iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

John Gallagher @johnrgallagher.bsky.social · 6m

I’m still here regardless

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John Gallagher @johnrgallagher.bsky.social · 6h

The book is here and I am over the moon!

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John Gallagher @johnrgallagher.bsky.social · 6h

The book is here and I am over the moon!

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Joshua Barsczewski @joshuabarsczewski.bsky.social · 19h

Y’all. We’re going to sign the adoption paperwork on our foster puppy on Wednesday. I’m so excited. Be prepared for many pictures.

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John Gallagher @johnrgallagher.bsky.social · 19h

Trader Joe’s selling gloves with Joe joes in em

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Le Ca-ghoul @lecagle.bsky.social · 03/07/2025

One time I had a student who was on the university rodeo team and he had to miss class to go compete and I said, "Good luck at the...meet? Competition? What do you call it?" And he looked at me I swear to God from under his big hat brin and said in a drawl, "Ma'am. We call it a rodeo."

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John Gallagher @johnrgallagher.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Here is why AI may never write well: it's not a problem to solve.

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John Gallagher @johnrgallagher.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Preview of an in progress book I'm currently stuck in. Would love a comment! meresophistry.substack.com/p/the-conten...

meresophistry.substack.com

The content compulsion of social media

Workshopping in progress academic work.

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 07/10/2026

I take this very personally, because this is my immediate community. My friends and colleagues' lives are being disrupted. The whole town of Champaign-Urbana, actually, is being attacked, because international scholars and students are a huge part of what makes it vibrant.

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John Gallagher @johnrgallagher.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I read about scientific theory today and now I understand scientific less well.

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John Gallagher @johnrgallagher.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

we don’t have an operational definition of writing because it’s both a thorny knotted activity and a wildly variable artifact whose quality depends on writer/audience/situation/genre/modality/culture/time

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John Gallagher @johnrgallagher.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

\begin{itemize} \item Time warp \item Again \end{itemize}

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David Roberts @volts.wtf · 05/10/2026

Holy shit.

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John Gallagher @johnrgallagher.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

New blog post up! "The treachery of approximation in an era of AI" I hope you'll read and enjoy. Maybe share if you enjoy. meresophistry.substack.com/p/the-treach...

meresophistry.substack.com

The treachery of approximation in an era of AI

Introduction

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John Gallagher @johnrgallagher.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Return to oz. Dorothy gets shock treatment (literally!) Half men, half gurney creatures Headless witch who has a hallway full of heads Oz is torn to shreds. All Dorothy's friends are turned to stone.

static.klipy.com

Return To Oz Mombi

ALT: Return To Oz Mombi

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John Gallagher @johnrgallagher.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

New blog post up! "The treachery of approximation in an era of AI" I hope you'll read and enjoy. Maybe share if you enjoy. meresophistry.substack.com/p/the-treach...

meresophistry.substack.com

The treachery of approximation in an era of AI

Introduction

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John Gallagher @johnrgallagher.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Babak just sent me this Friday! Very excited to see it.

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Benedek Kurdi @benedek.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

📊 New resource: ISAAC, an open corpus for studying social group attitudes 💬 527M+ Reddit posts (2007–2023) 🧠 Covers race, sexuality, age, ability, and skin tone 🗺️ Validated against Gallup and Google Trends 🔍 No-code or Python/SQL: isaac.psychology.illinois.edu 📖 Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2609.27059

We introduce the Illinois Social Attitudes Aggregate Corpus (ISAAC), an open, modular, and accessible corpus of 527 million+ English-language Reddit posts selected for relevance to six key social group distinctions based on race, sexuality, age, ability, body weight, and skin tone, covering the 17-year period from 2007 to 2023. A multi-step, human-audited filtering pipeline was used to keep irrelevant content in the curated dataset below 10%, both overall and for each social group distinction. Each post was then algorithmically annotated with the user's estimated home region, along with a suite of validated off-the-shelf and custom semantic labels including moralization, sentiment, emotion, and linguistic generalization. We confirm the validity of the resulting corpus through convergent evidence linking ISAAC to macro-level societal trends, such as online search behavior, temporal spikes during major societal events (both nationally and regionally), and long-term shifts in public attitudes. By offering a unified, public infrastructure, ISAAC eliminates research fragmentation and enables seamless replication while supporting diverse empirical workflows at scale. Specifically, ISAAC allows investigators to perform cross-category comparisons, conduct high-precision tracking of long-term temporal shifts in social group discourse, and map spatial variation onto localized public opinion and policy outcomes. ISAAC's fully public, modular pipeline facilitates easy extension of the corpus to new platforms, languages, and social categories. To accommodate various research needs, ISAAC is accessible both without coding through a point-and-click website and labeler web-apps, and programmatically via an SQL playground, a Python package, and HuggingFace.

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John Gallagher @johnrgallagher.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

ahhh. thank you. I understand better now.

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John Gallagher @johnrgallagher.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Micron's earnings are up 380% year over and year and their stock DROPPED at the opening bell. That's where we are. All of increases are baked into the prices. A downturn in the AI economy will result in serious fallout.

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John Gallagher @johnrgallagher.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I don't know what you mean (in all seriousness). Can you explain?

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John Gallagher @johnrgallagher.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

My 1st grader made the following to take for school lunch: salmon on a bed of wild rice. All were leftovers from two different meals.

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John Gallagher @johnrgallagher.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

It's fascinating to see how this is received, notably the biases it reveals. There are lot of professors who don't have a "reading list" because their courses are not conceived of through texts.

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John Gallagher @johnrgallagher.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

The AI "slow down" is related to burn rates of training new models and is an economic play for IPOs.

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Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

In our Nature paper, we introduce the first superhuman Stratego AI, which we built using general techniques that we developed for RL & test-time compute under imperfect information. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

nature.com

Scalable decision-making for games of imperfect information - Nature

Ataraxos, an AI for the board wargame Stratego, establishes a design pattern for reinforcement learning and search that is effective under large amounts of hidden information, a longstanding desiderat...

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John Gallagher @johnrgallagher.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Anthropic and OpenAI are going to be a massive asteroid that hits the US economy.

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John Gallagher @johnrgallagher.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

The GPT videos are literally just templates. Watch 4 of them and you'll see the edges immediately.

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John Gallagher @johnrgallagher.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

You can’t really go wrong in either case. If you didn't publish it, you’re totally good with submitting in my view.

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John Gallagher @johnrgallagher.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

AI token costs are going to SKYROCKET after IPOs to the point that it's eyewatering. In order to break even, Anthropic would need to make 400 billion a year for 5 years (they made 4.6 this year). THE MATH DOES NOT MAKE SENSE. www.reuters.com/business/fin...

economictimes.indiatimes.com

Anthropic IPO explained: $2 trillion valuation, ballooning net loss, AI risks and other details in leaked IPO papers

Anthropic is preparing for a potential IPO as its revenue surges, but losses and infrastructure commitments balloon. The AI company has also warned of existential risks from advanced models and highli...

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John Gallagher @johnrgallagher.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

The Atlanta Hawks are killing it.

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John Gallagher @johnrgallagher.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Retrieval practices are the best practice for learning and writing is the number 1 retrieval practice.

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John Gallagher @johnrgallagher.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

"maybe you should lay off the raspberry and brie on sourdough" ~my doctor

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John Gallagher @johnrgallagher.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Younger offspring: What talent do you want? Me: to control time, reality, and the knowledge to control those two things Older: They're fairy powers. Like water or flight. Me: Water. Younger: what is color is your outfit? Me: purple & black... Younger: No it's blue. That's the color you have.

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John Gallagher @johnrgallagher.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I got asked in an interview once, "What do you want on your tombstone?" It was a office job.

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John Gallagher @johnrgallagher.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

THIS IS LITERALLY HOW INSURANCE WORKS

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