Stephen Ramsay

@sramsay2.bsky.social

Professor of English and Fellow at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Mainly #DigitalHumanities. Blog at https://stephenramsay.net/

For the last two months, I've been working on tei2jsonl. I will blog the full rationale (basically, quickly load embedding dbs). But this morning, I would like to celebrate the fact that it just processed over 22 million word tokens across 410 eebo text in about 11 seconds.

I knew that gigantic frontier models were going to beat smaller local models on most tasks. What has been surprising is how smaller, more focused local models *blow away* larger more general local models on some tasks.

Well, I have my Pedantry Merit Badge. I've read it in English several times and in Greek at least once, generally prefer books to people, and I thought the movie was amazing. Lots of clever choices. Several moments of true visual/thematic brilliance.

NPR: "The 'Great American State Fair' will run from June 25 through July 10, promising to bring state-themed pavilions, movie screenings, musical performances, military flyovers, nostalgic snacks . . " What, pray, is a "nostalgic snack?"

"Archaeologists Unearth ‘Prototype’ of Stonehenge Monument Nearby." Thing is, it was written in Python by a bunch of physicists. No comments, no structure, no tests. A big dude with a black robe and very long beard kept saying, "Can we just build this fucking thing in C already?" So they did.

Realized just today that my students—plural, cause it’s a whole thing—getting early, offline iPods for their music collections are reaching as far back into media history as we were getting into vinyl in the early 2000s

Thinking about a programming assignment where I give students a bloated, slow, increasingly typical piece of garbage software. Assignment: Make the fans stop, make it idle at ~0%, and stop the earth from crying out over the user's tortured battery.

I don't know quite know what to make of the "convergence toward the mean" that we see in AI-generated video animations. Does all of human art ultimately tend toward a combination of Thomas Kindade and Fraggle Rock? Huge, if true.

Great! I'm glad you're all here for our annual Professionally Facilitated Visioning Exercise for the university. As you know from the updated Envisioning Our Future packets you received this morning, our question for the afternoon will be "Where Do You See Yourself in Eight Hours?"

Connecting to a repo that is giving the warning, "connection is not using a post-quantum key exchange algorithm." Love this. Whatever the next thing is, we need to call it "post-quantum." "I'm undertaking a post-quantum analysis of Dickens." "My work is situated firmly within post-quantumism."