Rob Malouf

We need guides through the inevitable bout of AI psychosis that affects professionals after they finally “get” AI. They often engage in intense, sleepless & impossibly complex projects in their area of expertise, with only AI for company. Its usually temporary & can be productive

I'm a prof but not in a research dept . We mostly teach undergrads and don't offer a PhD. AI agents are letting me tackle projects I've had in mind for years but haven't had the resources to put any sustained effort into. Transformational (maybe, we'll see how it goes)

Large language models (LLMs) in corpus linguistics – a new #SydneyCorpusLab resource sydneycorpuslab.com/large-language…

@aran_nayebi That's a perfectly good way to make a living, but it's not a calling and you'll drive yourself nuts trying to make it one.

@aran_nayebi Academia is big. That might be true for you in your position. Someone who's been teaching a 4/4 load in sociology at Southwestern Technical College for ten years probably doesn't love their job and also probably doesn't have a lot of better options.

This is unequivocally bad advice. Academia is the worst "job" one can have, if viewed solely in those terms. There are plenty of better paying jobs out there for the same skillset. You have to love what you do in academia for it to be worth it!

@ChrisGPotts I'm with you 100% on this. My least favorite movie in a very long time.

I feel betrayed by One Battle After Another. I’ve been telling myself for weeks that I should get over my own hang-ups and enjoy it for what it is – a well-crafted action movie – but I can’t manage the required mental rotation. (Note: this post contains no spoilers, but I confess that it is kind of an attempt to spoil the movie for you in a deeper sense.) Paul Thomas Anderson is my favorite filmmaker. I love PTA’s work primarily because it so deeply explains how individual personalities and larger social structures have interacted to create California as we know it today. The crowning achievement so far is There Will be Blood, followed closely by The Master. Inherent Vice and Boogie Nights are also compelling and move the story forward in time. Magnolia portrays a kind of end-state of the ambition, recklessness, delusion, passion, greed, isolation, and creativity that runs through all of these films. In contrast to all of the above work, One Battle After Another tells a fundamentally dishonest story. The overarching narrative is ahistorical and distorting. In addition – with only a few exceptions – the characters are all one-dimensional action-movie stereotypes. This is a double whammy. To be clear: I do not require all of PTA’s movies to fit into my personal “California history” series. Punch-Drunk Love is the movie that led me to fall in love with his work, and it is primarily a character study (set in Los Angeles). Phantom Thread is a masterpiece, and it is purely a very complex love story, set far from California. In principle, One Battle After Another could have told a fantasy story about California but been full of multidimensional characters, and I would have been happy. Well, maybe not entirely happy. One Battle After Another clearly does strive to serve as commentary on the political situation in the US, and it was always going to be impossible for me to ignore how wrong its premises are. I suspect the fundamental sin was drawing on Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland. That book was written about 35 years ago, and most of the action takes place 30 years before that – the 1960s. The 1960s had its share of militant left-wing groups, and PTA is exactly the artist I would pick to explore how those groups formed and operated. However, rather than setting One Battle After Another in that time period, PTA simply moved everything forward in time about 40 years and made superficial changes to their circumstances and motivations. The thing to explain was why those 60s-era left-wing militant groups didn’t survive into the present day, but instead we are asked to believe that they did, and in a hyper-competent, professionalized way that allows them to perform daring James Bond-level operations. It’s the antifa that the right has been describing but been unable to produce. As I said, I could partly forgive this if the characters were compelling. I’ve read some reviews that describe One Battle After Another as a movie about fatherhood. Okay, but then why did it have to include the lamentable trope of modern movie-making where the dangerously irresponsible father is abusive and threatening to his daughter’s new boyfriend? Here, as in all the schlock before it, we are supposed to take the father’s side, and feel no sense of irony when the father proceeds to ruin his own daughter’s life (and the lives of many others). The version of this tired tale that One Battle After Another tells is funny enough (though, even by the standards of the genre, very nasty), but it’s not true or insightful. There is an even worse scene later. Our hero is abusive on the phone with another member of his militant group, and that person is offended and reacts in a pathetic, whiny way. Now, look, conditional on this left-wing militant group existing at all in the current moment, it is perfectly reasonable to imagine that its members would have strong views about workplace ethics, respectful modes of interaction, “triggering behavior”, and all the rest. However, these are also militants who do extremely violent things outside of the law. They would not be pathetic and whiny about these matters – they would be fearsome and unrelenting. PTA and I are roughly the same age, so I feel like I can say this: the whole scene comes off as him complaining about young people while getting some cheap laughs from the audience. Could I go on from here? I suppose, but the movie descends into pure action-movie mode that doesn’t really merit close analysis. An equally absurd right-wing group appears, but it seems so short-staffed (despite vast resources) that one of its top members has to be sent out to assassinate someone (in a cool muscle car). There are some more scenes that I recognize from other action movies in which characters who are in impossibly dangerous situations nonetheless do funny and immature things to make the audience smile. All of this is so far from what I want from PTA that I will not dwell on it. The bright spots are Benicio del Toro (as always) and Sean Penn, who perfectly manifests a Pynchon-style caricature. The final thing I want to say is that there is one incredibly compelling character in the movie: Perfidia Beverly Hills, played by Teyana Taylor. Both the character and the performance are riveting. Perfidia is a true revolutionary and a purist, but also a selfish pragmatist with her own tangled relationship to power and to her own causes. There is so much to unpack and explore, and Teyana Taylor brings all these strengths and contradictions out so richly. Twenty minutes into the movie, she describes an entire philosophy in an intense and moving scene about motherhood, individuality, loyalty, and revolution. Soon after this, she disappears from the movie entirely except as a very distant and unexamined presence. She could have been the heart of a PTA movie that would have fit directly into the larger California narrative of personalities and institutions. Perhaps, since One Battle After Another is technically an action movie, there could be a sequel, or PTA could do one of those "extended universe" things about Perfidia’s life.

@yoavgo I use them for coding in Rust, but there it's the compiler that enforces proper memory management.

anyone using LLMs agents for coding in a non-GC language? how good are they at handling the memory management?

My basic take on the humanities contribution to AI: moving past "right answer" frameworks for validation. That alone would revolutionize the field.

@yoavgo Keynote is hard to replace! Also look into some of the third party utilities that make Macs more habitable (e.g., Moom, keyboard maestro, better touch tool)

the hype around DHH's dotfiles release and my hate to macos window management made me consider switching back to linux. two major questions remain: whats the msoffice situation? (i need to be able to open create and sign word files, and i need a decent slides software, ideally like keynote). is there a laptop with a decent trackpad?

The faculty are too “smart” to organize anything. The staff don’t know how smart they are, but can organize anything. And they are all too risk-averse to get another job. This is how we run the university!

The college cannot take a public stand on these political attacks on faculty. But we do hope someone does do something. We just can’t encourage it. Or sanction it. Also, we may have to fire you if you do take a public stand.

So I asked ChatGPT. "What's the part number for the plastic plug thing on the thermostat housing of a 3.2l VR6 (Audi 8p)". It instantly came back WITH THE RIGHT ANSWER. I, for one, welcome our new part-number-knowing overlords. 2/2

📷 Now I'm convinced. I'm replacing the thermostat housing on my ancient Audi. Of course, a little plastic doohickey broke off when I took it apart. I can't find it on any parts diagram and I have no idea what it's called so I can't look it up. 1/2

As what happened in Paramount, Compton and LA yesterday bursts into the national conversation, make sure you follow responsible news outlets with people on the ground and deep connections to their local community like @LongBeachPost, @LAist, @boyleheightsbt, @latimes

🎉 We’re thrilled to share that Joan Bybee, our Forum Lecturer (July 13th), has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences! It is wonderful to see the Academy recognize Professor Bybee's pioneering role in leading the field to focus on the role of language use

So for all the biliousness (re current overclass of billionaire jackals) this is actually an extended love-letter to my colleagues, UIC, and the whole world of public higher ed nplusonemag.com/online-only/on…

@mjpost @lelia_glass That's probably how it started here, since the tenure process is just overgrown annual evals. But the result is that each level of review below the provost writes a letter to the candidate (cc'ed to everyone else) explaining to them why they should/shouldn't be granted tenure.

@robmalouf @lelia_glass These are not written by the candidate, though, are they? JHU uses second person for Ph.D. annual evaluation letters. This is for their formal record, but the audience is the student, and the letters are written by advisors on behalf of the department, so it makes sense.

@timothyhenryr oops: cambridge.org/core/journals/…

@timothyhenryr core/journals/english-language-and-linguistics/article/vowel-change-as-systemic-optimisation-why-the-new-zealand-english-front-vowel-shift-is-not-a-good-example/7E9A1ABC818014663F792D6D6C07E5A8

Any recommendations on authors talking about synchronic chain shifts? I'm aware of the Northern Cities Vowel shift, of course, but am less up-to-date on literature on other languages.