Rui Chaves
@rpchaves.bsky.social
"Words, words, words." - Hamlet, Act II, scene ii. (he/him)
"AI" has been verbed: "How many people are going to A.I. the heck out of this photo (...)" [https://x.com/AldenOnTheAir/status/2078098773851377783] "We are not going to AI the job of a nurse" [www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJ508FyLQq4] "You should AI that with copilot." (Copilot advertisement)
How much do countries spend on their militaries? How has this changed over time, and how do different countries compare? The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (@sipri.org) provides a key resource for answering these questions and more.
My 10yo is going over a 5th grade study guide. The system tells him that "Either the students or the teacher is late" is correct, but "Either the teacher or the students are late" is incorrect. This is a double whammy of wrong: (a) the Proximity Rule (verb agrees with last disjunct) is made-up rule.
Very amusing vowel space playground editor.p5js.org/mimoi/full/x...
Number of Linguistics job postings have dropped significantly in the Linguist List. Please note that the numbers reported below are inflated because some job postings mention multiple areas of study (e.g. phonology + phonetics, or computational linguistics + semantics).
Yet another example of how LLMs are not robust (a key argument against symbolic AI): a small fraction of 'bad' data can compromise models regardless of dataset or model size. Data poisoning does not scale with model size. arxiv.org/pdf/2510.07192
arxiv.org
There is mounting evidence that LLMs rely heavily on brute-force and shallow heuristics to achieve high accuracy, despite some studies (though not all) finding evidence for sophisticated latent representations. Add another to the bunch: www.arxiv.org/abs/2506.16678
Mechanisms vs. Outcomes: Probing for Syntax Fails to Explain Performance on Targeted Syntactic Evaluations
Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit a robust mastery of syntax when processing and generating text. While this suggests internalized understanding of hierarchical syntax and dependency relations, the...
arxiv.org
Wow, yes. An amazing glimpse of the LLM Lie Machine at work. Anyone whose students are bring tempted by LLMs, sharing this could be very helpful showing how it lies, and how it fails.
Benjamin Dreyer@bcdreyer.social · last yr.This is a hell of a thing to read.
"So here’s one place my compass is pointing me to: pushing back against bullshit. Frequently. Publicly. This frightens me because I have enough to deal with...I’m a people pleaser. I love being loved. But we are in terrifying times and all I have is my compass." - @jimmycoan.bsky.social
Science Is Fraught
Ignorance can't govern and reality isn't negotiable
jimcoan.substack.com
Register now for the LSA Linguistic Institute in Eugene, OR: over 80 courses over two 2.5-week terms (July 7-22::July 24-August 8). I'm teaching Constructions & the Grammar of Context with E Francis in session 1! center.uoregon.edu/LSA/2025/
Linguistics Society of America Summer Institute
Linguistics Society of America Summer Institute
center.uoregon.edu
This the most recent job posting data in the Linguist List. Data and code: github.com/RuiPChaves/L...
Scientists research man missing 90% of his brain who leads a normal life www.cbc.ca/radio/asitha...
Scientists research man missing 90% of his brain who leads a normal life | CBC Radio
The case of a man who is still able to function even though most of his brain is missing, has given fuel to radical theories about consciousness. Psychologist Axel Cleeremans, of the Université Libre in Brussels, explains how.
cbc.ca
Cool paper showing that because LLMs use a trailing white space in their tokens, they incorrectly estimate probabilities (improper distribution error), and that this causes significantly different estimates of garden-path effects: arxiv.org/abs/2406.10851
Leading Whitespaces of Language Models' Subword Vocabulary...
Word-by-word conditional probabilities from Transformer-based language models are increasingly being used to evaluate their predictions over minimal pairs or to model the incremental processing...
arxiv.org
I need a German word for when a 7yo opts to play Conway's Game of Life (in Golly) rather than the usual Nintendo games. He loves the glider gun...! And experimenting with all the chaos. But don't we all?
