iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Zoltan P Majdik @zoltanmajdik.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

www.axios.com/2026/02/15/c... It's bonkers that anyone at the DoD would think that a _static (weights) and non-deterministic (outputs)_ LM should be entrusted with autonomous weaponry. I don't care how much RAG they throw at it, the very _architecture_ of LLMs is simply not designed for this.

axios.com

Exclusive: Pentagon threatens to cut off Anthropic in AI safeguards dispute

Anthropic has not agreed to the Pentagon's terms and defense officials are getting fed up after months of difficult negotiations.

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Zoltan P Majdik @zoltanmajdik.bsky.social · 15/04/2025

Many thanks to @stonybrooku.bsky.social and Roger Thompson for asking me to speak on aligning AI/language models with civic-deliberative values. I still don’t know what a Seawolf is, but at least I now know that it’s a thing.

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Reposted by Zoltan P Majdik

Randy Allen Harris @randyallenharris.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

Special 25th anniversary issue of POROI, reprinting a dozenish of its most influential articles. Very pleased to be between its covers with the likes of @leahcecc.bsky.social, @creekthinker.bsky.social, @rhetorologist.bsky.social, and @zoltanmajdik.bsky.social pubs.lib.uiowa.edu/poroi/issue/...

pubs.lib.uiowa.edu

POROI | Issue: Issue: 1(19) POROI’s First 25 Years: Mapping the Past, Charting the Future (2025)

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Reposted by Zoltan P Majdik

John Kausch (杰克口述) @realcharacterlanguage.world · 29/01/2025

Wow, it would be great if there were domain specific formal archictures, such as ontologies and other knowledge organization systems, which could verify ground truth for data! Oh wait, hooray, there is! www.isko.org/cyclo/ontolo...

isko.org

Ontologies as knowledge organization systems (ISKO Encyclopedia of KO)

This contribution presents the principal features of ontologies, drawing special attention to the comparison between ontologies and the different kinds of knowledge organization systems (KOS). The foc...

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Zoltan P Majdik @zoltanmajdik.bsky.social · 23/01/2025

I'm re-reading Walter Ong for a graduate seminar on communication, language, and AI, and it's striking how relevant his work remains. Love this: "Technologies are artificial, but -- paradox again -- artificiality is natural to human beings."

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Reposted by Zoltan P Majdik

julia 🌋 @hypv.bsky.social · 17/12/2024

people argue whether mathematics is a social product or is free from human contingencies. here is a sense in which maths is a social construct. this 1920 book of log & trig tables has values for an important trig function, the haversine. yet you've probably never heard of it. #MathSky

Table X — values and logarithms of haversines

[a big table of values]

from Logarithmic and trigonometric tables, Hedrick, E. R. (1920)

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Zoltan P Majdik @zoltanmajdik.bsky.social · 30/11/2024

Interesting example of auditing the rhetoricity of LLMs, with an unsurprising but nonetheless noteworthy insight: "Interestingly, the Deceptive strategy, which allowed the model to fabricate information, was found to be the most persuasive overall." www.anthropic.com/news/measuri...

anthropic.com

Measuring the Persuasiveness of Language Models

Anthropic developed a way to test how persuasive language models (LMs) are, and analyzed how persuasiveness scales across different versions of Claude.

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Reposted by Zoltan P Majdik

Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 27/11/2024

New paper: we confirm that works of fiction and nonfiction that were ahead of the curve textually also get more citations/attention. Intriguingly, what matters is not the average level but the most innovative/forward-looking *part* of the text. We did not expect to find that about fiction. +

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Zoltan P Majdik @zoltanmajdik.bsky.social · 25/11/2024

If the word “disrupt” hadn’t jumped the shark yet, this would be the moment.

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Zoltan P Majdik @zoltanmajdik.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

Back at the NCA conference in New Orleans, where @sscottgraham.bsky.social and @colleenderkatch.bsky.social and I drank _all_ the Sazeracs just two years ago.

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Zoltan P Majdik @zoltanmajdik.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

Just returned from presenting at one of the most intellectually and socially stimulating conferences, on rhetoric and AI, hosted by the University of Tübingen’s RHET AI Center and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. Amazing experience with great hosts and contributors.

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Zoltan P Majdik @zoltanmajdik.bsky.social · 22/05/2024

About to land in Denver for a short talk and roundtable discussion on distant reading and language modeling. In which we’ll start peeking into the blackbox. [Citations for graphs still to be added.]

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Zoltan P Majdik @zoltanmajdik.bsky.social · 16/05/2024

Finally out!! I lost count of how often I wanted to reference this over the last few months of research:

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Zoltan P Majdik @zoltanmajdik.bsky.social · 14/03/2024

I'm going to publish a paper that consists of nothing but ChatGPT language artifacts. It'll be known as the So-HAL Hoax.

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Zoltan P Majdik @zoltanmajdik.bsky.social · 13/03/2024

I know I'm late to the game, but Github Copilot integrated into an IDE is scary good. It can take my poorly written code with its hacky logic and answer my not particularly well-defined questions about how to add some new function. Truly impressed.

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Zoltan P Majdik @zoltanmajdik.bsky.social · 12/03/2024

“Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train and deploy its future foundation models.” Apparently, AI/deep learning chip makers are taking naming cues from cheap OTC drugs and vitamins.

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Zoltan P Majdik @zoltanmajdik.bsky.social · 06/03/2024

This post is a great example of why open models (and transparency about training data/procedures) are so important. Is Claude's ability to translate Circassian impressive? Maybe -- but there's no way to know unless we can see what's in the training set. >> www.reddit.com/r/singularit...

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Zoltan P Majdik @zoltanmajdik.bsky.social · 21/02/2024

While everyone is talking about Sora, this move toward small and easily malleable models might be more exciting in the long run: www.axios.com/2024/02/21/g...

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Zoltan P Majdik @zoltanmajdik.bsky.social · 04/01/2024

Worst time for a visual migraine+aura: the dotting i/crossing t/11pt font/deadline imminent/grants.gov final checks phase of a grant proposal submission.

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Zoltan P Majdik @zoltanmajdik.bsky.social · 23/12/2023

locusmag.com/2023/12/comm... | It’s not a bad article, but some of the statements are just so eye-poppingly off the mark: “The largest of these models are incredibly expensive. They’re expensive to make, with billions spent acquiring training data, labelling it […]”

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Zoltan P Majdik @zoltanmajdik.bsky.social · 22/12/2023

This is one of those "why didn't *I* think of doing it??" papers. Deceptively simple in hindsight, but takes a lot of creativity to actually make happen.

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Reposted by Zoltan P Majdik

Alex P. 👹 @saddestrobots.bsky.social · 09/12/2023

you: the existence of a "holy infant, so tender and mild" implies the existence of a crispy spicy infant jacques derrida, spiking his phone like a football: yes! yes! the world finally understands!!

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Zoltan P Majdik @zoltanmajdik.bsky.social · 20/12/2023

Ever written a paragraph about a complex concept, failed to explain it to your satisfaction, and edited it for so long that, in the end, you feel like you've unlearned and re-learned the concept a few times? All I know is I'll dream about non-linear activation functions in language models tonight.

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Zoltan P Majdik @zoltanmajdik.bsky.social · 08/12/2023

Excellent article on the possibilities of language models for academic research: www.businessinsider.com/ted-underwoo... As always with these things, my takeaway is: learn/teach how to fine-tune!

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Zoltan P Majdik @zoltanmajdik.bsky.social · 04/12/2023

This incredible visualization is all you need to learn how transformer-based language models work. Well, that, and two weeks to understand each layer. And a semester or so to learn linear algebra. bbycroft.net/llm

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Zoltan P Majdik @zoltanmajdik.bsky.social · 01/12/2023

Can I post tweets here? Will I be banned? As a long-time proponent of fine-tuning small models (*especially* vs. prompt guess-engineering on big general-purpose models), this is 💯: twitter.com/SashaMTL/sta...

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Zoltan P Majdik @zoltanmajdik.bsky.social · 21/11/2023

As someone who has been knee-deep in model benchmarking/comparison work for the last few weeks ... the scope of this paper is astonishing: arxiv.org/pdf/2311.110...

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Zoltan P Majdik @zoltanmajdik.bsky.social · 19/11/2023

Long layovers at airports create the most amazing liminal spaces. As a card-carrying time-obsessed Swiss person, it’s the only place where I can completely let go of time.

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Zoltan P Majdik @zoltanmajdik.bsky.social · 16/11/2023

Today at the NCA convention: our paper on analyzing GPT-3.5’s capacity for reasoning with metaphors … and how to fine-tune toward correcting imbalances in metaphor generation.

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Zoltan P Majdik @zoltanmajdik.bsky.social · 18/10/2023

Invigorating inaugural Conference on Computational Science at NDSU to lift us out of the mid-semester doldrums. And the best name tags I’ve seen.

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Zoltan P Majdik @zoltanmajdik.bsky.social · 06/10/2023

Data scientists/computational researchers who previously used the Twitter API in your research: what are new go-to sources for digital trace data with clean-ish APIs? Reddit is the most obvious, but where else do you look?

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Zoltan P Majdik @zoltanmajdik.bsky.social · 22/08/2023

This seems like it's a good direction to go: campustechnology.com/articles/202...

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