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Irina Dumitrescu Profile picture
Irina Dumitrescu
@irinibus
@irinadumitrescu.bsky.social Essayist, critic, professor. Editor @CCdot_net, column @TheTLS, podcast @LRB, writing in NYRB, NYT, BAE, elsewhere.
Oct 27 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Hear me out here, what if we refuse to call large language models "artificial intelligence" and consistently refer to them as "computerized pattern recognition"? It's not nothing. Pattern recognition is evidently worth quite a lot. But I'm wondering why people are collectively so willing to use verbs like "learning" about machine work when they can only be metaphorical. Why not refer to LLMs as eating, digesting, and excreting data?
Oct 25 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
In my case, absolutely no one said I was bored. They just left me to believe I was undisciplined and lazy when I procrastinated on a project that mainly involved pasting macaroni to coloured paper in grade four. Image My work ethic improved *a lot* once I tested into gifted. But I had to deal with the damage for years. Also didn't learn study skills because there was nothing I had to study for. That sounds nice, until you actually have to work hard at something and haven't built the muscle.
Aug 24 • 19 tweets • 4 min read
Ok. I bite. To the question of why academics in mediocre jobs put out second books that are not good, just done, here's an answer that might be tough to see from within the PhD Most people in "podunk towns in the Midwest for 45K a year", if they are even lucky enough to have gotten that job in the first place and have stuck it through to tenure, will find that tenure brings them: a tiny raise, way more service work.
Jul 26 • 16 tweets • 2 min read
Guys, this new #tradwife trend is dull and depressing. Let's normalize #oldschooltradwife, the way they did it in the Middle Ages New tradwife: has 7 kids

Old tradwife: has 14 kids, is beset by demons, visited by Jesus wearing purple silk, now has regular conversations with God
May 20, 2023 • 20 tweets • 4 min read
This whole thread is worth reading. What I want to press on a bit is this:

Just because a new technology has arrived that disrupts our teaching does not mean the best thing to do is integrate it into our teaching. Let me repeat that in different words for the folks in the back: we do not have to adopt new technologies into our pedagogy just because they're there. We don't. It's a lie that we do.