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Kristian Berg

@kristianberg.bsky.social
237 followers 227 following 83 posts

Linguist an der Uni Oldenburg

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Reposted by Kristian Berg
kottke.org @kottke.org · 08/10/2026
Bertrand Russell Shows How to Respond to Fascists Who Want to Debate. “The emotional universes we inhabit are so distinct, and in deepest ways opposed, that nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge from association between us." [kottke.org]
kottke.org
Bertrand Russell Shows How to Respond to Fascists Who Want to Debate
Late in his life, the prominent English mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell was subject to an attempt in the early 1960s by Oswald Mosley to provoke him into a debate about the merits of fascism. Before WWII,
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James O'Malley @jamesomalley.co.uk · 07/10/2026
Holy shit. Someone has decompiled the Adobe suite, rebuilt it in Rust and released it as open source. Either all software is dead or the US copyright laws are about to receive an update. getartcraft.com/apps
getartcraft.com
Crafting Apps: open-source creative tools
Image editing, vector illustration, video, photography, PDFs, motion graphics and page layout: seven native, open-source apps from the ArtCraft team, built in Rust and free to use.
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Dr Dean Burnett @drdeanburnett.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
"By using AI, tasks like essays that used to take hours can be completed in minutes!" Sure, like how if I arrive at the gym and immediately go for a shower, my workout is done in record time. And if I throw my sandwiches straight in the bin, I can finish my lunch in under 10 seconds.
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rax ‘levon honkers’ king @raxkingisdead.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
with all respect: i'm losing touch with what AI does because i have no interest in it and it's not my business. nobody worries about me losing touch with developments in particle physics or artificial bull insemination. it's not my fault the richest guys on earth want me to make their toy my life
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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
I can't say for sure what's going on in other people's heads, but I think it's because for so many boosters & doomers, it's become a core belief that their chatbot buddies/LLM-enabled supertools are understanding and reasoning. >>
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Kilu von Prince @kilinguistics.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Do you like having high-quality, peer-reviewed, Open Access Books on linguistics? Yes? Is your institution among those that have pledged support for the new funding period of Language Science Press (see thread)? No? Then talk to your librarian! We need you! langsci-press.org/knowledgeunl...
Meme: Bernie Sanders "I am once again asking". 
Text: I am once again asking for your support for Language Science Press
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Johannes Franzen @johannesfranzen.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Incredible stuff.
Commentary|Essay
        

AI and the crisis of the author
        

By Anchit Sathi

September 4, 2026
Read this issue

Editor’s note (September 21, 2026): We have removed this essay. AI was used in its preparation. The TLS editorial guidelines prohibit the use of AI in the writing and editing process. The author states that he was unaware of the policy.
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Adele Goldberg @adelegoldberg.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Feeling profoundly lucky to have had to read carefully, write stuff that took time, learn modern stats I wouldn't have had the self-discipline to do it if I could have relied on AI since HS I fear a whole lot of researchers are going to suffer appropriately from imposter syndrome in the future
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Ronen Steinke @ronensteinke.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Ich empfehle sehr, den Essay von @dnah.bsky.social in der taz zu lesen. taz.de/Antisemitism...
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Marina Weisband @afelia.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Ich weigere mich, dass Juden instrumentalisiert werden, um progressive Politik und gerechte Mieten zu verhindern. Es ist so offensichtlich vorgeschoben, dass es beleidigend ist.
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Joshua J. Friedman @joshuajfriedman.com · 23/09/2026
From the famous Tumblr thread:

roguetelemetry posts: 
LET THE BEES RIDE THE ROLLER COASTER
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Adrian Daub @adriandaub.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Y'all are so lost
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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
"I belong to a cult. Someone did some research that undermines the core tenets of my cult and came up with a catchy phrase that makes it harder to recruit more people to my cult. This makes me sad."
Screencap of tweet on X from @jackclarkSF (Jack Clark):

"stochastic parrot" was a mimetically-fit cognitive virus that spread from 2021-2025; it temporarily blinded many gifted people to the nature of AI progress, burning up crucial years in which they could have helped think through the response to the situation.
7:34 AM · Sep 20, 2026
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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
But speaking of staying in one's lane, can we PLEASE switch the default position from "It's fine to use 'AI' for this thing I'm not an expert in" to "Yeah, I'd be really skeptical of any use cases and need to see strong evidence that it's okay, but I'm not the one who can produce that evidence"?
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Dave Willner @dwillner.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Certain kinds of smart people tend to have a "sexy apocalypse" problem when it comes to thinking about risk. E.g. skynet turning everyone in paperclips, while bad, is also *kind of cool and fun* at the same time. Where the reality is that most actual disasters are both stupid and disappointing.
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Jan Vanhove @janhove.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
New blog post: "Cluster analysis: A skeptic’s guide". In which I ask a few questions that social scientists wishing to identify hidden classes in their data ought to address. janhove.github.io/posts/2026-0...
A two-dimensional scatterplot showing a three-cluster solution.

Caption: "Figure 2: A visualisation of a Latent Profile Analysis fit. Such visualisations may help readers appreciate that the clusters aren’t nicely separated and that the researchers’ notion of clusters may not correspond to their own."Table of contents:

Refresher: What is cluster analysis?
What are the clusters for?
What clusters, exactly?
Does the pipeline work?
What does the solution look like?
When running follow-up analyses, how is the uncertainty in the cluster assignments taken into account?
Was it worth it?
Conclusion
References
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David @yonderdavid.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
poets.org/poem/little-...
"A Little Tooth"
by Thomas Lux, 1946 – 2017.

Your baby grows a tooth, then two,
and four, and five, then she wants some meat
directly from the bone.  It's all

over: she'll learn some words, she'll fall
in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet
talker on his way to jail.  And you,

your wife, get old, flyblown, and rue
nothing.  You did, you loved, your feet
are sore.  It's dusk.  Your daughter's tall.
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samuel mehr @mehr.nz · 18/09/2026
the longer I'm a prof the more certain I become that each university operates in a wildly different way to the rest. most sensible, then, is to adopt a strategy of radical advice-seeking ask for help! early and often! academics love nothing more than to put off work to help out junior colleagues!!!
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Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Its fitting that one of the tells of AI writing is over-assigning agency and action to inanimate objects: "the code knows it now," "the plan remembers," etc.
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kottke.org @kottke.org · 16/09/2026
Usenet-Rewind: search over 1 billion Usenet text posts from 1981 to the present. [usenet-rewind.com]
usenet-rewind.com
Usenet-Rewind
Search Usenet news text-message archives from 1981 to present across hundreds of thousands of newsgroups.
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Marie Le Conte @youngvulgarian.marieleconte.com · 14/09/2026
thinking about this tweet again, and the fact that it's got such a hold on me that I genuinely think about it whenever I write a feature because I don't want to do "the hot dog thing"
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Yoïn van Spijk @yvanspijk.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
The best introduction to etymology and historical linguistics I've ever had the pleasure to read. Reading it from A to Z will be worth every minute. 😊
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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
So how about this for a "pause AI" proposal: "pause credulous AI reporting". No more media about "breakthroughs" or "rogue agent swarms" or ... UNLESS and UNTIL that media demands the actual empirical evidence and/or focuses on the motivations of & harms by these companies.
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beloved Mothra @audleyzdarke.myatproto.social · 11/09/2026
The adolescent version of Godzilla from "Shin Godzilla" who, to put it charitably, looks both startled and like he was the victim of a rogue orthodontist, with the caption "the fuck you lookin at keep scrolling"
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Till Raether @tillraether.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Ich finde man könnte noch deutlich weniger Artikel über die aktuelle Lage mit Fotos der Faschofresse bebildern
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Lisa DeBruine @debruine.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
I love the concrete examples of how to avoid anthropomorphism in this article: artificial intelligence → probabilistic automation image recognition → image labeling speech recognition → automatic transcription shows bias → reflects bias hallucination → undesirable output goal → success condition
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Matt Seybold @mattseybold.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
The conflation of AI-critical with technophobic is tactical & infuriating. While accusing us of just knee-jerk hating tech, they’re enshittifying search engines, degrading digital archives, sundowning or enclosing popular tools, etc. We were all happily using that tech!
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Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.blacksky.app · 26/08/2026
Friends, I think Ghent University should hear from us as the eugenicists are out in full force. This letter is from academics there to counter the ridiculous letter supporting the white supremacist now being called a "whistleblower" by his ilk You can add your name👇🏽 docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
docs.google.com
Open letter on the suspension of Nathan Cofnas at Ghent University
***Version française en dessous*** We, colleagues of Nathan Cofnas - supported by many colleagues internationally - want to respond to the negative and incorrect framing of Ghent University’s decisio...
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Thomas Lecaque @tlecaque.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
My genuinely non controversial take is that if you're signing an open letter of support for Cofnas you're either a racist or want to be admired in racist spaces.
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Özden Terli @terliwetter.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
Interessantes Debunking von “Annahmen” der AfD zum Klima. Lesenswert. Von @rahmstorf.bsky.social scilogs.spektrum.de/klimalounge/...
scilogs.spektrum.de
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Leonore (Lee) Carpenter @leecarpenter.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
In case you are an academic who is currently being gaslit into believing that you're a caveman who wants their students to be jobless if you resist allowing AI in your classrooms... I present to you Berkeley Law's response, which can be summarized as "Fuck off directly into the sun."
law.berkeley.edu
Artificial Intelligence Policy
Effective Summer 2026 Purpose Future lawyers may need to use artificial intelligence (“AI”) fluently. But the current state of the technology requires that AI use be coupled with the cognitive […]
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Berit Glanz @beritmiriam.bsky.social · 09/08/2026
Es ist ein schwieriger Sommer, wenn man mit Jugendlichen über die Situation der Welt sprechen muss / will. Meine Strategie aktuell: Beispiele aus der Geschichte, wie sich Verhältnisse überraschend rasch und radikal verändert haben = Veränderung ist möglich + man muss sich organisieren.
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kottke.org @kottke.org · 04/08/2026
The Phone in Your Hand. “A layer-by-layer teardown of the most intricate object you’ve ever held.” [everythingmachine.io]
everythingmachine.io
The Phone in Your Hand
A layer-by-layer teardown of the most intricate machine you’ve ever held.
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Alex von Tunzelmann @alexvont.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
If somebody came to one of my writing classes with a novel about a “24-year-old wunderkind” on Wall Street called Leopold Aschenbrenner who graduated from Columbia aged 19, looked and dressed exactly like this, and crashed the stock market, I’d advise them to tone it down a bit
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Kristian Berg @kristianberg.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
Claude Opus 5 is like a truly amazing magician who can materialize anything out of thin air -- run this experiment, do this meta-analysis -- but who, unfortunately, is also very very stupid
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Jeff Smith @sumisu3.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
US Courts… ‘The Anthropic copyright case set the precedent — the US court ruled that by making a digital copy and destroying the physical in a one-for-one transfer, the process is deemed “transformative” and therefore protected by fair use.’ Unbelievable and unconscionable
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Kilu von Prince @kilinguistics.bsky.social · 26/07/2026
Zeno would have approved
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Bodo Winter @bodowinter.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
For several years now, @timoroettger.bsky.social and I have been working on an online course on how to effectively communicate data. It's shaping up nicely and we can't wait to share it soon. Sign up for our mailing list to not miss the launch: making-numbers-meaningful.github.io
making-numbers-meaningful.github.io
Making Numbers Meaningful
Get updates about when and where we launch our online course on data communication.
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Philip Bump @pbump.com · 18/07/2026
Visualized.
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kottke.org @kottke.org · 15/07/2026
Legibility of effort in the LLM age. “What software (and writing, to an extent) is missing now is legibility of effort - the ability to tell at a glance whether something took a human meaningful work.” [eieio.games]
eieio.games
Legibility of Effort · eieio.games
LLMs have broken legibility of effort - our ability to tell, at a glance, whether something took a human real work. What happens next?
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Margarete Stokowski @margaowski.bsky.social · 14/07/2026
ok ich bin fertig und lege mich fest: buddenbrooks verhält sich zu lázár wie animal farm zu peppa wutz
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Michael Chesnut @michaelchesnut.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
"We attack the state-of-the-art Go-playing AI system KataGo by training adversarial policies against it, achieving a >97% win rate against KataGo running at superhuman settings. Our adversaries do not win by playing Go well. Instead, they trick KataGo into making serious blunders." WILD!
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Amy @aamoakuh.bsky.social · 04/07/2026
While it may seem obvious that writers of prose don't make use of rhymes and meter like poets do, it turns out Dutch prosaists actually seem to *avoid* meter in their sentences. At least iambic pentameter and hexameter (alexandrine) occur less frequently than expected by chance. Interesting!
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Norbert Maria Schüssler @nmschuessler.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
1/4 Der Bettelbrief des BSW an Alice Weidel räumt mit der letzten Illusion auf: Wagenknechts Projekt ist keine Alternative, sondern der parlamentarische Türöffner für Rechtsextreme. Wer der AfD strategische Avancen macht, hat die Demarkationslinie zum Verfassungsbogen mutwillig überschritten.
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PBF Comics @pbfcomics.bsky.social · 17/02/2026
Two circles labeled “you” and “me” romantically intersect. In their loving embrace, they form a venn diagram featuring “us” in their overlap. Later: Us (now independent) wields a spatula and a knife, climbing the stove above broken glass. You and me are defeated, exhausted parents (and now crescent-shaped)
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samuel mehr @mehr.nz · 20/06/2026
Open Mind, the free OA competitor to Cognition (El$evier) founded by Richard Aslin, has nearly caught up to it impact-factor-wise Submit your best work! It's a great journal with fast and constructive review, a great ed board, and lots of cool work Open Mind is the future of cogsci journals!
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Jan Skudlarek @janskudlarek.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
🫠
Remember, it is only true capitulation if it is signed in the Versailles region of France, otherwise it is just sparkling surrender.
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kottke.org @kottke.org · 15/06/2026
Extinction-Level Capitalism. "AI is inher­ently polit­ical tech­nology. If AI works as intended, it will grad­u­ally corrode our liberal democ­racy, risking an irre­versible shift into another polit­ical and economic config­u­ra­tion." [kottke.org]
kottke.org
On Inherent AI Risk: “Extinction-Level Capitalism”
Matthew Butterick is a lawyer, programmer, writer, and designer. He’s written a long, interesting piece about the inherent risks of AI called Extinction-Level Capitalism. It is well-worth a read; I’ve excerpted several p
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