Laura K. Nelson
@lauraknelson.bsky.social
3.6K followers 730 following 1.3K posts
Associate Professor @ UBC computational sociology machine learning is feminist You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing. www.lauraknelson.com
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lauraknelson.bsky.social
It depends on how you use it, as has always been the case, for forever. You can use it to summarize a text so you don't have to read the text yourself. Or you can use it to explain things you don't know (and no amount of thinking will get you the answer), so that you can engage more deeply.
lauraknelson.bsky.social
Ok but in all seriousness, how is this different from profs telling students to look up words or references they don't understand while reading difficult texts? My profs told me to have a dictionary on my desk when I read assigned texts in undergrad. Like this can be an actually helpful, good thing?
joshuaerlich.bsky.social
“where’s the whale? did he get the whale yet?”
lauraknelson.bsky.social
The book Python for Everybody by Charles Severance still slaps, and it's free online
Reposted by Laura K. Nelson
axz.bsky.social
In collab w/ Semantic Scholar, we conducted a large scale (800+) survey of researcher usage and perceptions of LLMs for science.

Major findings:
+Most are using LLMs already, mostly for writing
+LLMs seem to be a win for research equity
+But some groups, like women, have more ethical concerns too
simonaliao.bsky.social
Hi everyone, I am excited to share our large-scale survey study with 800+ researchers, which reveals researchers’ usage and perceptions of LLMs as research tools, and how the usage and perceptions differ based on demographics.

See results in comments!

🔗 Arxiv link: arxiv.org/abs/2411.05025
LLMs as Research Tools: A Large Scale Survey of Researchers' Usage and Perceptions
The rise of large language models (LLMs) has led many researchers to consider their usage for scientific work. Some have found benefits using LLMs to augment or automate aspects of their research pipe...
arxiv.org
lauraknelson.bsky.social
Yeah my violin plots typically look, erm ... suggestive, so much so that I feel like I can't publish them. These are good.
lauraknelson.bsky.social
Anyway - now that I've looked at this, love it!
lauraknelson.bsky.social
And I got to my computer and opened the link, and it's the first two words in the Figure note. Sorry! (I was on my phone before and hadn't looked at the article.)
lauraknelson.bsky.social
Ooh neat! (trivial question - what's the name of that type of visualization in your screenshot?)
Reposted by Laura K. Nelson
timkellogg.me
Muon optimizer learns more from rare data than Adam

i need to dig deeper. i think the industry is coalescing on:

- Adam is faster
- Muon is more stable
- now, Muon learns rare data better

i wonder if that’s why K2 has that vibe that it has

arxiv.org/abs/2509.26030
Muon Outperforms Adam in Tail-End Associative Memory Learning
The Muon optimizer is consistently faster than Adam in training Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the mechanism underlying its success remains unclear. This paper demystifies this mechanism through th...
arxiv.org
lauraknelson.bsky.social
Last summer I landed in Stockholm and I picked up my phone, ready to try to connect to the airport wifi, but I was already autoconnected to eduroam. In the airport. No university nearby. I was connected pretty much everywhere in Sweden. Yeah it's impressive.
Reposted by Laura K. Nelson
maggy.kia.net
We need to figure out how to take a hard turn away from policing students. They didn't create this problem. Educators didn't create this problem. All attention on control and stricture is wasted, while further entrenching and legitimizing industry extraction. Let students live. Change your pedagogy.
jimmcgrath.bsky.social
I’ve seen this Wikipedia resource on Signs of AI Writing going around. I would caution folks looking to use it as a manual or even reference in course assessment contexts. It is definitely useful and descriptive thinking out loud within the context of Wikipedia. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...
Wikipedia:Signs of AI writing - Wikipedia
en.m.wikipedia.org
Reposted by Laura K. Nelson
jimmcgrath.bsky.social
If you are in education, please excise “I can just tell it’s AI” from your vocabulary. I know it’s hard, but we are already on a speedrun to infantilizing an entire generation of students at a point when we probably want to be doing more to get them to care about the value of education.
Reposted by Laura K. Nelson
ralmeling.bsky.social
Yale Sociology is hiring an associate or full professor in quantitative sociology. Come work with me! Applications open tomorrow. Details available here:

apply.interfolio.com/174709
Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio
apply.interfolio.com
lauraknelson.bsky.social
The Labubi thing is legit tho. I do see and hear about that everywhere
lauraknelson.bsky.social
Mixtape you probably haven't heard
lauraknelson.bsky.social
Same. I absolutely will not join, not my lane, but boy I'm so curious
lauraknelson.bsky.social
This is a weekly reading group, so if you're keeping score or comparing against your syllabus, they're self-assigning six articles *per week*