John Gallagher
Using qualitative & computational methods to study writers on the internet. I study how machine learning experts communicate. I study the interaction between writers & audiences. Professor @ University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign
- The one thing I’ll say that AI has done: made a lot of people demonstrate their definitions of learning, most of which are wrong or not backed up by empirical evidence.
- For me it’s cheeses and all I want is brie
- If I ever ran a food truck, it'd be a crepe cart. Savory and sweet.
- My undergrads and I were analyzing data from 2013-2020 (holy moly it’s like 30m). Anyways we started talking about 2013. they remarked they were in 4th grade. They asked me about it like. honestly, looking back over the post 2012 election data, it does feel like a different world.
- Don’t let the government give OpenAI a bailout. Let it fail in 2028 when all of its bills come due.
- In my social media methods class, we are doing our ethics unit. This study as an exemplar of an unethical study, even if it was deemed not applicable by the IRB. "Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks" www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...
- Let me scream about a weirdly specific thing: Celebrate your IRB approvals!! They’re a big deal. It’s a giant amount of paperwork and it means your thought about you study quite a bit. go out to dinner. Eat a fancy dessert. buy a reasonably priced video game.
- The family hid cookies in the car from me. Not even the 6 year old told me. I’m devastated for multiple reasons
- Maybe this is just me, but this reads precisely like AI both textually (sentence structure) and in the restatement of an idea (optionality away implies the four points after the em dash)
- The evening ended with a lecture on the fascinating structure of an owl's neck (it can keep it's head still while it's body moves/rotates). Scientists can't figure out how it works at a mechanical level but they are studying it for many applications related to camera work.
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- The engineers I eat dinner with (two PHDs, EE and ChemE) turned circus performing into a statics problem
- I think we are entering a true "coding for everyone" era with a crucial importance of breaking users away from defaults. The idea of seeing our tech interfaces differently is going to have a renaissance.
- Last night, at dinner, I listened to the complexity of (I swear, I am not making this up): 1) how to put more transistors on a wafer across the temp range of -5 to 150 C 2) why we don’t understand the nature of cutting vs tearing of polymers (soft tissues)
- Yes!!
- Yes!!!
- Never mind the jobs you had, tell me five classes you took in college: 1) Epistemology 2) Euripides 3) History of Rock Music 4) Dead Sea Scrolls & Apocrypha 5) Twentieth Century US Political History with @rauchway.bsky.social
- Yes!!!
- Reposted by John GallagherNever mind the jobs you had, tell me five classes you took in college: 1. Introduction to Islamic Studies 2. Introduction to Rock Music 3. African Music 4. Arabic 101 5. Southern Politics
- Never mind the jobs you had, tell me five classes you took in college: 1) Epistemology 2) Euripides 3) History of Rock Music 4) Dead Sea Scrolls & Apocrypha 5) Twentieth Century US Political History with @rauchway.bsky.social
- Yes!!!
- Yes!!!
- This all I want from bluesky right now. just fill up my feeed with these amazing classes!!
- I like the democratizing nature of coding tools. I dislike their corporate power. I think a lot that 90% of people don’t touch their defaults…and how that connects to corporate power, default power. are we approaching template culture?
- The coming code catastrophe
- This study by people from Anthropic itself should raise huge alarm bells about the use of AI in teaching how to code (and later on in coding itself, but esp. in the learning stage). And remember: this is by the people who make Claude! tl;dr: not that long, read it www.anthropic.com/research/AI-...
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Ah, the psychic relief of writing with a little “scraps” document on the side. Don’t worry, scraps: you’re safe here. Maybe you’ll even get called up to the Big Leagues. I love all my scraps equally, and I’d never delete you. - I’ve actually stopping putting up original lectures on canvas because the platform steals my intellectual property.
- when CEOs say they’re going to “use AI to reduce inefficiencies” I always hear “CEO wants a machine that doesn’t call in sick, works around the clock, never complains, or asks for a raise” But that’s just me, I suppose
- Claude code is an amazing leap (try it!). I‘m on board with it for one off, non-security things. I’m worried about a coming code catastrophe of lost knowledge and that companies will make LLMs worse except for the highest paying customers or degrade the quality over time in favor of advertising.
- Super short blog post! I’m curious what you think. Let me know either here or in the comments of the post. meresophistry.substack.com/p/on-that-st...
- I was sitting at my kids ballet studio reading Capitalism: A Global History (2025). Person asked me what I was reading about. I replied, “The advantages of capitalism’s forged templates as opposed to fiat templates of feudalism.” SILENCIO
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- The ratio on that Inside Higher Ed article is *off the chain*
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- We are living with state terrorism
- My sister is a principal for a middle school. We are both convinced that a lot of the problems currently are related to the political environment. People act like the chaos and disrespect don't filter down...but they do. They ooze in like DDT.
- I am at the “are you growing a beard or in the production of a book” stage
- Reposted by John Gallagher#Adequate is finally in my hands after 3ish years from concept to print. So happy 🕺🏻 OBLA26 gets ya a discount at upcolorado.com
- You ever read a magnificent book of 1,000 pages? Read Beckert’s Capitalism.
