Joe Pater

Poster advertising lectures on "Raisonnement Philologique et Modèles Informatiques" stating at 4pm, Thursday, March 12, at 54 Boulevard Raspail, Paris.

Paris friends! Amis parisiens ! This Thursday is the first of four public lectures I'm giving on AI and philology, broadly defined: "Philological Reasoning and Computational Models." The advertisement is in French, but the lectures are in English. I'd also love to meet while I'm here in March! 1/

So according to the WSJ a US Senator conspired with another country to manipulate the US into starting a war, am I getting this right

MAGA folks are doing all they can to erase trans kids & adults

Kansas revoked trans people’s IDs overnight

This report finds that “many alleged suicides of Black trans women are in fact modern-day lynchings”: www.advocate.com/news/crime/b...

The Atlantic chooses to stoke a fake anti-trans panic 👀

This is essential viewing—thank you Dr Green for sharing it

It’s a genuine tragedy to see the NIH Director embracing censorship so gleefully; his response to Dr Green (“it’s bad science!”) is one of the most repulsive things I’ve seen from Jay Bhattacharya, amidst a long list of vile utterances

!!

Hegseth just shot down a DHS drone with a laser because he thought it belonged to a Mexican cartel, but let’s let him preside over a radical shift to unrestrained AI on our most advanced weapons systems. What could go wrong?

Excellent and frightening for our future.

This should be great!

+1

Thank you to both @gregggonsalves.bsky.social and @joshuasweitz.bsky.social for these important words.

Thank you Joe!

Wow - could this maybe break through all the noise?

I can’t stop laughing about this!

Canadian Company Cancels Sale of Virginia Warehouse to ICE

This is a fascinating story. ICE tried to buy a warehouse in VA from a Canadian company, to turn into a detention center. One of the company’s advertising partners basically told them that if they sold, they could kiss their ads goodbye.

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/01/u...

Omg this is wild. Hauser getting advice from Epstein about crisis management.

(PDF) P-hacking with one prompt PDF | This brief note reports a mini-experiment, which tested whether major AI systems (Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT) readily perform p-hacking when... | Find, read and cite all the research you need o...

"P-Hacking with one prompt" by Shigeto Kawahara.

TL/DR: Ask LLMs to find a significant effect, and they will oblige.

www.researchgate.net/publication/...

The people of Minnesota have executed one of the most impressive civil resistance campaigns I can remember:

- Organized a city wide general strike
- Maintained nonviolent discipline amidst violence
- Mobilized 10,000s in subzero temps to protest and watch ICE
- Flipped public opinion against ICE

“in the absence of additional information, it appears Thao was taken half-naked in 10 degree weather simply because he’s Asian.”

DECLARATION In proceeding this day to the signature of the Convention respecting the cession of the Danish West-Indian Islands to the United States of America, the undersigned Secretary of State of the United States of America, duly authorized by his Government, has the honor to declare that the Government of the United States of America will not object to the Danish Government extending their political and economic interests to the whole of Greenland. ROBERT LANSING New YorK, August 4, 1916. [Page 701]

Just for the record, and it’s insane that the mad king made me look this up, there is documentation of the US giving up all claim to Greenland to Denmark when we bought the Virgin Islands from them in 1916.

history.state.gov/historicaldo...

And the stuff on copyright and how to fight back against the corporations is essential. The article is based on a lecture he gave for an upcoming book.

Brilliant essay by Cory Doctorow - I'd never understood the key role of trying to be a growth stock in how these companies behave.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

Non-protesting dad just trying to hustle his kids, as young as 6mo, out of the neighborhood. ICE threw a flash-bang INTO HIS car, all 6 kids in the hospital now.

If anyone wondered how things turn against occupying armies there's a case study playing out in front of you.

How a billionaire with interests in Greenland encouraged Trump to acquire the territory US president’s friend Ronald Lauder – who first proposed Arctic expansion – is now making deals in the island

This helps make sense of what’s going on.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

The dissertation is a nice find! I'm a longtime fan of the papers that followed (Olazaran 1993, 1996). I cite them here (and in my Language paper): websites.umass.edu/comphon/2017...

Wow. Good things can still happen in this country!

Yeah, famously superpowers go around bragging how strong they are, making colonies, establishing regional spheres of influences, blustering at shifting coalitions of allies, undermining stability with squabbles over barely-populated islands, oh wait I’m describing declining 19th century great powers

As the great Suketu Mehta wrote in the accompanying essay, "By 1643, only nineteen years after the first Walloon settlers founded New Amsterdam, 18 languages were already being
spoken in the city—among a population of a mere 500." To hell with fictions of a homogenous past, linguistic & otherwise.

Over the holidays, I did a quick and dirty genealogy by copying and pasting information from genealogy sites into a spreadsheet. Here's what I got, a lot more than I ever thought I'd find (e.g. I'm maybe descended from Brian Boru, and Charlemagne and Hildegard?!) websites.umass.edu/pater/2025/1...

It is unclear to me how much traction Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is getting on BlueSky. I am thinking of switching communication about new papers to LinkedIn, which gives better insight into the # of views garnered. Give us a like if you want Glossa to stay on the Blue side of things.

I mean yeah it’s an authoritarian takeover but can we take some comfort in the fact that the people doing it are INSANELY stupid?