Naomi Saphra
@nsaphra.bsky.social
9.7K followers 1.5K following 2.4K posts
Waiting on a robot body. All opinions are universal and held by both employers and family. Literally a professor. Recruiting students to start my lab. ML/NLP/they/she.
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nsaphra.bsky.social
I wrote something up for AI people who want to get into bluesky and either couldn't assemble an exciting feed or gave up doomscrolling when their Following feed switched to talking politics 24/7.
The AI Researcher's Guide to a Non-Boring Bluesky Feed | Naomi Saphra
How to migrate to bsky without a boring feed.
nsaphra.net
Reposted by Naomi Saphra
kmahowald.bsky.social
UT Austin Linguistics is hiring in computational linguistics!

Asst or Assoc.

We have a thriving group sites.utexas.edu/compling/ and a long proud history in the space. (For instance, fun fact, Jeff Elman was a UT Austin Linguistics Ph.D.)

faculty.utexas.edu/career/170793

🤘
UT Austin Computational Linguistics Research Group – Humans processing computers processing humans processing language
sites.utexas.edu
Reposted by Naomi Saphra
histoftech.bsky.social
The Virginia Senate just told UVA it’s not getting state funding if it accepts the compact since UVA exists to serve Virginia, its residents, & their interests—not be a tool of the federal govt. Scoop from our student newspaper, who’ve been doing vital reporting www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2025...
nsaphra.bsky.social
Id you’ve already written it, you can always pass it through for editing right? And if you haven’t written it, you maybe don’t need to fill the cap?
nsaphra.bsky.social
I guess I think 90% of the time writing is improved by cutting out long strings of predictable text that just add unnecessary volume?
nsaphra.bsky.social
Cool! Is the intuition of the moments insight that you want synthetic data that increases the diversity of certain co-occurrences?
nsaphra.bsky.social
What’s your goal? LLMs can edit and they can turn your outline into soulless unreadable prose. are you trying to skip the actual outline step lol
nsaphra.bsky.social
Didn’t Harvard just sign a concession and send a ton of money to the treasury?
Reposted by Naomi Saphra
stephenturner.us
Lost Science is a new NYT series of accounts from scientists who have lost their jobs or funding. You can send your story to the Times here www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/c...
Reposted by Naomi Saphra
matthiasnau.bsky.social
This is one of those papers that just deserves a post every now and then. Half a century old, with a message still relevant today: Cognition won't be understood one variable at the time.

You Can't Play 20 Questions with Nature and Win, by Allen Newell (1973) www.coli.uni-saarland.de/~crocker/doc...
nsaphra.bsky.social
I guess it’s time to accept canva
nsaphra.bsky.social
some recent responses to me egregiously traversing the crosswalk by my office:
- honks
- middle fingers
- screaming “BITCH” (this was my fault, I had offended an aggrieved motorist by pointing at the yield sign)
nsaphra.bsky.social
If Boston can require cars to pass an annual inspection they can require motorists to pass an annual one question exam where you just have to explain what this sign means
Yield to pedestrians sign
nsaphra.bsky.social
If I were willing look for my own dumb clip art I’d be willing to do my own low effort layout on a default color scheme template
nsaphra.bsky.social
I want it to have cute lil pictures everywhere, like clip art style. That’s why I’m not bothering to make it myself. I am not a good designer and I want a cute piece of paper to hang by my bed and sink.
Reposted by Naomi Saphra
mariaa.bsky.social
Keynote at #COLM2025: Nicholas Carlini from Anthropic

"Are language models worth it?"

Explains that the prior decade of his work on adversarial images, while it taught us a lot, isn't very applied; it's unlikely anyone is actually altering images of cats in scary ways.
nsaphra.bsky.social
What’s current SOTA for consumers generating flyers? I’ve been trying to make my own little “morning routine” list to hang by my bed for AGES and all the LLM default tools still fail to generate coherent text when theres a long list of items.
Reposted by Naomi Saphra
aachimova.bsky.social
In a new exciting collaboration with @marlenfroehlich.bsky.social and @profgerhard.bsky.social we think about how studying ambiguity in human and great ape communication can advance our theories of language evolution. Paper out at doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...
nsaphra.bsky.social
It’s not just the world champion in vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, Rwanda also has a capital that just seems like a nice place to live? Polite drivers, clean streets, civic responsibility (enforced by violence). I came back from ICLR 2022 obsessed like a US undergrad after a one month study abroad
nsaphra.bsky.social
tbf we won’t know if he’s doing a good job until succession, but he’s taken one of the most intractably violent victims of Euro colonialism and turned it into regional tech hub and the only east african country where it’s legal to be gay (because he refuses to submit to American missionaries)
nsaphra.bsky.social
My worst global politics take is: People overrate LKY and underrate Kagame, either because they’re cowards who won’t say that a living dictator is actually doing a good job, or because Africa
Reposted by Naomi Saphra
queerinai.com
We are launching our Graduate School Application Financial Aid Program (www.queerinai.com/grad-app-aid) for 2025-2026. We’ll give up to $750 per person to LGBTQIA+ STEM scholars applying to graduate programs. Apply at openreview.net/group?id=Que.... 1/5
Grad App Aid — Queer in AI
www.queerinai.com
Reposted by Naomi Saphra
dhsu.bsky.social
The work winning this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry is science-fiction-like-materials-wizardry, but this insight about people from one of the winners (also a UCB alumnus!) is particularly profound: www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/s...
nsaphra.bsky.social
just checked yours and. sorry. I’m sorry. @jay.bsky.team why do you humiliate your top users by exposing them as top users.

@elfprince13.mumak.app you could maybe go outside though
nsaphra.bsky.social
I would pay to hide my profile post count. No one but my followers should know how online I am