iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Brandon Prickett @bprickett.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

No problem! I used this site and then you copy and paste it over: share.google/W3tpICzlzPPD...

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Brandon Prickett @bprickett.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Cool! And you 𝘤𝘢𝘯 italicize, but they don't make it easy in the app.

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Brandon Prickett @bprickett.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Just finished Babel by R. F. Kuang (a book with the premise of "scifi if the science were #linguistics"). Highly recommend!

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ʤan~ʤɑn~ʤɔn @languagedoodad.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

I made a Phonology Feature & Segment engine app. You can query a given segment inventory by features or query features by segments. It uses set computations to determine natural classes, minimal feature specifications, segments needed to form a natural class, etc. jhnwnstd.github.io/phono-feature/

jhnwnstd.github.io

Phonology Segment & Feature Engine

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Matt (Tired) @mattfrith.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Please observe my madness... I'll finish this eventually ;') #pixelart

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Canaan Breiss @canaan.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

Hi language science bluesky! If you have 20 minutes, PhD student Dhanya Charan (dhanya.humspace.ucla.edu) and I are recruiting volunteer participants for a 20-minute speech production study! Link here: www.labvanced.com/player.html?... Please re-skeet / share widely! Thank you!

dhanya.humspace.ucla.edu

DHANYA CHARAN – [d̪an.jaː t͡ʃa.ɾan]

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Brandon Prickett @bprickett.bsky.social · 30/05/2026

Oh look! A plot of what I do when someone is walking the opposite direction down a hallway and neither of us can choose to go right or left. 🐦🐦

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Brandon Prickett @bprickett.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

Saw a lot of people say McDonald's fries for this and I think that's probably right. But I want to name Arby's curly fries, KFC coleslaw, and Jack-in-the-box tiny tacos as honorable mentions.

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Brandon Prickett @bprickett.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

Not exactly what you're talking about, but there was a very fun poster I saw at a conference a while back about the sound patterns in Star Trek names: personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/wendel...

personalpages.manchester.ac.uk

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Tom McCoy @rtommccoy.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

🤖🧠 New commentary 🧠🤖 What role should large language models (LLMs) play in linguistics? I reflect on this question in a commentary now on arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2605.10061 To appear in BBS as a commentary on @futrell.bsky.social and @kmahowald.bsky.social's excellent piece on LLMs & Linguistics!

Screenshot of the title and abstract of a paper.
Title: "Not-So-Strange Love: Language Models and Generative
Linguistic Theories are More Compatible than They Appear"
Further information: "Open Peer Commentary on “How Linguistics Learned to Stop Worrying and
Love the Language Models” by Richard Futrell and Kyle Mahowald"
Author: R. Thomas McCoy
Abstract: Futrell and Mahowald (2025) frame the success of neural language models (LMs) as supporting gradient, usage-based linguistic theories. I argue that LMs can also instantiate theories based on formal structures - the types of theories seen in the generative tradition. This argument expands the space of theories that can be tested with LMs, potentially enabling reconciliations between usage-based and generative accounts.

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lcon @lgconstable.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

MA: About 15.5 DDs per 100,000 people and about 1 DD per 10 square miles. NY: About 7.4 DDs per 100,000 people and about 1 DD per 32 square miles.

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McSweeney's @mcsweeneys.net · 30/03/2026

"Each time you sign in, you'll need to learn a new bell or whistle of our new system. You might think there aren't enough bells and whistles for us to teach you a new one every time you log on, but there are." www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the...

mcsweeneys.net

The New Ten-Factor Authentication Processes for University Faculty

“Each time you sign in, you’ll need to learn a new bell or whistle of our new system. You might think there aren’t enough bells and whistles for us to teach ...

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Retro Tech Dreams @retrotechdreams.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

RollerCoaster Tycoon (1999)

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Brandon Prickett @bprickett.bsky.social · 15/03/2026

Baron is gonna cry when he reads this

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Brandon Prickett @bprickett.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

Very weird that the answer to "which #scifi author predicted 21st century technology best" might be Shel Silverstein...

Page from "A Light in the Attic" by Shel Silverstein. At the bottom is a drawing of a kind put a piece of paper into a machine with gears and buttons. Above that is the following poem:

The Homework Machine, oh the Homework Machine,
Most perfect contraption that’s ever been seen.
Just put in your homework, then drop in a dime,
Snap on the switch, and in ten seconds time,
You homework comes out, quick and clean as can be.
Here it is – “nine plus four?” and the answer is “three”.
Three?
Oh me …
I guess it’s not as perfect
As I thought it would be.

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Peter Gray @pgdataviz.bsky.social · 23/02/2026

Me? I'm just happy to be here #rstats

Everyone fighing over TIbble versus DF

>| vs %>%

Me: googling what mean means

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Brandon Prickett @bprickett.bsky.social · 19/02/2026

This is great and also feels like the kind of thing that's destined to show up in the slides for an Intro #Linguistics course

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Robert "The Bobby Yaga" McNees @mcnees.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

[Searching through the fanfold printouts of my parents' ELIZA chats, trying to figure out what it told them that made me this way]

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Brandon Prickett @bprickett.bsky.social · 28/11/2025

Never seen the Lawn Mower guy! Sounds very mint hill though. I'll have to keep my eye out for him.

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Brandon Prickett @bprickett.bsky.social · 28/11/2025

Live in the town with this horse and can confirm. Dude just ties it up outside the bars in a parking spot too, lol

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Jerry Chen @jcsalterego.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

they should invent a tamale printer

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Dr Erika’s (spookily) Online, PhD @erikas.online · 15/09/2025

Do you like comic books and want to think more seriously about the linguistics of them? Are you a social scientist or a linguist who wants to know more about nation-building or language planning in fiction? HAVE I GOT EXACTLY THE ARTICLE YOU NEVER ASKED FOR, on CAMP Anthropology. 🐦🐦

campanthropology.org

X-Men, Krakoa, and Linguistic Sovereignty

by Erika Alpert Krakoan national co-founder Magneto explains to diplomats at the new Krakoan Embassy in Jerusalem why mutants have decided to create their own language, from House of X #1 (Hickman …

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Brandon Prickett @bprickett.bsky.social · 19/07/2025

I found that when you use PFA with a MaxEnt model and train it on Types I-VI, II starts off harder than IV, but becomes easier for the model later in learning. Since lab learning involves less exposure than natural language acquisition, this could explain the mismatch in M&P's (2014) results. 5/6

A figure showing six learning curves (epochs on the x-axis and accuracy on the y-axis). Each curve is associated with one of the Shepard Types. Type II starts off lower than Type IV, but by the end of learning Type II is second only to Type I.

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Brandon Prickett @bprickett.bsky.social · 19/07/2025

Probabilistic Feature Attention (PFA) can potentially explain this. PFA adds ambiguity to the learning process, randomly sampling which features a model can attend to (similar to dropout in neural networks). E.g., if the model doesn’t attend to [voice], it can’t distinguish between [t] & [d]. 4/6

On the left, a cube with edges of equal length. At each corner of the cube is a shape that can be circle/triangle, large/small, and black/white. On the right is the same cube, but squished in a way that illustrates that the large/small distinction is less important now. In the middle, an arrow labeled “PFA”. Cube illustrations borrowed from Nosofsky (1986), where the definition for "attention" I'm using was coined.

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Brandon Prickett @bprickett.bsky.social · 19/07/2025

...And found that Type II phonotactic patterns were harder for participants to acquire than Type IV patterns. But when they looked at typological data, Type II phonological patterns were more common than Type IV. But why does typology seem to favor the more difficult pattern? 3/6

The six Shepard Types, illustrated using phonological segments. Segments are either voiced or voiceless, stops or fricatives, and labial or alveolar. (Just an illustration, not the actual patterns used by Moreton and Pertsova, 2014).

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Brandon Prickett @bprickett.bsky.social · 19/07/2025

Shepard Types (I-VI below) have been used widely in category learning since they were introduced by Shepard et al. (1961). These assume a stimulus space with 3 features, 8 stimuli, and 6 possible ways to halve that space. Moreton & Pertsova (2014) adapted these to the domain of phonotactics... 2/6

The six Shepard Types, illustrated using simple shapes. Shapes are either circles or triangles, large or small, and black or white. Taken from Moreton et al. (2017).

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Brandon Prickett @bprickett.bsky.social · 19/07/2025

Artificial language learning experiments often explain typology by showing that more common patterns are easier to learn. But this isn’t always the case. In work I recently presented at SCiL, I present a possible explanation for one such mismatch between the lab and typology. 🐦🐦 #linguistics 1/6

An academic poster with images and text that goes through roughly the same points as this thread. To download a PDF of the poster, see https://brandon-prickett.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/SCiL_Poster.pdf .

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Brandon Prickett @bprickett.bsky.social · 08/07/2025

Lots of great computational #linguistics in this year's SCiL proceedings! (Including an extended abstract from me that I'll probably post more about closer to the conference.) 🐦🐦 openpublishing.library.umass.edu/scil/

openpublishing.library.umass.edu

Society for Computation in Linguistics

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Heidi Harley @heidiharley.bsky.social · 27/06/2025

Linguists! Abstracts for the LSA annual meeting in NOLA in January 2026 are due on July 7! Please submit! It’s going to be a great conference, and a chance to confer and strategize. Would love love love to see you there! #linguistics @lingsocam.bsky.social www.lsadc.org/abstracts

lsadc.org

LSA Annual Meeting - Call for Abstracts

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Brandon Prickett @bprickett.bsky.social · 19/06/2025

Really nice example to bring up in a data science or corpus #linguistics class about dealing with weirdness in your data!

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Brandon Prickett @bprickett.bsky.social · 31/05/2025

Also saw this as a kid and was scarred for life

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Brandon Prickett @bprickett.bsky.social · 13/05/2025

Look who I found outside my front door! 10/10, no room for improvement.

A snail so perfect looking, it's like what you'd find in the dictionary if you looked up "snail". It's sliding slowly across a sidewalk.

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Jerry Chen @jcsalterego.bsky.social · 24/04/2025

(reading the specs of a clown car) wow 32 cupholders

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 07/04/2025

Humans do representation learning all the time and one of the most tangible aspects of representation learning (from a continuous physical space to mental representations) is human phonology. Submit to the Special Session at this year's AMP on modeling phonology with deep neural networks!

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Canaan Breiss @canaan.bsky.social · 13/03/2025

New article out on how infants learn to find affixes in early infancy! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 03/03/2025

One thing that needs to get repeated until it sinks in is that “AI” does not simply function as a tool that people in power are using; it’s even more powerful as a permission structure for the destructive & extractive things they wanted to do in the first place.

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Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium @ptdefiancezoo.bsky.social · 22/02/2025

Baby tapir Ume had her first encounter with the water dish and it’s adorable! 🥰

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Max Kennerly @maxkennerly.bsky.social · 25/01/2025

It's one of the unwritten rules of civilization: if a child pours air into a cup and offers you tea, you will sip it and say "thank you, it's delicious."

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Jack Saint @lackingsaint.bsky.social · 22/01/2025

wikipedia honestly gotta be top 5 human creations in the past thousand years

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weird medieval guys @weirdmedieval.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

maybe my favourite etymology: the phrase “curry favour” originates from a medieval french morality poem about a conniving horse named fauvel who amasses a following of sycophantic humans to groom and tend to him. over time, “currying fauvel” eventually became “currying favour.”

version.

As the horse Fauvel is about to join Vainglory in the bridal bed, the people form a charivari in protest. From the Roman de Fauvel.
The romance features Fauvel, a fallow-colored horse who rises to prominence in the French royal court, and through him satirizes the self-serving hedonism and hypocrisy of men, and the excesses of the ruling estates, both secular and ecclesiastical. The antihero's name can be broken down to mean "false veil", and also forms an acrostic F-A-V-V-E-L with the letters standing for the human vices: Flattery, Avarice, Vileness, Variability (Fickleness), Envy, and Laxity. The romance also gave birth to the English expression "curry fauvel", the obsolete original form of "curry favor".

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Brandon Prickett @bprickett.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

The amount of green food you could buy in grocery stores that summer was astounding.

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