Caleb Moses
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mathematiguy.bsky.social
Caleb Moses
@mathematiguy.bsky.social
Indigenous language technology. PhD candidate at McGill University in Montreal. Ngāpuhi Nui Tonu.
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I'm trying to be more active here, so I thought I would introduce myself for anyone who doesn't know me:

My name is Caleb, I'm Māori from Waimā in Te Tai Tokerau. My hapū (subtribe) is Te Mahurehure, and my iwi (tribe) is Ngāpuhi.

I'm a Compsci PhD student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.
"If anyone builds it everyone dies" but the "it" is colonialism
November 2, 2025 at 2:10 PM
I honestly just got lucky. I made the decision based on not a lot of information, mostly vibe. Talking to their students if you can (I wasn’t able to) is certainly recommended.

Also perhaps it’s good to be willing to trade things off. Often the really high powered academics are bad supervisors.
It is, actually, a very complicated problem!
How do you get insights about a future advisor?
November 1, 2025 at 8:50 PM
Reposted by Caleb Moses
Looking for a PhD program? It all starts with great supervision. Choose wisely.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...
November 1, 2025 at 7:26 PM
Reposted by Caleb Moses
When you read a poem, do you wonder how the poet structures it through whitespace between/before words and lines?

We did! Our findings on whitespace - how to measure/preserve it, how usage varies across form/time, how it affects LLMs - now in an #EMNLP2025 (main) paper: arxiv.org/abs/2510.16713
🧵👇
October 31, 2025 at 3:08 PM
Hana-Rawhiti accepting the Time Magazine award in NYC is a great example of how the world is really not paying attention to the NZ govt at all.

They can go lose in their Oxford Union debates and kiss up to Trump all they like but they won’t get anywhere near that kind of attention.
October 31, 2025 at 1:58 AM
Reposted by Caleb Moses
#nzpol Labour is proposing to create a Capital Gains Tax on property - excluding farms and the family home. That income will help make GP visits free for the majority of people. Is that a better policy than continuing tax-free profits on, say, someone's seventh property? Absolutely. A🧵
Release: Targeted tax to grow the economy and fund free doctor’s visits
www.labour.org.nz
October 27, 2025 at 9:09 PM
Reposted by Caleb Moses
my 17yo niece is part of a choir that won an international championship earlier this week, just casually singing at the montserrat benedictine monastery

she has had a hard start to life and when i was 17 looking after her we would sing phantom of the opera over and over (even the organ parts)
October 24, 2025 at 6:33 AM
I grew up visiting my friends and family nearly always unannounced unless it was for some kind of occasion.

I wish we would all drop by each others places more often. In my family, if you just drive past it’s considered rude if you don’t say hi.

Maybe it’s too much for some but I liked it.
If you are invited to someone’s house for dinner (say, at 6:00), what’s the earliest you might arrive and the latest and still be considered polite?

(Bonus q: what’s the *optimally* polite time?)

I’m curious how this varies culturally/regionally/generationally.
a man in a suit and tie is saying " do not test my politeness "
ALT: a man in a suit and tie is saying " do not test my politeness "
media.tenor.com
October 13, 2025 at 4:57 PM
I wonder what it felt like for Elon to be publicly rebuked by Dr Jane Goodall from beyond the grave
Earlier this year, Dr. Jane Goodall sat down for an interview for Brad Falchuk’s new Netflix series, Famous Last Words.

The premise of the series is to interview people on the condition that the interview not air until the subject has passed away.
October 7, 2025 at 2:02 AM
Reposted by Caleb Moses
hate to say it but people like sina and i who’ve been around more than 5 minutes have been warning about the direction TPM’s been travelling in since at least 2023. it’s a highly divisive party, especially within māori society itself. solidarity with eru www.rnz.co.nz/news/politic...
Toitū Te Tiriti's Eru Kapa-Kingi rules out starting rival political party after split from Te Pāti Māori
The activist hopes the split will spur Te Pāti Māori into creating genuine change from the inside.
www.rnz.co.nz
October 4, 2025 at 5:19 AM
Reposted by Caleb Moses
Where the separate divisions of ANTIFA landed on the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944:
September 18, 2025 at 11:19 PM
I’m picking D for sure. G is my only regret bc of Mexico.

Also someone needs to redo the boundaries so that they at least cover equal surface area.
For the rest of your life, you can only eat food from one of these regions. Which do you choose?

For more maps: brilliantmaps.beehiiv.com/s...
September 16, 2025 at 10:43 PM
Reposted by Caleb Moses
“States should think very carefully about what they actually want to get out of this before spending hundreds of billions of dollars trying to indigenize the entire AI stack. You still won’t be able to eliminate dependencies and vulnerabilities on foreign states.”

restofworld.org/2025/chinese...
The myth of sovereign AI: Countries rely on U.S. and Chinese tech
As countries pursue self-sufficiency in AI, they risk depending on foreign companies, undermining their independence and their goals.
restofworld.org
September 13, 2025 at 6:15 AM
Ask not what your country can do for you. Definitely, definitely don’t ask what your country can do for you. I beg you, seriously.
Treasury advice hasn’t changed since 1984 what’s new 🙄
September 10, 2025 at 5:53 AM
It’s pretty funny that Amazon rug pulled their data centre plans moments after Luxon tried to take credit for them.

If he kept his mouth shut then he could’ve blamed the rug pull on labour but now he looks like a dunce even though it’s literally not his fault. Amazon predictably doesn’t give a f-
September 9, 2025 at 11:33 PM
I noticed today that they’re starting to sell postcards at the magazine shop with AI art on them.

You can tell which because they don’t credit an artist on the back. The irony of using a picture of a native bird to sell AI art is not lost on me.
September 9, 2025 at 8:35 AM
Labour resents having to work with the rest of the left wing block to their own detriment.

The main reason Luxon won the last election is that he simply wanted it the most. There’s nothing he wasn’t willing to say, and no compromise too damaging to his pride.
Say what you will about Luxon and his weird mantra around “building relationships” - the coalition is still stands more than halfway through the term. Labour is still holding onto the pipe dream of governing alone for some inexplicable reason.
September 9, 2025 at 3:54 AM
Reposted by Caleb Moses
(trying to explain "fuck, marry, kill" to a black widow spider) no it's *three different* guys
September 8, 2025 at 10:34 PM
Reposted by Caleb Moses
Also, our version of the opening monologue would have gone something like:

Space: she's pretty big, eh? This is the Starship Enterprise's five year tiki-tour to check out what's happening on other planets, say "kia ora!" to whoever's around, and have a squiz round the back of the galactic boonies.
September 2, 2025 at 4:30 AM
Me, contemplating returning back to Montreal soon: Mm it’s gotta be possible to get boil up ingredients somehow 🤔

I need to explore the blue line more except my French is not good
August 25, 2025 at 6:10 AM
Reposted by Caleb Moses
August 21, 2025 at 12:19 PM
One way I can tell I've been back home for a while is that I'm back to thanking the bus driver every time I get off the bus
August 16, 2025 at 11:13 AM
Today I started a project to scrape a website and gather together some data. After some quick testing, I found that they had implemented countermeasures which implied that they didn't want to be scraped.

Then I quit the project and did something else. Crazy idea I know.
August 13, 2025 at 11:08 PM
Only being able to speak one language is much more of a disservice to young children than knowing a few words in Māori.

The whole drama proves that racism is not just a moral deficiency, but an intellectual one. We should resist them not just because it's unethical, but because it's stupid.
August 13, 2025 at 10:54 PM
I sometimes think about how once I get this PhD I’m going to be seen by a lot of people as part of “the establishment” when I really don’t see myself that way at all.

I wonder what it was like for other academics, if they noticed a shift in how others (probably mostly strangers) perceive them.
August 11, 2025 at 4:11 AM