Ted Underwood / is on Nostr

I use machine learning to study cultural history at the School of Information Sciences, UIUC. Also #generativeAI, #digitalhumanities, #sciencefiction, #computational #socialscience. Author of Distant Horizons (Chicago, 2019). #tfr #fedi22

Last Notes

2024-03-23 12:31:11

IRL, if all particle accelerators started generating weird results and scientists saw a flashing countdown clock superimposed on their vision, 100% of them would assume it was a grant deadline.
https://www.threads.net/@tedunderwoodillinois/post/C41478vtflW

2024-02-14 05:21:28

- reply

@npub1f6a…pnql It's so eerie that they're building this core function in natural language. I would have imagined it as a separate model trained to recognize snippets that ought to be persisted.

2024-02-09 17:49:07

It seems like a big deal that a bridge between Bluesky and the Fediverse is set to open up in a month. https://fediversereport.com/bluesky-opens-the-network/
https://cdn.masto.host/sigmoidsocial/media_attachments/files/111/902/778/791/088/496/original/4727073dd9e0d584.png

2024-02-09 17:49:07

2023-08-29 18:41:46

Doing a bibliometric study of political science, history, economics and looking for journals that have been relatively central to English-language scholarship over a long print run. Need to have a few that were central early on (1930-1950). Recommendations? #history #polisci #econ

2023-07-01 17:20:07

Well, looks like I'm back on Mastodon.
https://cdn.masto.host/sigmoidsocial/media_attachments/files/110/639/970/860/691/861/original/37b950e21074c075.png

2023-06-30 11:56:21

“A grad student who fell asleep in 1982 and woke up in 2022 might see large language models as a triumph for cultural theory.” My contribution to the debate this week in the CI blog. #LLM #Foucault https://critinq.wordpress.com/2023/06/29/the-empirical-triumph-of-theory/

2023-04-25 22:14:18

I'm notoriously pro - #[0], but I've been on two committees now where someone suggested "let's just ask ChatGPT to do our initial brainstorming for us," and I am getting intolerant of that gesture. I can see a model as a useful interlocutor for an individual's brainstorm, but "just paste ChatGPT output into our committee writing space" is LAZY.

2023-03-29 22:21:02

Controversial hypothesis: Twitter is a bit less "nasty" now (in particular, less fiercely judgmental) than it was pre-Musk.
I could be wrong about this. My perspective on the platform is limited. Also, I readily acknowledge that Twitter is worse in lots of ways than it was pre-Musk. Especially, it's *trashier* — overrun by hustlespam accounts pitching 10 ways ChatGPT can make you more productive in the SEO game, etc. But the moralistic flame wars do seem to have declined for some reason?