Ted Underwood

@tedunderwood.com

22802 Followers 6184 Following

Uses machine learning to study literary imagination, and vice-versa. Likely to share news about AI & computational social science / Sozialwissenschaft / 社会科学 Information Sciences and English, UIUC. Distant Horizons (Chicago, 2019). tedunderwood.com

https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009737487 I ask to be made your instrument in the hands of Providence for this great , this mighty work . And where is the man who will not raise his full voice and cry aloud , it shall be done ! I ask you , through your representatives in Congress , to grant to me 60 miles wide of the public domain from Lake Michigan to the Pacific Ocean , the proceeds and avails of which to be applied ex- clusively to the building and completing the said road ; after which all the surplus land to belong to me as a reward for the work .
About twelve years ago I invented a calculating machine , which was patented in America in the year 1850 ; in working out this instrument , a great many #21 (p.11) 11 ideas suggested themselves as to the improvement of the arithmetical system , weight and measure in general . In a pamphlet printed in Philadelphia in 1851 , describ- ing the calculating machine , mention is made about systems of arithmetics with 8 and 16 as the base , with suggestions how to form six new figures for the latter . At that time I acquired a good practice in a system with 16 as the base , and intended to publish in the Journal of the Franklin Institute an article similar to the contents of this , but was not fulfilled .
Project of a new system of arithmetic, weight, measure and coins : proposed to be called the tonal system, with sixteen to the base / by John W. Nystrom, 1862 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044091868034&seq=11
The future that should concern us is one where AI does empower students and faculty but continues to be shaped off campus. If we take that path, higher education risks losing its central place in the production and distribution of knowledge. It isn’t hard to envision a world where everyone knows that you get intellectual substance from an AI subscription, while formal degrees confer prestige mainly through association with beautiful campuses and victorious football teams.
The source described leading AI labs or their allies approaching the administration every 3-5 months with an idea to ban open-source models.
The coding carve-out eats the thesis The essay concedes that coding is being automated because it’s a “structured, formal language that can be tested in real time,” and quarantines it as an exception for “formal or verifiable domains.” Anyone who’s shipped software professionally should raise an eyebrow here. The formal part of programming was never the hard part. The job is deciding what to build from vague requirements, choosing among designs with no provably right answer, and figuring out what the person asking actually meant. Tests catch a slice of failures; “the code compiles” tells you almost nothing about whether the work is good. If LLMs are genuinely displacing coding work, they’re handling ambiguity, planning, and judgment, the exact capacities the essay says they lack. And the “verifiable” boundary isn’t a fixed property of jobs. It’s an engineering frontier that keeps moving: math got verifiable through proof assistants (AlphaProof solved IMO problems in Lean back in 2024), legal citations got verifiable by checking against case databases, and the essay’s own example of an impossible task (“a database of all U.S. case law, which the model could use to avoid fabricating judicial precedents”) is a product that already exists at Westlaw and Lexis. Imperfect, improving, and definitely not blocked by some theorem.
Surely there never was such fragile china - ware as that of which the millers of Coketown were made . Handle them never so lightly , and they fell to pieces with such ease that you might sus- pect them of having been flawed before . They were ruined , when they were required to send laboring children to school ; they were ruined , when inspectors were appointed to look into their works ; they were ruined , when such inspectors considered it doubtful whether they were quite justified in chopping people up with their machinery ; they were utterly undone , when it was hinted that perhaps they need not always make quite so much smoke . Be- sides Mr. Bounderby's gold spoon which was generally received in Coketown , another prevalent fiction was very popular there . It took the form of a threat . Whenever a Coketowner felt he was ill - used - that is to say , whenever he was not left entirely alone , and it was proposed to hold him accountable for the consequences of any of his acts he was sure to come out with the awful me- nace , that he would " sooner pitch his property into the Atlantic . " #113 (p.117) HARD TIMES . 117 This had terrified the Home Secretary within an inch of his life , on several occasions . However , the Coketowners were so patriotic after all , that they never had pitched their property into the Atlantic yet , but on the contrary , had been kind enough to take mighty good care of it . So there it was , in the haze yonder ; and it increased and multi- plied .
Andrew Curran @AndrewCurra... · 1h Dean Ball took a lot of heat this week for calling open source decelerationist. Many people read this as him being personally anti-open source. I don't think that's true. This was my interpretation of what he was saying: if open source is sufficiently capable and ubiquitous, it will eventually destroy the big labs business models. This means they would no longer have funding. To quote Ilya Sutskever from his testimony in the OpenAI vs. Elon Musk trial: "If there is no funding, there is no big computer." And without big computer, there can't be big model. In my opinion, what would happen next in this scenario is that the United States Government would step in, nationalize the leading labs, consolidate them into a single federal entity, and then fund it directly through the Department of War under national security. To put into perspective how easily they could do this, the proposed 2027 defense budget is $1.5 trillion. Most people who strongly support open source would probably not see that outcome as ideal, or this future as a pleasant one. This doesn't mean we should abandon open source or stop wishing for its success. It simply means we should take the middle path. There is fire on both sides of us now, and that will likely remain true for the foreseeable future.
screenshot of high score 3 on CLOD BIRD, with a note in the corner
Picture of a man wearing ragged clothes stumbling through a post-apocalyptic desert, chased by giant bees. His thought bubble reads "I want to escape to a city on Mars; I want clean water; and I want to survive bees."
“I didn’t expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition.”
Ted Underwood pntrosSedo0hcu2t7cfl u e 7mu n 3009m2c6g51g i5mu90t6 J cml961 6 f6ha7 · Shared with Friends; Except: John Underwood, John Underwood, Anne Underwood, Karen Cotton, Blue Montakhab and 3 others When this shit is over I want thirty years of shameless, sentimental propagandizing for liberalism. I need The Crucible to be rewritten by Lin-Manuel Miranda and have an extended Broadway run. I need obvious remakes of High Noon, Twelve Angry Men, and everything by Frank Capra. All high school libraries get extra copies of J. S. Mill, Mary Wollstonecraft, Martin Luther King, George Orwell, and _Gender Queer: A Memoir,_ and students get subsidized field trips to the monument to victims of ICE on the National Mall. When people object that forcing ten-year-olds to memorize speeches about the rule of law from A Man for All Seasons is propagandistic and self-contradictory, our response should be "tough cookies, freedom isn't free."
value. But I think in the future that will become less important than exercising judgment and all of these fuzzy things that have a lower status in the Al community today. That's a mental shift that we're maybe not quite prepared for. Many of us will be sad about it, and that's okay. Inset slide: How much of conferences such as ICML should be about evaluation? Radical proposal: Maybe half. At least we need a dedicated track. Thoughtful evaluation is a form of alignment. Without enough emphasis on evaluation, the community behaves like a powerful but rudderless ship.
Google Sign in Q good night, westley All - Images Videos Shopping Short videos • Al Overview 0-+2 : Good work. Sleep well. I'll most likely kill you in the morning • IMDb Have you ever wondered what makes that line from The Princess Bride so perfect? It is a great contrast. The first part sounds like a kind boss. The second part is a scary threat. • Instagram • Ekazop It is just like a battery. A battery has two ends: a positive end and a negative end. Let's look at how that works. Parts of a Battery • Cathode: This is the positive end. It pulls things in. Think of it like a magnet grabbing tiny metal bits. • Anode: This is the negative end. It pushes things out. Think of it like a crowded room pushing people out the door.
Cheonggyecheon at sunset, Wikipedia commons
Tidal wave from day after tomorrow
Screenshot of a language-model interpretability interface showing a masked-word completion task alongside neuron activation visualizations. At the top, the prompt reads: “Provide the masked word here. Don't write anything else. ‘It was on a dreary night of [MASK] that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils.’” A small tooltip marks the masked token at “Position 37.” On the left, the model's response appears in a chat-style box containing the single word “November.” On the right, a panel labeled “J-Space” displays layer controls, with “ALL LAYERS” selected, a horizontal overview of layers 0–63, and a table listing high-activating readouts for upper layers (including tokens such as <|im_end|>, “Mary,” “Frank,” and “quote”), each accompanied by small horizontal activation bars. The interface is shown in a light gray theme with controls for different lens modes across the top.
#9 (p.5)|v PRACTICAL ELECTRO-THERAPEUTICS AND X-RAY THERAPY WITH CHAPTERS ON PHOTOTHERAPY, X-RAY IN EYE SURGERY CAL ASPECT OF THE XAND MEDICO. BY J. M. MARTIN, M. D. PROFESSOR OF ELECTRO-THERAPEUTICS AND X-RAY METHODS IN THE MEDICAL DEPARTMENT OF BAYIOR UNIVERSITY. IN THE MEDICAI, DEPARTMENT OF SOTTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY. AND IN THE STATE DENTAL COLLEGE, DALLAS, TEX.; MEMBER OF THE TEXAS STATE MEDICAL ASSOCIATION, AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION. CONTAINZNG 219 ILLUSTRATIONS EC ST. LOUIS C. V. MOSBY COMPANY 1912 Digitized by Google UNIVER Original from Zoom Out
From https://www.simonstalenhag.se/es.html Alt text: A moody, blue-toned science fiction scene on a rainy highway at dusk or dawn. A colossal, weathered bipedal robot towers over the road, its rounded head and bulky torso festooned with dangling cables and exposed mechanical components. Thin wires trail from its body to the ground, creating the impression of tethering or control. In the left foreground, an older blue station wagon with a roof rack is stopped on the wet pavement, its taillights reflecting in the rain-slick road. Beyond the vehicle, a line of small human figures with glowing red lights stands near the giant machine, emphasizing its immense scale. Low shrubs and trees fade into dense fog, while the empty sky and cool blue palette create a quiet, ominous atmosphere.
JauntyWunderKind @jauntywk.bsky.social i wonder how much ai psychosis is that people have never ever ever had help or labor they can access before () and are just totally unaccustomed to, unused to, overwhelmed by such a world. by having help. man, it feels great. 1:40 AM • Jun 29, 2026 ) Everybody can reply 3 reposts 12 likes 4 3 12
flag of the United States
A futuristic city scene with glass towers, domed buildings, elevated transit lines, flying vehicles, and a bright blue sky. In the foreground, a person walks a small robot dog along a curved pool beside sleek modern architecture. Overlaid interface elements announce that “Fable 5” is currently unavailable, with a dark rounded notification at the top and a larger message bar at the bottom reading, “Fable 5 is not currently available.”
Alt text: A chart titled “What should we let AI write?” shows a grid of writing tasks and levels of AI involvement, with green meaning “Yes,” yellow meaning “Edge case,” and red meaning “No.” The horizontal axis runs from more mechanical writing tasks to more ideas-led ones: admin email, data summary, terms and conditions, lit review, business memo, academic paper, news analysis, think-tank report, op-ed, political speech, and novel. The vertical axis on the right is labeled “AI involvement,” increasing upward from AI proofread, fact-check, research, red-team, brainstorm, light edits, polish draft, notes-to-AI draft, long back-and-forth, and one-shot AI. Most lower levels of AI involvement are shaded green across nearly all writing types, suggesting that proofreading, fact-checking, research, red-teaming, brainstorming, and light edits are generally acceptable. Higher levels of AI involvement become more restricted, especially for ideas-led writing. One-shot AI and long back-and-forth drafting are mostly red for academic papers, news analysis, think-tank reports, op-eds, political speeches, and novels. Yellow edge-case areas appear in places such as one-shot AI for more mechanical writing, notes-to-draft for business or academic writing, polish drafting for novels and political speeches, and brainstorming for some ideas-led forms. The chart visually argues that AI is more acceptable when the task is mechanical or assistive, and less acceptable when AI is doing substantial drafting of original, ideas-led work.
Alt text: A hand-drawn style chart titled “What should we let AI write?” maps writing tasks along two axes: left to right moves from mechanical to ideas-led genres, and bottom to top increases AI involvement. A legend marks green as “Yes,” yellow as “Edge case,” and red as “No.” Most of the lower area is green, suggesting AI is acceptable for tasks like proofreading, fact-checking, research, brainstorming, red-teaming, light edits, and some polishing. The upper-right area is red, suggesting AI should not substantially write more ideas-led work such as op-eds, political speeches, and novels, especially as one-shot or heavily AI-driven drafting. A yellow transition band runs diagonally through the middle, marking ambiguous cases like notes-to-draft or AI polish for business memos, academic papers, news analysis, and reports. Categories along the bottom include admin email, terms and conditions, data summary, lit review, business memo, academic paper, news analysis, think-tank report, op-ed, political speech, and novel. The right side lists increasing AI involvement from “AI proofread” at the bottom to “One-shot AI” at the top.
A Cartesian grid describing views of AI along axes from bad to good (vertically) and overhyped to transformative (horizontally). The author of The Post is right on the Boundary between yellow region (optimist) and blue (true believer).
You've answered 1 and 2 correctly, but let me sharpen the framing, because the sharper version makes the circularity vanish more completely than "two separate questions" does — and it also tells you exactly what to do for 3.
recap: Running free-generation eval of the fine-tuned Qwen 2.5-7B LoRA model on Delta. Updated the slurm script with TRANSFORMERS_CACHE; resubmit qwen25_qlora_freegen_A100.slurm to test the fix. (disable recaps in /config) ❯ Thanks! One small detail. Could you tell me whether the program run by that slurm script has a particular property -- the property that it will always terminate? Let me look at the generation loop and any retry or resume logic in the script. Searched for 2 patterns, ran 1 shell command Yes, it will always terminate. The main loop (for idx, q in enumerate(questions)) iterates over a fixed list with no retries or
AI company revenue from https://www.the-ai-corner.com/p/anthropic-30b-arr-passed-openai-revenue-2026
Why Language Models Hallucinate Adam Tauman Kalai∗ OpenAI Ofir Nachum OpenAI Santosh S. Vempala† Georgia Tech Edwin Zhang OpenAI September 4, 2025 Abstract Like students facing hard exam questions, large language models sometimes guess when uncertain, producing plausible yet incorrect statements instead of admitting uncertainty. Such “hallucinations” persist even in state-of-the-art systems and undermine trust. We argue that language models hallucinate because the training and evaluation procedures reward guessing over acknowledging uncertainty, and we analyze the statistical causes of hallucinations in the modern training pipeline. Hallucinations need not be mysterious—they originate simply as errors in binary classification. If incorrect statements cannot be distinguished from facts, then hallucinations in pretrained language models will arise through natural statistical pressures. We then argue that hallucinations persist due to the way most evaluations are graded—language models are optimized to be good test-takers, and guessing when uncertain improves test performance. This “epidemic” of penalizing uncertain responses can only be addressed through a socio-technical mitigation: modifying the scoring of existing benchmarks that are misaligned but dominate leaderboards, rather than introducing additional hallucination evaluations. This change may steer the field toward more trustworthy AI systems.
Same user iterating on "Meredith Lexington" story added = inserted vs. previous prompt removed = removed vs. previous prompt Jun 28, 15:38 Make a story about Meredith Lexington, a news editor from Los Angeles, California, who wants to end her parents' forced marriage, and Andrew Bennett, a journalist from Brooklyn, New York, who wants to solve a murder mystery. They wanted to go back in time, so they changed history. They were strangers. Meredith bought scarf from the market then she wore it. Andrew was driving a car when he saw a woman walking through a tunnel and tried to stop the automobile, but it was out of control. The vehicle then came to a stop. Meredith was there. Meredith and Andrew were transported to the 1994 (1990s). Meredith became a teenage girl studying at Laurel Springs School. Jun 28, 16:21 Make a story about Meredith Lexington, a news editor from Los Angeles, California, who wants to end her parents' forced marriage, and Andrew Bennett, a journalist from Brooklyn, New York, who wants to solve a murder mystery. They wanted to go back in time, so they changed history. They were strangers. Meredith bought magical scarf from the market then she wore it. Andrew was driving a car when he saw a woman walking through a tunnel and tried to stop the automobile, but it was out of control. The vehicle then came to a stop. Meredith was there. Meredith and Andrew were transported to the 1994 (1990s). Meredith became a teenage girl studying at Laurel Springs School, where her mother Maureen attended. She wished to prevent her mother's forced marriage. Meredith noticed her mother at school, and she appears to…
"What Do Historical Language Models Model?" by Thierry Poibeau
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/americans-and-ai-2026-chatbots-smart-devices-and-views-on-impact/
Neo stopping bullets in the first Matrix
Hugo Weaving saying "You hear that, Mister An-derson? That — is the sound — of in-ev-itability."
But the genuinely elegant answer, the one that reuses machinery you're already building rather than training a new discriminator at all, is to read the classifier off your CFG generative model. The implicit classifier in classifier-free guidance is exactly p(metadata | text) ∝ p(text | metadata)/p(text); the guidance term is a discriminator over your conditioning vector. So score a generation by log p(text | intended metadata) − log p(text | ∅)
https://www.anthropic.com/research/coding-agents-social-sciences
Ted Underwood orSontpesdm : 12 7 61 6 c783 6i a 0 n a15 J 2m0 t c2 agahc 0 ma40f e u ci 9 l0ul · Shared with Friends; Except: John Underwood, John Underwood, Anne Underwood, Karen Cotton, Blue Montakhab and 3 others There are really two different conversations about AI happening right now. Most people I know here (on FB) have encountered AI in a chat window, or as something that's used to draft documents. Unsurprisingly, we mostly hate it. I, too, hate reading an email or paper drafted by AI! The vibe is gross. Communications between human beings should have a human speaker. I think the people I interact with over on Bluesky (software developers, social scientists, CS/IS profs, digital humanists) mostly use AI in ways suggested by the first four rows of the graph below (source: Anthropic survey of social scientists). They use it to code, or they use it dialogically to get advice about methods, feedback on an (existing!) draft, etc. I believe the ppl I know use AI to draft documents even less often than the graph below suggests.
the android leader overheating in I, Mudd
https://www.yorku.ca/eye/lambdas.htm
We tend to think of light as a diffuse uniform field, or an abstraction, if we think about it at all, but real physical light has a length, and the length isn't as small as you might think. The wavelengths of light you can see range from about ½ to ¾ of a micrometer, which is about 1/10th of the thickness of a strand of spider silk, or about 1/20th the thickness of plastic wrap. Light is small, definitely microscopic, but still similar to the size of real things.
The return of Gandalf from the Peter Jackson films.
even superintelligent AGI agents. But this discourse about large models as intelligent agents is fundamentally mis-conceived. Combining ideas from social and behavioral sciences with computer science can help us to understand AI systems more accurately. Large models should not be viewed primarily as intelligent agents but as a new kind of cultural and social technology, allowing humans to take advantage of information other humans have accumulated.
Claude has written up a plan to destroy a mighty empire and is ready to execute. Would you like to proceed?  ❯ 1. Yes, and use auto mode    2. Yes, manually approve edits    3. No, ask a follow-up question, such as “Which empire? Mine?” or “Are any of my enemies technically not ‘of woman born’?”    4. Tell Claude what to change       shift+tab to approve with this feedback
YouTube still image showing handwritten lowercase Greek letters in a variety of alternate forms
For krill density, whale-feeding studies use values like 0.1 kg/m³ as a critical lower density, 0.5 kg/m³ as a productive feeding density, and rich patches up to 4.5 kg/m³. One 25 m blue whale gulping 80 m³ of water could get ~360 kg of krill in a very rich patch. By contrast, measured flying insect biomass in air is more like 0 to 1.2–1.34 mg dry mass/m³, with summer averages around 0.5 mg/m³ in one optical-sensor study. Converting dry insect mass to wet mass generously by multiplying by ~3, that is only about: 0.0015 to 0.004 g wet insect/m³ of air Compare that to krill: Medium Food density Rich krill patch ~4.5 kg/m³ Good krill patch ~0.5 kg/m³ Critical whale-feeding krill density ~0.1 kg/m³ Flying insects in air, generous wet estimate ~0.0000015–0.000004 kg/m³ So aerial insects are roughly 25,000 to 3,000,000 times less dense than whale-usable krill patches, depending on which comparison you choose.
Line chart titled “Renewables Overtake Coal in Global Electricity Mix,” showing the share of global electricity generation by source from 2000 to 2025. Renewables rise steadily from about 18% in 2000 to 33.8% in 2025, crossing above coal near the end of the series. Coal declines from around 38–40% for much of the early 2000s and 2010s to 33.0% in 2025. Gas and other fossil fuels remain fairly steady in the mid-to-high 20% range before falling to 24.4% in 2025. Nuclear declines gradually from about 16% to 8.9%. Source: Ember; chart branded Statista.
Screenshot of three YouTube-style jazz video thumbnails in a row. The first shows a smoky, noir-ish cat with a cigarette and orange text reading “9 Soul Jazz,” titled “Late Night ‘9’ Soul Jazz 🎸 Smooth Groove with a Cat.” The second shows a black-and-white portrait of a woman smoking, with large turquoise text “ETHIO JAZZ,” titled “The Hypnotic Soul of Addis: Why Ethio-Jazz is the Deepest Groove on Earth.” The third shows a woman smoking in a wood-paneled private library with gold text “OLD MONEY JAZZ,” titled “You’re studying in a private library in 1920s (Old Money Jazz).”
This Jesus Must Die (From "Jesus Christ Superstar" Soundtrack) Bob Bingham, Kurt Yaghjian https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lN4TxOd9I8Q&ra=m
Gustave Doré "When London is In Ruins"
Moonshine still c. 1920, from https://archaeology.org/issues/november-december-2020/collection/alcohol-united-states-moonshine/alcohol-through-the-ages/
From Borges, "Death and the Compass": In order to attract you I have premeditated everything, Erik Lannrot, so as to draw you to the solitude of Triste-Ie-Roy." Lannrot avoided Scharlach's eyes. He was looking at the trees and the sky d~vided into rhombs of turbid yellow, green and red. He felt a little cold, and felt, too, an impersonal, almost anonymous, sadness. It was already night; from the dusty garden arose the useless cry of a bird. For the I~st time, La9nrot considered the pt'oble~ of ~ymmetrical and periodic death. "In your labyrinth there are three lines too many," he said at last. "I know of a Greek labyrinth which i~ a single stre,tight line. Along this line so many philosophers hav~ lost themselves that 12 New Mexico Quarterly, Vol. 24 [1954], Iss. 3, Art. 3 https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/nmq/vol24/iss3/3 D EAT HAN D THE COM PAS S 263 at mere detective might well do so too. Scharlach, wheJ:l in sorpe other incarnation you hunt me, feign to commit (or do commih a crime at A, then a second crime at B, eight kilometers from ..j\, then a third crime at C, four kilometers from A and B, halfw~y enroute between the two. Wait for me later at D, two kilometers from A and C, halfway, once again, between both. Kill me at D, as you are now going to kill meat Triste-Ie-Roy," "The next time I kill you," said Scharlach, "I promise you t~e Jabyrinth made of the single straight line which is invisible and everlasting." . He stepped back a few paces. Then, very carefully, he fired.
Image of human beings being grown rather than born from The Matrix