Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 6h“Why are you even on LinkedIn in the first place, though?” Filing this in the faq with the other frequently asked questions. 000
Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 07/10/2026Every year in my intro phonetics class I like to do an assignment that @ludling.bsky.social devised, where they have to draw vocal tract diagram, and genAI a diagram, and compare them. Here are some of my favorites among the incomprehensible horrors submitted. #🗣️💬 271
Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 07/10/2026Yo hive mind: do we have the technology to search audio for a specific spectral signature? If so, how? I feel like an LLM* ought to be good at a task like “listen to these four hours of wav files and give me a timestamp of every point where intensity at 8Khz exceeds a specified threshold. 000
Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 07/10/2026This is an under voiced take that is completely spot on 070
Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 06/10/2026groundup.org.za/article/chil... What a horribly horribly bleak situation. Just as I was getting to the end, one of my undergrads wrote to apologize for handing in their assignment late because they were stuck getting back from chemotherapy. Eish.groundup.org.zaChildren are dying in pain because our palliative care is so poorDamning report from World Health Organisation confirms what professionals already know 000
Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 04/10/2026@strictscrutiny.bsky.social @openargs.bsky.social 000
Reposted by Will BennettEmily @emilydawn.bsky.social · 01/10/2026@hockeyviz.com I found some beautiful data viz for you 7142331024
Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 03/10/2026Dear law podcasters: there is no country called “Eswitani”. Or “eswihani”. It’s Eswatini, as in “the place of the Swati people”. Like Swaziland. The vowels don’t magically jump around just because you suck at geography. 100
Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 01/10/2026Fai’ do do is clearly from the old Semitic radical FD, in the jussive imperfect 010
Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 30/09/2026Little known Snapple fact: Cajuns are not originally from Louisiana, and the clue is in the name. Cajun is a shortening of ‘Akkadian’, which reflects the group’s history of being forcibly resettled from Mesopotamia by the French after the fall of Sumeria. #cuneiformdelafayette 2103
Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 30/09/2026When a university says “we are committed to constructive engagement”, that usually means “you can email us and we will ignore it” 000
Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 30/09/2026My health insurance sent a text message to remind me about ADHD awareness month. They categorically refuse to cover ADHD medication for adults. 001
Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 29/09/2026Erratum: Doke used numbers in his textbook of Zulu grammar. But with 1 for the top of the range, 9 for the bottom, and with the numbers furigana-style above each syllable 000
Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 29/09/2026I am familiar with this only from Chinese (and osmosis of the convention therefrom). My preference used to be superscript numbers after the syllable. But now my worsening vision questions the merit of superscript when none of the numerals look too much like any IPA. 110
Reposted by Will BennettHadas Weiss @hadas.bsky.social · 19/09/2026did they say grad school was a good investment 0341
Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 22/09/2026Said dog apparently tried to dig a tunnel under his Land Rover 000
Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 21/09/2026“I don’t know if dogs can be on the spectrum, but your dog is” -a literal biologist 100
Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 14/09/2026What kind of monster puts condensed milk into a cheese sauce meant for fried chicken? Just gross. 010
Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 31/08/2026Even NEW ZEALAND has better trains than America. Think about that for a second. 120
Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 28/08/2026Our new paper we’ve been trying to finish since 2015 is finally out: www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.2... 🗣️💬tandfonline.comOn the productivity of length-based alternations in Xhosa noun class prefixesNoun classes in isiXhosa are each associated with specific prefixes on the noun stem. Some of these noun class prefixes exhibit length-based allomorphy: they take one form before multisyllabic stem... 030
Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 26/08/2026The existence of Bouillabaisse implies that one can be Bouillacringé 000
Reposted by Will BennettKate Elliott @kateelliottsff.bsky.social · 20/08/2026I recommend this entire thread, and you'll understand why when you get all the way through it. A lovely analysis of human communication. 06628
Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 17/08/2026I just got an email from an “AI writer”, which profiles itself as “Victoria Chase, a writer tracking the last two speakers of a dying language”. 🗣️💬 What in the #freshaihell is ilands.ai? They are asking for whether the people we recorded during fieldwork have died yet. Unconscionable lack of tact. 021
Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 12/08/2026Please everyone join me in welcoming “grok” to the list of words that are their own antonyms 020
Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 06/08/2026I thought I had a joke about Mbabaram canines being good dogs, but it didn’t stand the test of time 000
Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 04/08/2026I guess the thing to learn from RFKj is that Kennedys either die young or live long enough to become the villain 000
Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 01/08/2026The new Infowars has delivered the most brutal satire I think I’ve ever seen.youtu.beCONSERVATIVE HERO: Lucas Reilly Is FIGHTING For The 2nd AmendmentYouTube video by InfoWars 000
Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 28/07/2026The Bennett (No relation) et al 2009 salmon poster remains one of my all time favorite academic pubs. prefrontal.org/files/poster... Q: how much of the hype around AI is basically this kind of error writ large?prefrontal.org 010
Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 22/07/2026aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-m... Note to self: share this link with the next person who tells you prompt engineering matters for anythingaclanthology.org 000
Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 21/07/2026Apparently my lecture yesterday got tiktok’d by one of the students. Let’s see if I get fired for *checks notes * “playing the pink trombone “ 140
Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 20/07/2026The South African Library for the Blind thanks you for watching 010
Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 14/07/2026Anyway the France-Spain referee used to be a professor of organic chemistry, so….. 110
Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 10/07/2026The trouble is the obvious way to show this empirically would involve being mean to parrots, and I don’t think that’s going to pass ethics review 000
Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 10/07/2026Hypothesis: real parrots are actually way more deterministic than stochastic ones (ie LLMs) 110
Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 09/07/2026once I bought an electric toothbrush advertised on some podcasts. Shipping was delayed so long I assumed it wasn’t coming and did a chargeback. And then one day it arrived! Free toothbrush! Two root canals and thousands later, I found out quip was a scam. This is a tweet about LLMs. 011
Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 09/07/2026Cooked: “Good luck” Overlooked: “May all of your errors be grammatical” 151
Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 08/07/2026Hey Claude, give me a function that explains the relation between tokens and wickelphones 000
Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 07/07/2026Me, watching soccer: oop, sorry, I guess I conceded that goal because I looked away at the wrong moment 010
Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 29/06/2026Yellow cards for both coaches. You love to see it. Go Paraguay! #theotherguaysturntowin 000
Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 27/06/2026This many choices is way above the threshold of usefulness, Google 000