iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Getting cited in a J.R. Moehringer opinion piece is a highlight

I might feel differently if perfecting balls and strikes were possible. But that would require the strike zone to be a definable physical space, like the end zone or Arkansas. It’s not. It’s liminal, and subliminal, a 430-square-inch(ish) terra incognita. Vaguely described by the rulebook, the strike zone has always been a matter of conjecture and opinion and heated, healthy argument. Researchers at Cornell, who studied the interface of A.I. and baseball, classified the strike zone as a “social construct.” Beautiful.

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David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Sparky does not think one day is sufficient to appreciate black cats 🐈‍⬛

A lovely black American shorthair gives you a quizzical expression

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David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

What I liked best about The Odyssey movie was that it made me want to get back to the source

Scooby Doo "mask reveal" meme in which Homer Adaptation is shown to be actually Aeneid Book 2, the one with the horse and Cassandra and the snakes that come out of the sea to kill Laocoon and his sons.

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David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

What I liked best about The Odyssey movie was that it made me want to get back to the source

Odysseus and the sirens mosaic from the Bardo in Tunis, image from Wikimedia

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David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Me when "book guillotines" hits the discourse again

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe

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David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

I’ve heard about Jevons from enough places that I thought I’d go to the source. Initial impression: this guy really likes coal.

A rather worn red copy of Jevons “The Coal Question” from an academic library

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David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

Here's an example showing marginal dots and underline bars, with HTML code, the docs have a function to compose different combinations of vis elements

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

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David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

Excited to announce my next career pivot thanks to Mistral 3.2!

Mistral identifies me as an experimental electronic musician 👨‍🎤

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David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

I googled a quote I half remembered ("one bite from the sunny side of the peach"). No results, but I thought I'd try the AI mode. It said this was Diderot criticizing Rousseau. I asked for a source, and it pointed me to Scott's Waverley (the correct answer it seems). What happened to Diderot?

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

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David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · 25/04/2026

Running out of 5️⃣s. Is this a good sign?

Gas pump with handwritten 5 numbers. Premium gas is listed at above $5 per gallon.

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David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

Rebecca Hicke presents our work on Christian fiction #CHR2025

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

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David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

What does it mean for a song to be narrative? @dbamman.bsky.social Sabrina Baur, Mackenzie Hanh #CHR2025

Slide comparing lyrics in Cats in the cradle by Harry Chapin to Dua Lipa

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David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

Lavinia Dunagan and @dallascard.bsky.social find implicit references to bible verses using a combination of neural embeddings and text similarity—neither is enough on its own #CHR2025

Slide showing significant differences in implicit references to bible verses by US political parties

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David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

Someone’s experiment with notebookLM, not entirely successful

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

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David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

Can we find all the maps in (out of copyright) literature? @axel-bax.bsky.social presents his work at #CHR3025!

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David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · 04/11/2025

Happy broken pumpkins in the gorge season to all who celebrate!! 🎃 🌊

Cascadilla creek with a couple smashed pumpkins in it that will stay there for months

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David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

COLM word cloud. Yoav says it’s the year of reasoning, but evaluation is also huge.

Evaluation reasoning interpretability rl in context benchmark alignment synthetic data

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David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · 10/03/2025

Nacht und Nebel (Manchester, the Arms of Krupp)

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”

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David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · 07/03/2025

It’s obvious that Steely Dan’s “aja” is an ASCII art dick, right? The official story makes no sense and the band is named after a fictional sex toy. But no one says this?

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David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · 30/01/2025

“However much you 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” -Orwell

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

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David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · 01/11/2024

Capitalism and fascism are definitely NOT mutually exclusive

Page image from “The Arms of Krupp” describing the near bankruptcy of the Nazi party in 1932 and its rescue by German industrialists

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David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · 27/10/2024

“Of course I know it’s National Black Cat day. You wake me up for this?” -Sparky

A black cat on a couch looking a little grumpy

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David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · 06/10/2024

Heading to Philly for COLM and holy shit, it’s TRUE

Weather app screenshot predicting its always sunny in Philadelphia

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David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · 25/06/2024

I appreciate that Google is trying to attribute suggested code from Colab to sources, but the threshold is set waaaay too low. Possible opportunities for malicious license trolls.

A trivial two line import statement with the warning "Suggested code may be subject to a license" and a link to a towardsdatascience page

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David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · 20/06/2024

UMass administration building

UMass Amherst Whitmore Administration building

Motte and Bailey castle https://www.castlesworld.com/tools/motte-and-bailey-castles.php

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David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · 15/05/2024

Waikiki could be one of the world’s great biking cities but they somehow manage to treat everything but cars as an afterthought AND create a miserable experience for drivers

3-lane road intersection with traffic jam

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David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · 09/04/2024

In the totality, Chimney Bluffs NY

Three silhouettes with Lake Ontario in the background and light on the horizon

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David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · 04/04/2024

New CIS building giving strong “emerges once per decade from the fog off Cape Hatteras” vibes

The steel skeleton of a building under construction with plastic sheeting torn by the wind

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David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · 20/02/2024

“Many” workers worked less than the median? I think we can be more precise than that

“And that’s the median; many workers worked less than that”

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David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · 12/02/2024

I’ve updated my arxiv NLP topic model. Not much change from last summer, mostly reinforcing the post-ChatGPT dynamic. Full model at mimno.infosci.cornell.edu/arxivcl/, scraping code on GitHub!

Topics about LLMs, prompting, and fine-tuning

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David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · 30/11/2023

Me telling students to make the font in slides bigger

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David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · 01/10/2023

Sparky is not as excited as I am to learn about Lester Del Rey’s influence on the development of fantasy as a genre from @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social

Cat napping on a couch by a window looking like “who disturbs my slumber”

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David Mimno @dmimno.bsky.social · 27/09/2023

Picked up the Iliad at Odyssey. Looking forward to reading the translator’s note, but for now just letting book 1 wash over me like the reverberating sea @emilyrcwilson.bsky.social

Wilson’s Iliad with a receipt from Odyssey Books in Ithaca NY

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