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Ben Schmidt@bschmidt.bsky.social |
543 followers 288 following 600 posts
VP of Information Design at Nomic building new interfaces to embeddings; onetime history professor/digital humanist. In general I use this account for humanities-y things, @benmschmidt@sigmoid.social for techy stuff, and the bad place for business.
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Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
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Ranking of US-ian Nobel laureates by how quickly I would buy an LOA edition: 4. Pearl S. Buck. How did that happen? 3. Louise Glück. I have too much LOA poetry. 2. Morrison. Too expensive at release; but like Roth, wait until the market's glutted to get them at $8 a pop. 1. 1-vol complete Dylan.
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Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
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Also the number of later Philip Roth titles that are plausibly chapter titles in a Donald Trump biography is kind of spooky. Besides "Zuckerman Unbound" and "Sabbath's Theater," there's a decent interpretation for every one!
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Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
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Since 2016 I've had this nagging fear somehow we might be inflicted with a multivolume set that starts with "Art of the Deal," includes 2000's understudied "The America we Deserve," and has volumes "The Tweets: 2009-2020" and "The Truths: 2021-2030."
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Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
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British voters seem to be weirdly good at tactical voting, but the upshot for me here is that the tories will recenter on Johnson's brexitism, and will probably need (and get) a lib dem partner to govern next time around. (With the caveat that I have zippo understanding of northern ireland).
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Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
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Just working through this all, seems like: 1. Labor + SNP + Greens 43.1%, compared to 38.6% last time. 2. Reform+Tories 38%, compared to Tories 43.6% last time; 3. Greens up 4%, which probably came out of the labour/SNP left. 4. Lib Dems up slightly in %, and recover in seats.
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Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
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WOW, perfect framing. Ivy-pedigreed-academics tend to see the NYT as a wayward sibling, or the 13th Harvard house, or a prize committee, or a high-impact-factor venue. At core, part of their prestige, non-profit ecosystem. I've struggled to explain how different it feels in the building. This is it.
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Anil Dash
@anildash.com
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Is there good journalism and opinion in the NYT sometimes? Of course. And sometimes there are useful items on Facebook Marketplace. But what is it _for_? It's for the same thing as Facebook, and run with the same arrogance and insularity, based on the same fictions.
2 replies 45 reposts 433 likes
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Anil Dash
@anildash.com
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I need to write the whole piece about this, but the thing to understand is that the NYT is now just Facebook. The platform dictates narrative to normies, is totally gamed by the right, and is still so ubiquitous as to be unavoidable even by those who see how broken it is. It's just Facebook.
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Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
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sometimes if the leven stain turns up nothing you run a gram stain just to be sure.
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Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
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Now do Henry-Winkler distance.
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Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
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This would totally work in like an episode of Fringe or something where they could scan someone with a tricorder, say “his levenstain score is off the charts” and immediately realize they’re an imposter from the mirror universe.
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Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
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Also my previous post included a setup for a Berenstein Bears alternate universe/spelling differences joke I can’t figure out how to deliver on so I’m just going to skunk it here lest I spend all day trying to make good on it.
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Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
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Yeah it’s a decent story… But also commanding the heights that determine which books, podcasts, tv shows succeed could make a decent anecdote too.
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Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
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Duckdb has levenstain dist (and jato winkler, etc) as a built in function. I would so love to rewrite my old R text as a cross-language duckdb guide to humanitiea data work… duckdb.org/docs/sql/fun...
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Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
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The way out of this is to find an os error in your photos app that only partially obscures the picture and screen cap it, and then open the screencap in your photos app. After a few days of recursion you’ll either get cured or go fully mad. Good luck!
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Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
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That one still listing the title as chief science officer is a little shady.
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Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
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Oh wait that’s a different page. This is the one I meant. authors.ai/team/
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Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
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I imagine that what showed up on that page and slide decks was something that got negotiated when he left there… co-founder without an operational title signals to me that he has no day-to-day role, but they want to continue featuring his name.
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Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
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He's hired at least two DHers that I know of into that group, too.
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Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
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Not really--I don't think he's been really involved with that place for years. He's at Apple as the manager of the recommendation systems group, which determines what books, podcasts, TV shows, etc. show up in personalized recommendations.
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Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
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Today Nomic released version 3.0 of GPT4All, the easiest and best way to run LLMs on your own computer. If you've never run a private local LLM, try some of the llama3 or mistral derivatives, and chat locally with your own documents. Open source LLMs have gotten crazy good.
www.nomic.ai/gpt4all
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Joshua J. Friedman
@joshuajfriedman.com
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Hooray for the New York Public Library! It's going to be open 7 days a week, thanks to the budget passed by the City Council today—and all the organizers who pushed to make this happen
16 replies 519 reposts 2545 likes
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Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
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The history of the Bush administration will be written from one surviving paper tome: fortunately as its title makes clear, it is comprehensive.
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Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
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It is almost impossible for me to imagine how the first thirty years of the Internet could be as poorly documented as the first thirty years of radio or television were. Let alone the vaudeville performances that preceded them.
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Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
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"I leave it to the reader to imagine how a precocious, all-knowing goat might narrate the history of disease transmission in the Neolithic."
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Hypervisible
@hypervisible.bsky.social
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🫠
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Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
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unclear to me how much that is history depts and how much Af Am. For enrollments, they’re ok… but IIRC the 2022 numbers were surprisingly sharp drop.
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Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
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There’s a clear story that African American history specifically has some way better. Some here. benschmidt.org/post/2023-12....
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Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
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I couldn’t afford one until I was like 40 or so though
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Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
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Idk I guess it’s possible from this curve. www.statista.com/forecasts/91.... But strong suspicion that investment banks surveying teenagers get a lot more rich kids Than they should.
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Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
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iPhones are like 60% of the US smartphone market—is it really plausible that teenagers are 85% iPhone users?
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Ted Underwood 🦋
@tedunderwood.me
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A team centered at McGill and Harvard argues that LLM "hallucination" is better understood as confabulation, and resembles human habits of using narrative for sense-making. #machinelearning 🤖 arxiv.org/abs/2406.04175
4 replies 13 reposts 38 likes
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Dael Norwood
@dael.bsky.social
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In 1926, the President of the New York Chamber of Commerce - then the nation's most powerful association of financiers and capitalists – kept an autographed & gilt-framed photograph of Mussolini in his office. (Judging from the size - 11" x 14.5" – I'd say there's a fair chance it sat on his desk)
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Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
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Now that electric cars all make humming sounds so they don’t kill us, are those sounds branded? Can you tell a Kia from a Toyota?
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Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
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Had a dream about being one in a band of Vikings wandering around a medieval Wal-Mart in Germany.* Realized on waking that it was about the challenges of balancing all these male egos in the tech industry. *(So basically an Aldi).
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Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
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ABOLISH KITTENS
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Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
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It's a general phenomenon though -- we hosted an event last night Sasha Rush from Cornell who was saying that adding text makes image models better, code models better, etc.; but adding other modalities tends not to make text models better. Maybe language is just a good way to describe things.
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Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
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Oh this is really cool: one of the Huggingface people built a real-time in-browser classifier using our model to instantly describe what's there according to your own template.
huggingface.co/spaces/Xenov...
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Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
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We designed our own map for the launch with photos, but some undergrad social media influencer made a much better one so I'll link that: all (?) the images in the Metropolitan Museum's online collection embedded, and text queryable.
atlas.nomic.ai/data/andrewg...
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Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
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Pure intuition, I didn't do the training, but I think part of it is that image labeling tasks are much more poorly defined than text ones, and the nuance in them lies in their text descriptions. If you try to capture ground truth from image labels, you'll always get lots of noise compared to text.
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Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
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Yeah, ten years ago when I did career workshops I used to tell people that they should go on Twitter and treat it as a never-ending conference. Now I tell people to find the appropriate slack/discord.
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Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
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Announcing a new open-weights model from Nomic -- it puts images into the same space as our best-in-class text embedder. blog.nomic.ai/posts/nomic-.... That means you can do rich language search directly on any image dataset! E.g., searching for 'kitschy Americana' at the Met gets cigarette ads.
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Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
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but that edit uses special characters that exclude people with certain screenreaders from this conversation why did you make the conscious decision to exclude them you monster
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Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
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In conclusion, ABOLISH THE FAMILY
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Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
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there and you're here despite them hating Elon more… they, like him, are interested in ending the world as we know it and this place only makes sense if there are parts you don't want to light on fire.
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Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
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Well but also social media has a *radicalizing* effect. Your politics are by my sense fundamentally moderating/liberal -- but most of the leftists who have stayed/migrated back to Twitter are actively looking to consolidate new norms and new communities in new directions. So no mystery why they're…
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Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
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(Speaking of course as someone who still posts on that site almost exclusively to advance their own material interests as a shareholder of an AI company).
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Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
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Just to pick a fight—it’s not clear to me that if you believe in and want to engage in *political* speech this is a useful place… I’ve been more and more funding this a great replacement for the mythical “faculty lounge” but like what’s even of the point of criticizing Kathy Hochul here?
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Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
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Thank you! Sociology makes so much sense as the source, I'm embarrassed not to have thought of it! This is a Goffman-friendly curve below... There's also this 1980 book I'm seeing in the self-help/psychology vein which seems somewhat widespread and plausibly downstream of Goffman.
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Ben Schmidt
@bschmidt.bsky.social
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Is there a locus classicus for "we need to reframe the discourse of X around Y"? Like I don't even know looking at it if it's inherently some kind of marketing talk or what. At least 'reframe' seems maybe post-1990.
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