David Mimno
@dmimno.bsky.social
He teaches information science at Cornell. http://mimno.infosci.cornell.edu
Pinned
David Mimno
@dmimno.bsky.social
· Nov 13
Optimist: AI has achieved human level performance!
Realist: “AI” is a collection of brittle hacks that, under very specific circumstances, mimic the surface level of human intelligence
Pessimist: AI HAS achieved human level performance
Realist: “AI” is a collection of brittle hacks that, under very specific circumstances, mimic the surface level of human intelligence
Pessimist: AI HAS achieved human level performance
The basic problem is that the amount of money at stake in government decisions is vastly more than the amount of money it takes to influence those decisions
people writing actual law from one of four bedrooms in a group house, while everyone they’ve heard from in person about that law they’re writing lives in a mansion in McLean or Potomac
people who write actual laws cringing when the dinner bill comes and gasping when a friend pays without blinking
people who write actual laws cringing when the dinner bill comes and gasping when a friend pays without blinking
November 7, 2025 at 8:30 PM
The basic problem is that the amount of money at stake in government decisions is vastly more than the amount of money it takes to influence those decisions
In Chap 4 of #ComputationalHumanities, Crystal Hall proposes parallax (looking at the same thing from two different angles) as a metaphor for how to interpret computational approaches. Tool variability can be a problem, but with intention it can be powerful!
dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/projects/com...
dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/projects/com...
Computational Humanities | Debates in the Digital Humanities
Bringing together leading experts from across North America and Europe, _Computational Humanities_ redirects debates around computation and humanities digital scholarship from dualistic arguments to n...
dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu
November 7, 2025 at 5:24 PM
In Chap 4 of #ComputationalHumanities, Crystal Hall proposes parallax (looking at the same thing from two different angles) as a metaphor for how to interpret computational approaches. Tool variability can be a problem, but with intention it can be powerful!
dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/projects/com...
dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/projects/com...
Reposted by David Mimno
I’m recruiting students this upcoming cycle at UIUC! I’m excited about Qs on societal impact of AI, especially human-AI collaboration, multi-agent interactions, incentives in data sharing, and AI policy/regulation (all from both a theoretical and applied lens). Apply through CS & select my name!
November 6, 2025 at 6:52 PM
I’m recruiting students this upcoming cycle at UIUC! I’m excited about Qs on societal impact of AI, especially human-AI collaboration, multi-agent interactions, incentives in data sharing, and AI policy/regulation (all from both a theoretical and applied lens). Apply through CS & select my name!
Reposted by David Mimno
Job alert!
@ischoolui.bsky.social is hiring in 4 areas this year
Early literacies: illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...
Information behavior/HCI/UX: illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...
Information, Culture & Society: illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...
Open IS: illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...
@ischoolui.bsky.social is hiring in 4 areas this year
Early literacies: illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...
Information behavior/HCI/UX: illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...
Information, Culture & Society: illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...
Open IS: illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...
November 6, 2025 at 3:54 PM
Job alert!
@ischoolui.bsky.social is hiring in 4 areas this year
Early literacies: illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...
Information behavior/HCI/UX: illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...
Information, Culture & Society: illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...
Open IS: illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...
@ischoolui.bsky.social is hiring in 4 areas this year
Early literacies: illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...
Information behavior/HCI/UX: illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...
Information, Culture & Society: illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...
Open IS: illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...
Reposted by David Mimno
No better time to start learning about that #AI thing everyone's talking about...
📢 I'm recruiting PhD students in Computer Science or Information Science @cornellbowers.bsky.social!
If you're interested, apply to either department (yes, either program!) and list me as a potential advisor!
📢 I'm recruiting PhD students in Computer Science or Information Science @cornellbowers.bsky.social!
If you're interested, apply to either department (yes, either program!) and list me as a potential advisor!
November 6, 2025 at 4:19 PM
No better time to start learning about that #AI thing everyone's talking about...
📢 I'm recruiting PhD students in Computer Science or Information Science @cornellbowers.bsky.social!
If you're interested, apply to either department (yes, either program!) and list me as a potential advisor!
📢 I'm recruiting PhD students in Computer Science or Information Science @cornellbowers.bsky.social!
If you're interested, apply to either department (yes, either program!) and list me as a potential advisor!
Reposted by David Mimno
It was fantastic to collaborate across Cornell and Apple for our EMNLP paper auditing LLMs for dialectal biases in multiple choice benchmark datasets: arxiv.org/abs/2510.00962.
Anna @annaseogyeongchoi.bsky.social (who's on the job market this year!) did a great job presenting this work today!
Anna @annaseogyeongchoi.bsky.social (who's on the job market this year!) did a great job presenting this work today!
November 6, 2025 at 1:17 AM
It was fantastic to collaborate across Cornell and Apple for our EMNLP paper auditing LLMs for dialectal biases in multiple choice benchmark datasets: arxiv.org/abs/2510.00962.
Anna @annaseogyeongchoi.bsky.social (who's on the job market this year!) did a great job presenting this work today!
Anna @annaseogyeongchoi.bsky.social (who's on the job market this year!) did a great job presenting this work today!
Reposted by David Mimno
I'm recruiting multiple PhD students for Fall 2026 in Computer Science at @hopkinsengineer.bsky.social 🍂
Apply to work on AI for social sciences/human behavior, social NLP, and LLMs for real-world applied domains you're passionate about!
Learn more at kristinagligoric.com & help spread the word!
Apply to work on AI for social sciences/human behavior, social NLP, and LLMs for real-world applied domains you're passionate about!
Learn more at kristinagligoric.com & help spread the word!
November 5, 2025 at 2:56 PM
I'm recruiting multiple PhD students for Fall 2026 in Computer Science at @hopkinsengineer.bsky.social 🍂
Apply to work on AI for social sciences/human behavior, social NLP, and LLMs for real-world applied domains you're passionate about!
Learn more at kristinagligoric.com & help spread the word!
Apply to work on AI for social sciences/human behavior, social NLP, and LLMs for real-world applied domains you're passionate about!
Learn more at kristinagligoric.com & help spread the word!
Reposted by David Mimno
Perhaps relevant today, a framework for understanding how many election rumors mislead.
The 2024 election is upon us. Millions of ballots have already been cast. Mail-in ballots are being returned. Early voting is taking place. And dozens of rumors are spreading. So, let me re-introduce our framework for diagnosing how many “evidence-based” rumors mislead:
November 4, 2025 at 10:27 PM
Perhaps relevant today, a framework for understanding how many election rumors mislead.
Happy broken pumpkins in the gorge season to all who celebrate!! 🎃 🌊
November 4, 2025 at 10:19 PM
Happy broken pumpkins in the gorge season to all who celebrate!! 🎃 🌊
It's great to see the #computationalhumanities DDH volume getting attention! We start with two essays about interpretation. In Chap 1, Hannah Ringler distinguishes tools and interpretations, asking with vs asking about.
dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/projects/com...
dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/projects/com...
Computational Humanities | Debates in the Digital Humanities
Bringing together leading experts from across North America and Europe, _Computational Humanities_ redirects debates around computation and humanities digital scholarship from dualistic arguments to n...
dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu
November 4, 2025 at 4:37 PM
It's great to see the #computationalhumanities DDH volume getting attention! We start with two essays about interpretation. In Chap 1, Hannah Ringler distinguishes tools and interpretations, asking with vs asking about.
dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/projects/com...
dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/projects/com...
Reposted by David Mimno
This essay from @bschmidt.bsky.social on how history rejected computational methods, & so "quantitative history" ended up in the social sciences, & "digital humanities" in literature, with no historians doing computational work, is fascinating, & worth a read: dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/computa...
![The first is a working paper by three economists—Elliott Ash, Daniel Chen, and Suresh Naidu—from 2017. While the authors are economists, the actual contribution—summed up in a title that few historians would think debatable, “Ideas Have Consequences”—is about legal or intellectual history. It presents a powerful and discrete account of the transmission of ideas across social networks through textual analysis. The substance argues that privately funded Manne seminars in law and economics—which were attended by a substantial proportion of the federal judiciary—affected the language, decisions, and sentencing of federal justices who attended them and thus, by implication, allowed large-value conservative donors to capture the federal judiciary. The effect seems robust to a variety of covariates [...]
Reading this paper was exciting, but looking through the tools and tricks and sources also made me feel like someone in a science fiction movie encountering an artifact sent back from a few decades in the future. The extraordinary quality of data that economists can obtain is almost unimaginable to humanists. It is not just a million or so circuit court votes and 300,000 opinions but also the institutional capacity to file Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to get the exact years of attendance for every judge who went to the Manne program and the disciplinary capacity to casually use relatively new methods like word embeddings without spending pages slowly, gently analogizing them to some “simpler” concept. Humanists wandering through algorithms seem to have to justify using an algorithm by first identifying which Borges short story—whether about the Map of the Empire, the analytical language of John Wilkins, or Pierre Menard and the Quijote—it most closely resembles.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:643p6z4ydk2xnwv77maa6eec/bafkreidctt57eseamimgzctkjtu2ly2vmsugcjwcrargerohe5bljg7jie@jpeg)
November 4, 2025 at 3:34 AM
This essay from @bschmidt.bsky.social on how history rejected computational methods, & so "quantitative history" ended up in the social sciences, & "digital humanities" in literature, with no historians doing computational work, is fascinating, & worth a read: dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/computa...
"Computational Humanities is far more than a collection of essays; it is a meticulously curated critical tool kit."
This is exactly what we were going for! dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/projects/com...
This is exactly what we were going for! dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/projects/com...
November 3, 2025 at 5:18 PM
"Computational Humanities is far more than a collection of essays; it is a meticulously curated critical tool kit."
This is exactly what we were going for! dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/projects/com...
This is exactly what we were going for! dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/projects/com...
Reposted by David Mimno
Huggingface: The secret to training an LLM
a huge (v huge) blog post describing every detail of training SmoLM and what our takes to train a high performance LLM
huggingface.co/spaces/Huggi...
a huge (v huge) blog post describing every detail of training SmoLM and what our takes to train a high performance LLM
huggingface.co/spaces/Huggi...
The Smol Training Playbook: The Secrets to Building World-Class LLMs - a Hugging Face Space by HuggingFaceTB
Discover amazing ML apps made by the community
huggingface.co
October 31, 2025 at 10:44 AM
Huggingface: The secret to training an LLM
a huge (v huge) blog post describing every detail of training SmoLM and what our takes to train a high performance LLM
huggingface.co/spaces/Huggi...
a huge (v huge) blog post describing every detail of training SmoLM and what our takes to train a high performance LLM
huggingface.co/spaces/Huggi...
Reposted by David Mimno
People three hops away in your social network are people you don't know
- Your friends' friends' parents
- Your partner's parents' friends
- Your boss's kid's teachers
- Your friend's doctor's parents
- Your ex's partner's colleague
List goes on and on for why this is terrible criteria
- Your friends' friends' parents
- Your partner's parents' friends
- Your boss's kid's teachers
- Your friend's doctor's parents
- Your ex's partner's colleague
List goes on and on for why this is terrible criteria
This three-hops theory is especially insane. Even if you assume each person is connected to only 100 other people, there are 1m people within three hops of every suspected drug trafficker—and remember that even *known* drug traffickers aren’t legitimate targets. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/30/u...
October 31, 2025 at 12:24 PM
People three hops away in your social network are people you don't know
- Your friends' friends' parents
- Your partner's parents' friends
- Your boss's kid's teachers
- Your friend's doctor's parents
- Your ex's partner's colleague
List goes on and on for why this is terrible criteria
- Your friends' friends' parents
- Your partner's parents' friends
- Your boss's kid's teachers
- Your friend's doctor's parents
- Your ex's partner's colleague
List goes on and on for why this is terrible criteria
Reposted by David Mimno
Clicke "like" on my workes, ye mightye, and subscrybe.
October 29, 2025 at 11:11 PM
Clicke "like" on my workes, ye mightye, and subscrybe.
Reposted by David Mimno
Looking for news on @msftresearch.bsky.social FATE internships & postdocs? YES, we will have positions, but bear with us — we expect postings to go up in mid-November and I will post an update here as soon as they do.
October 24, 2025 at 7:36 PM
Looking for news on @msftresearch.bsky.social FATE internships & postdocs? YES, we will have positions, but bear with us — we expect postings to go up in mid-November and I will post an update here as soon as they do.
The point of grokipedia is to produce vast volumes of apparently high-quality open-licensed tokens to be scooped up by LLM trainers, not to be read by humans, right?
October 29, 2025 at 4:40 PM
The point of grokipedia is to produce vast volumes of apparently high-quality open-licensed tokens to be scooped up by LLM trainers, not to be read by humans, right?
Reposted by David Mimno
Cornell (NYC and Ithaca) is recruiting AI postdocs, apply by Nov 20, 2025! If you're interested in working with me on technical approaches to responsible AI (e.g., personalization, fairness), please email me.
academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/30971
academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/30971
Cornell University, Empire AI Fellows Program
Job #AJO30971, Postdoctoral Fellow, Empire AI Fellows Program, Cornell University, New York, New York, US
academicjobsonline.org
October 28, 2025 at 6:19 PM
Cornell (NYC and Ithaca) is recruiting AI postdocs, apply by Nov 20, 2025! If you're interested in working with me on technical approaches to responsible AI (e.g., personalization, fairness), please email me.
academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/30971
academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/30971
Cornell Information Science is hiring a Teaching Professor! Apply this week for full consideration:
academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/30763
academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/30763
Cornell University, Information Science
Job #AJO30763, 2025-2026 CORNELL INFORMATION SCIENCE FULL-TIME TEACHING FACULTY SEARCH (OPEN-RANK TEACHING PROFESSOR), ITHACA CAMPUS , Information Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, US
academicjobsonline.org
October 28, 2025 at 1:12 PM
Cornell Information Science is hiring a Teaching Professor! Apply this week for full consideration:
academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/30763
academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/30763
Your regular reminder that NSF is required by US law to support increasing the participation of historically less represented groups in science and technology fields
October 28, 2025 at 1:55 AM
Your regular reminder that NSF is required by US law to support increasing the participation of historically less represented groups in science and technology fields
Reposted by David Mimno
Does anyone have a dataset of 1,000 + pages of handwritten text on Transkribus that they want to use for finetuning a VLM? If so, please let me know. This would be for any language and any script.
October 27, 2025 at 5:56 PM
Does anyone have a dataset of 1,000 + pages of handwritten text on Transkribus that they want to use for finetuning a VLM? If so, please let me know. This would be for any language and any script.
Reposted by David Mimno
❗REMINDER: The I School is hiring❗We are looking for an Assistant Professor of Information who can address key questions about metadata, information systems, and more. #AcademicSky
The final review date is Nov. 1. We look forward to reading your applications! https://aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05014
The final review date is Nov. 1. We look forward to reading your applications! https://aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05014
Assistant Professor - Information - School of Information
University of California, Berkeley is hiring. Apply now!
aprecruit.berkeley.edu
October 27, 2025 at 4:57 PM
❗REMINDER: The I School is hiring❗We are looking for an Assistant Professor of Information who can address key questions about metadata, information systems, and more. #AcademicSky
The final review date is Nov. 1. We look forward to reading your applications! https://aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05014
The final review date is Nov. 1. We look forward to reading your applications! https://aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05014
Binghamton/Endicott was a tech hub in the past, and could be again
Chicago is a city, a far better (and bigger) one than Seattle? It's not a purge if you move your company somewhere you can afford? I'm not suggesting living in a woods. There are lots of communities with great hipster restaurants & entertainment even in the rustbelt, you just have to look a little.
October 27, 2025 at 12:18 AM
Binghamton/Endicott was a tech hub in the past, and could be again
Reposted by David Mimno
What is "culture"?
October 23, 2025 at 11:33 PM
What is "culture"?
Reposted by David Mimno
AI is already at work in American newsrooms.
We examine 186k articles published this summer and find that ~9% are either fully or partially AI-generated, usually without readers having any idea.
Here's what we learned about how AI is influencing local and national journalism:
We examine 186k articles published this summer and find that ~9% are either fully or partially AI-generated, usually without readers having any idea.
Here's what we learned about how AI is influencing local and national journalism:
October 22, 2025 at 3:24 PM
AI is already at work in American newsrooms.
We examine 186k articles published this summer and find that ~9% are either fully or partially AI-generated, usually without readers having any idea.
Here's what we learned about how AI is influencing local and national journalism:
We examine 186k articles published this summer and find that ~9% are either fully or partially AI-generated, usually without readers having any idea.
Here's what we learned about how AI is influencing local and national journalism: