Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 51m

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.

Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 10h

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 · 10h

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 · 13h

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 · 1d

@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 · 1d

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 · 3d

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 · 6d

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 · 8d

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

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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 8d

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 · 9d

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 · 9d

So fucking sick.

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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 11d

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 · 11d

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 · 11d

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 · 12d

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 · 12d

🚨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 · 12d

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 · 13d

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

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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 13d

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

Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 14d

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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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 15d

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

GENERIC PROPOSITIONS: WHAT ROLE DO THEY PLAY IN GLIDING ACTION

BERNHARD NICKEL

Generic generalizations such as "ravens are black" or "tigers have stripes" have seen an upsurge of interest, due in significant part to the fact that they are also the language of stereotypes ("Germans lack a sense of humor"). This interest is presumably motivated by the thought that generics guide actions. In this talk, I investigate this link more closely. The basic problem is that generics display incidence variability: the truth of a given generic is compatible with an incredibly wide range of frequencies with which the predicated property is present among members of the kind. Yet the most widely accepted model of rational action that takes risk into account is expected utility theory where such frequency information is crucial.
I'll look at various solutions and present my own, according to which the truth of a generic proposition is only distally related to any particular instance of action guidance.

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Reposted by Aaron Steven White

Adam Chalmers @adamchalmers.com · 16d

Please stop using OpenTorment!!! It's only open-core! TormentLibre is the fully FOSS alternative!

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Reposted by Aaron Steven White

Robert (Bob) Kubinec @rmkubinec.bsky.social · 16d

I just want you guys to know that if your #rstats models aren't converging, it's likely because you're taking Tylenol.

Tylenol can flatten likelihood surfaces due to multidimensional recontainerization of typhoid surfaces.

I'm going to ask the FDA to modify the label of Tylenol to indicate this.

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