Dez Miller
@dezmiller.bsky.social
370 followers 280 following 140 posts
~ PhD candidate at Emory doing a dissertation on urban rivers, using NLP and literary criticism in combo Dez Miller.com
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dezmiller.bsky.social
Becoming Human by Zakiyyah Iman Jackson
Reposted by Dez Miller
chrislhayes.bsky.social
According to eyewitnesses, armed ICE agents dragged kids out of their beds in the middle of the night, zip tied them and put them in rented vans while raiding an * entire apartment building* on the South Side of Chicago.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOXO...
‘F--- them kids’: ICE agents drag children out of bed, ransack Chicago building
YouTube video by MSNBC
www.youtube.com
Reposted by Dez Miller
Reposted by Dez Miller
tedunderwood.com
Update of a paper first submitted in June. Still worth thinking about!
ai-firehose.column.social
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
Reposted by Dez Miller
tedunderwood.com
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.
dorialexander.bsky.social
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...
dezmiller.bsky.social
It’s meant to be a joke…this is the unfortunate state of my life atm
dezmiller.bsky.social
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
dezmiller.bsky.social
The folks who did the most work during that time are long graduate now, and won’t get to reap the benefits of this contract. They worked for this because unionization is the right thing to do for workers everywhere.
dezmiller.bsky.social
I’m very happy, and very happy to have a piece of news to be happy about
dezmiller.bsky.social
I remember being in a zoom room with maybe four other people in 2020 and 2021, talking about what we could possibly do
dezmiller.bsky.social
Students have been working for this for about ten years, keeping the flame alive through the first trump administration and the pandemic despite so many setbacks.
dezmiller.bsky.social
Emory’s grad union (the first grad union in Georgia) just ratified our first contract.
dezmiller.bsky.social
Seems to me that their results would've been stronger with access to a HTRC environment, providing strong metadata attached to texts (2/2)
dezmiller.bsky.social
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
dezmiller.bsky.social
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
mkirschenbaum.bsky.social
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: 🧵
dezmiller.bsky.social
I very much appreciate this thread. What about though, a return to ole pen and paper? Not something I ever considered before this past semester.
dezmiller.bsky.social
You just store the environment as a kernel and then in jupyter notebook you can activate the kernel and it's all there. It definitely took some time for me to get used to it, and sometimes it feels easier to just do a bunch of pips but for long term projects I like it.
dezmiller.bsky.social
I use anaconda and the way I use it is to organize all my libraries in the anaconda navigator software. It's a nice way to set up environments and then be able to scan what you've got in there and what versions, etc. Then if you need to update a library, you don't have to clog up your script...
dezmiller.bsky.social
Janet Planet is a perfect film
dezmiller.bsky.social
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?
dezmiller.bsky.social
Not to mention his sarcastic giggle
dezmiller.bsky.social
I have historically made music and maybe will again, someday dezmediah.bandcamp.com
Dez Miller
dezmediah.bandcamp.com