David Mimno

@dmimno.bsky.social

6875 Followers 4663 Following

He teaches information science at Cornell. http://mimno.infosci.cornell.edu

A rather worn red copy of Jevons “The Coal Question” from an academic library
five lines of poetry, each with a blue or red circle in the left margin, and a blue or red underline extending from the left or right side towards the center, both indicating a negative or positive value for the line
Mistral identifies me as an experimental electronic musician 👨‍🎤
No, Denis Diderot did not actually say this about Jean-Jacques Rousseau.The first explanation provided was a complete hallucination—an artificial "history" mistakenly invented to fit your memory of the quote.Setting the Record StraightThe Real Author: The metaphor belongs entirely to Sir Walter Scott in his 1814 novel Waverley.The Real Target: Scott was describing his own fictional protagonist, Edward Waverley, to illustrate the young man's lack of academic discipline and his tendency to abandon books the moment they required real intellectual effort.Why the Mix-up HappenedDiderot and Rousseau did have a famously volatile friendship and an eventual bitter public falling-out. Diderot wrote extensively about Rousseau's erratic, intense, and deeply flawed
Print of “Moby Dick is about whales” with cool whale and orange checker pattern. I love the physicality of the type, and the message that technology has to add something beyond the obvious— but at the same time, we sometimes need to remind ourselves of the obvious
Gas pump with handwritten 5 numbers. Premium gas is listed at above $5 per gallon.
Slightly blurry pic of a complete circle rainbow from an airplane window
Norman Rockwell “Freedom of Speech” town hall painting
A New York City metrocard, the key to transit access for decades, due to be finally deactivated in a few weeks, lies crumpled and caked in road salt in a gutter next to a cigarette butt
Slide showing results: Left Behind is very different from most Christian fiction Most stories model Christian femininity and depict a loving god LLMs can do a great job of annotating complex constructs but it takes a lot of effort
Slide comparing lyrics in Cats in the cradle by Harry Chapin to Dua Lipa
Slide showing general fan fiction affect, LoTR is most positive, then Greek myth, Harry Potter, and Percy Jackson
Slide showing significant differences in implicit references to bible verses by US political parties
A slide with three QR codes that may or may not work with DOIs that are probably ok, and text that seems completely made up
Cascadilla creek with a couple smashed pumpkins in it that will stay there for months
Looking forward • Scaling context-length: 1M > 10/100M • Scaling model parameters 1T > 10T • Scaling training tokens 10T > 100T • Scaling test-time compute 64k -> 1M • Scaling RL compute 5% -> 50% • Scaling synthetic data -> more compute than training • Scaling environments
Evaluation reasoning interpretability rl in context benchmark alignment synthetic data
NYT spelling bee showing “not in word list” for BIELEFELD, referring to the conspiracy theory that this city does not exist
DECeNBER7, 1941, lives in infamy in Burope for a crime raster in some and, in its affront to humanity, far more shocking than the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, for it was on that Sunday that the Führer promulgated den Nacht und Nebel Erlass, the Night and Fog Decree. The decree's original goal was to winnow out people "endangering German security" (die deutsche Sicherheit gefährden), but two months later Feldmarschall Keitel expanded it to include all persons in occupied countries who had been taken into custody and were still alive eight days later. In such cases . . . sollen künftig die Beschuldigten heimlich nach Deutschland gebracht . . . werden. .. the prisoners are to be transported to Germany secretly these measures will have a deterrent effect because a) the prisoners will vanish without leaving a trace, b) no information may be given out as to their whereabouts or their fate.1 At Nuremberg, Keitel confessed to the International Military Tribunal that of all the atrocities in which he had collaborated. this was "the worst”
The cover of Steely Dan’s album aja
A sign says “sidewalk closed ahead” directly in front of a four story building
GEORGE ORWELL nights no. only the future tower happenede Icader « . controls sach an event, "It never happened - well it no suchened. It he says that wo and wo are five - well woe happen five. This prospect fighter she last uch more than two are and after our experiences of the last few years than not a frivolous statement. But is it perhaps childish or morbid to terrify oneself with ous of a totalitarian future? Before writing off the totalitar. visions of a totalitarian future? Before writing off the totalitar. tan world as a nightmare that can't come true, just remember that in 1925 the world of today would have seemed a nightmare that couldn't come true. Against that shifting phantasm-goric world in which black may be white tomorrow and yesteruays weather can be changed by decree, there are in reality only two safeguards. One is that however much vou deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back, and you consequently can't violate it in ways that impair military efficiency. The other is that so long as some parts ot the earn remain unconquered, the uberal tradition can be kept alive. Let Fascism, or possibly even a combination of several Fascisms, conquer the whole world, and those two conditions no longer exist. We in England underrate the danger of this kind of this ESSAY. the buying, mited. Ins stance - the the Americo ing that thi domination cause in or savery mus the slave e Civilisatio, four thous When those hun rested Be record W whole of are knov Spartacu at the Bi inscribe picture round
Spelling bee refuses to recognize “mimnotization”
Black cat rolled up in a ball sleeping
Page image from “The Arms of Krupp” describing the near bankruptcy of the Nazi party in 1932 and its rescue by German industrialists
A black cat on a couch looking a little grumpy
Introductory remarks at the conference on language models
Weather app screenshot predicting its always sunny in Philadelphia
Blue screen on an airport display hanging from a ceiling
A trivial two line import statement with the warning "Suggested code may be subject to a license" and a link to a towardsdatascience page
UMass Amherst Whitmore Administration building
3-lane road intersection with traffic jam
The Merlin app detects a merlin 🧙‍♀️ 🦅
Three silhouettes with Lake Ontario in the background and light on the horizon
The steel skeleton of a building under construction with plastic sheeting torn by the wind
“And that’s the median; many workers worked less than that”
Topics about LLMs, prompting, and fine-tuning
A view of the East River looking north from the Roosevelt Island tram
Kylo Ren screaming MORE
Two black cats
Ted’s book with a post it correcting ZO to ZZI
Cat napping on a couch by a window looking like “who disturbs my slumber”
Wilson’s Iliad with a receipt from Odyssey Books in Ithaca NY
Adorable kitten on my lap