Oli Liu
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oliliu.bsky.social
Oli Liu
@oliliu.bsky.social
(over)thinking about speech and language and most things in life @ University of Edinburgh 🦄 inadequate servant of three cats, shameless bibliophile.
Very excited for my first encounter with Eileen Chang in English!
Also my first nyrb classics. The typesetting is very classy.
September 10, 2025 at 7:27 PM
the feeling when I keep coming up with ideas of additional experiments when trying to write up a paper
August 25, 2025 at 3:32 PM
“Life is like the bible, translated from Hebrew to Greek, from Greek to Latin, from Latin to English, from English to Mandarin. When Cuiyuan read it, it’s translated into Shanghainese in her mind. Some things do not come through.”
August 8, 2025 at 8:29 PM
I get the feeling that my cat is as concerned as my supervisors about how things are going
Oh what would I do without my cat? Who’s gonna keep on eye on my draft even after I’ve gone to bed?
August 6, 2025 at 3:27 PM
Oh what would I do without my cat? Who’s gonna keep on eye on my draft even after I’ve gone to bed?
August 6, 2025 at 3:19 PM
Reposted by Oli Liu
genAI saves time alright but at cost of actual learning
“When they give me an assignment, I just research and copy. I don’t read or anything. Sometimes I’ve wondered if what it’s telling me is true, but it helps me save time.”
the enshittification of education is underway

restofworld.org/2025/colombi...
July 31, 2025 at 11:24 AM
Reposted by Oli Liu
I wish more aspiring academics really appreciated this aspect, that academia is dialogical. You have to be able to extemporaneously defend your ideas and discuss them in great detail, orally. You have to know it well enough to have it at your fingertips.
At PhD/post-PhD level, academia is fundamentally dialogical and unless you intend to hide behind a prompt your whole life, you are going to look like a fool when you open your mouth and don't have a working understanding of the things you profess to write about.
July 31, 2025 at 10:13 AM
Reposted by Oli Liu
NEW PREPRINT!

Language is not just a formal system—it connects words to the world. But how do we measure this connection in a cross-linguistic, quantitative way?

🧵 Using multimodal models, we introduce a new approach: groundedness ⬇️
December 20, 2024 at 5:05 PM