fully Open Data
How we train an open everything model on a new pretraining environment with releasable data (Common Corpus) with an open source framework (Nanotron from HuggingFace).
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
How we train an open everything model on a new pretraining environment with releasable data (Common Corpus) with an open source framework (Nanotron from HuggingFace).
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
September 27, 2025 at 3:15 PM
One of the reasons this will be valuable for academics is that it provides a very clear recipe for pretraining ~3B-scale models on custom corpora.
One thing I learned in my PhD program that I think applies to everyone is you should pretty much only read things that can directly inform a writing project
September 16, 2025 at 4:33 PM
One thing I learned in my PhD program that I think applies to everyone is you should pretty much only read things that can directly inform a writing project
Emory’s grad union (the first grad union in Georgia) just ratified our first contract.
September 12, 2025 at 11:26 PM
Emory’s grad union (the first grad union in Georgia) just ratified our first contract.
Fascinating that this study from a psych perspective used google n-grams to get word counts for nature-based words as one of their measures for "nature-connectedness" over time. Similar research question to my paper measuring the intimacy of river-related words in Hathi Trust corpus.... 1/2
www.mdpi.com
September 12, 2025 at 1:56 PM
Fascinating that this study from a psych perspective used google n-grams to get word counts for nature-based words as one of their measures for "nature-connectedness" over time. Similar research question to my paper measuring the intimacy of river-related words in Hathi Trust corpus.... 1/2
Why is it that most women’s button up shirts are like here’s a nice shirt but with some random baby stuff on it
September 5, 2025 at 7:17 PM
Why is it that most women’s button up shirts are like here’s a nice shirt but with some random baby stuff on it
Reposted by Dez Miller
Here’s my bottom line on the firehose of AI higher ed discourse: for the vast majority for us it’s over. “It” here is not “college” or “teaching”’per se; rather, “it” is the transactional underpinning of those endeavors. Let me explain: 🧵
August 18, 2025 at 6:50 PM
Here’s my bottom line on the firehose of AI higher ed discourse: for the vast majority for us it’s over. “It” here is not “college” or “teaching”’per se; rather, “it” is the transactional underpinning of those endeavors. Let me explain: 🧵
Janet Planet is a perfect film
August 3, 2025 at 2:28 PM
Janet Planet is a perfect film
A nuanced depiction of how AI insinuates itself into one's thinking patterns...https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/18/opinion/ai-chatgpt-school.html...I'm thinking the next class I teach will be in-person essays except for the final essay. I wish I knew more about what other people are concretely doing?
July 18, 2025 at 5:40 PM
A nuanced depiction of how AI insinuates itself into one's thinking patterns...https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/18/opinion/ai-chatgpt-school.html...I'm thinking the next class I teach will be in-person essays except for the final essay. I wish I knew more about what other people are concretely doing?
I have historically made music and maybe will again, someday dezmediah.bandcamp.com
Dez Miller
dezmediah.bandcamp.com
July 9, 2025 at 5:11 PM
I have historically made music and maybe will again, someday dezmediah.bandcamp.com
Reposted by Dez Miller
Would love to see a history of this capitalization-as-emphasis style in contemporary U.S. The top users of it appear to be this guy and my uncle Dale from north Georgia.
July 7, 2025 at 5:15 PM
Would love to see a history of this capitalization-as-emphasis style in contemporary U.S. The top users of it appear to be this guy and my uncle Dale from north Georgia.
Say more about this "we"
May 22, 2025 at 7:46 PM
Say more about this "we"
Reposted by Dez Miller
Highly recommend following the work of the Southern Environmental Law Center who have tracking this and other polluting data center projects in the South
www.selc.org/topic/data-c...
www.selc.org/topic/data-c...
May 10, 2025 at 4:05 PM
Highly recommend following the work of the Southern Environmental Law Center who have tracking this and other polluting data center projects in the South
www.selc.org/topic/data-c...
www.selc.org/topic/data-c...
Reposted by Dez Miller
Amid all the other news, it's easy to become inured to the basic facts here. Öztürk:
-Is not accused of committing any crime
-Is nonviolent
-Was in this country legally
-Merely engaged in speech that the administration objects to
-Has been locked up for six weeks
-Is not accused of committing any crime
-Is nonviolent
-Was in this country legally
-Merely engaged in speech that the administration objects to
-Has been locked up for six weeks
Now from Öztürk’s ACLU lawyer Esha Bhandari:
“Rümeysa Öztürk’s case is unprecedented and shocking. She has been held behind bars for six weeks while her health deteriorates for writing an op-ed.”
“Rümeysa Öztürk’s case is unprecedented and shocking. She has been held behind bars for six weeks while her health deteriorates for writing an op-ed.”
May 6, 2025 at 2:50 PM
Amid all the other news, it's easy to become inured to the basic facts here. Öztürk:
-Is not accused of committing any crime
-Is nonviolent
-Was in this country legally
-Merely engaged in speech that the administration objects to
-Has been locked up for six weeks
-Is not accused of committing any crime
-Is nonviolent
-Was in this country legally
-Merely engaged in speech that the administration objects to
-Has been locked up for six weeks
Reposted by Dez Miller
City of Atlanta Tree Protection Ordinance work session live thread.
May 1, 2025 at 2:39 PM
City of Atlanta Tree Protection Ordinance work session live thread.
Apparently I've become somewhat like those Germans who lived next to concentration camps and somehow said "I had no idea." The Federal Pen in Atlanta pictured in this article is a few blocks from me. I don't know what to fucking do. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
Trump administration jails hundreds of immigrants in notorious federal prisons
Immigrants report moldy food, used underwear and ‘pandemonium’ as Trump dramatically expands detention
www.theguardian.com
May 1, 2025 at 3:52 PM
Apparently I've become somewhat like those Germans who lived next to concentration camps and somehow said "I had no idea." The Federal Pen in Atlanta pictured in this article is a few blocks from me. I don't know what to fucking do. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
Reposted by Dez Miller
“Calling it Weelaunee signals the utopic visioning of the Stop Cop City movement, which refuses a forward march of history that erodes commons and public spaces and treats any resource, like the Weelaunee River, as a tool for the state or for corporations.”
Check out our latest article by @dezmiller.bsky.social, a personal account of their experiences with the movement to Stop Cop City and learning to engage with the forests, creeks and streams around which Atlanta was built.
atlantastudies.org/2025/04/22/w...
atlantastudies.org/2025/04/22/w...
April 22, 2025 at 4:52 PM
“Calling it Weelaunee signals the utopic visioning of the Stop Cop City movement, which refuses a forward march of history that erodes commons and public spaces and treats any resource, like the Weelaunee River, as a tool for the state or for corporations.”
It means a lot to me that this piece—which I originally wrote as a preface to my dissertation—found a home in @atlstudies.bsky.social
Check out our latest article by @dezmiller.bsky.social, a personal account of their experiences with the movement to Stop Cop City and learning to engage with the forests, creeks and streams around which Atlanta was built.
atlantastudies.org/2025/04/22/w...
atlantastudies.org/2025/04/22/w...
April 22, 2025 at 6:14 PM
It means a lot to me that this piece—which I originally wrote as a preface to my dissertation—found a home in @atlstudies.bsky.social