That's a wrap on #COMPTEXT2026! Huge thanks to lead organiser @chrisguarnold.bsky.social and IDAI/@unibirmingham.bsky.social team, plus all tutors, chairs, discussants & sponsors. Conference dinner at a world-renowned cricket stadium—what a treat. Safe travels home; see you at COMPTEXT 2027!

Trump is so unlucky. Every time he’s trying to win a close election or is bombing in the polls because of his failed policies someone lets off a gun in his vicinity.

Software development in 2026 increasingly feels like giving up control. Move beyond "role-play and pray" with vibe-coding best practices.

Here's a totally harmless hammer to break ChatGPT.

📢Publication alert 📢 LLMs are an awesome technology, but they come with trade-offs! Paul Balluff, @justinho.bsky.social, @seanhp.bsky.social, Alexis Palmer, @lrossi.bsky.social, Irina Shklovski, Chung-hong Chan and I commented on these trade-offs in #commsky research. Out now and open access!

To be critical of the government is the most American thing ever. Dario Amodei, PhD, the CEO of Anthropic has a spine for refusing to let our Mad King use Claude for domestic mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. I just bought a Claude Pro subscription. Fight on scholar. 🎓⚔️

In the latest #aBitOfCCS episode, we dig into research showing that LLMs often deliver only marginal gains at major environmental cost. 🌱🌍 Sean-Kelly Palicki breaks down when simpler methods beat large models—and why a CO₂-adjusted F1 score matters.🌱 Listen here ⤵️ aboutccs.net/abitofccs/

Free Audiobooks!! Good AI ❤️https://marhamilresearch4.blob.core.windows.net/gutenberg-public/Website/index.html

Academic life hack: check which papers AI hallucinated most often and write them 🚀🚀🚀

Speaking of Europe, I've been deGoogling on the grounds of data privacy, personal freedom, and surveillance capitalism. Yeah, it's kind of annoying but it's also pretty great. Here's what started my journey and how you can get started www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_Lx...

📢 New Preprint: "Don’t Look Up: Evaluating the Tradeoff between Performance and Sustainability of LLMs for Text Analysis." Providing guidance for social scientists, we challenge the "bigger is better" narrative, instead encouraging social and environmental responsibility. osf.io/preprints/so...

Germany drops opposition to nuclear power in rapprochement with France Discussion

In case you missed it - last week they had the F1 drivers race giant lego cars for one lap and mayhem ensued. Some of the best racing drivers on the planet giggling like schoolboys as they race (and wreck) the cars 🤣 youtu.be/pdxiNBwxYxU?...

Gossip on the internet, hang out, and let some political party decide what you’re going to do. And the next thing you know, you go, ‘Where did my health care go? Why are we fighting a war over here?’ Because you didn't pay attention. Maybe you should pay attention. www.wired.com/story/cyberp...

Looks like the original artisanal pencil sharpener was David Rees, here's his short film from twelve years ago vimeo.com/60718161

May the 4th be with you! Watch Andor Season 2 ;)

More dumb…

This article is a great reminder to “appreciate” that we’re living in a cyberpunk future. www.noahpinion.blog/p/welcome-to...

Great read about the emergence of a topic that’s becoming increasingly part of popular culture: An AI enabled “afterlife”.

All praise to @seanhp.bsky.social @isaacbravo.bsky.social for producing and presenting this fantastic paper! Check out the results and the R adaptation of CodeCarbon on linktr.ee/comptext25

See you at COMPTEXT 2025 in Vienna! I'll be presenting "Don’t Look Up: Evaluating the Tradeoff between Accuracy and Sustainability of LLMs for Text Analysis"

Things are changing fast. ICA, the largest academic conference for communication researchers, has begun omitting paper titles from acceptance letters to smooth out issues during the travel visa application process. #AcademicFreedon #BandAidSolution

Trump’s former vice-president, Mike Pence, who said in a social media post: “Mr. President, Ukraine did not ‘start’ this war. Russia launched an unprovoked and brutal invasion claiming hundreds of thousands of lives. The Road to Peace must be built on the Truth.” www.theguardian.com/world/2025/f...

I've been writing BLOOD IN THE MACHINE for months, but I was on the fence about going all-in. Recent events have made the call easier. Elon Musk, the Silicon Valley oligarchs and their AI are taking over. I want to do all I can to push back. I hope you'll join me, and I'm asking for your support.

Brazil’s former President Bolsonaro charged over alleged coup that included a plan to poison Lula However, the prosecutor-general perpetuates the narrative that the armed forces had been a 'victim' of the plot, despite the obvious institutional involvement apnews.com/article/bols... #CivMilSky

Let's see how the intrepid Elon inspired team at DOGE - the folks who are currently examining your tax records - are doing! Today they put up their their idea of "open data" which they call a "Wall of Receipts". And look here - two cancelled DEIA contracts for $9,999,999. Wow, they saved $20M! 1/

From a tech perspective, the Groq platform is awesome for trying open models like Deepseek-R1, Mistral and Whisper. It's cheap, easy to access and it's stupid fast. Available via API and chat "playground" from US servers. groq.com/pricing/

South Korea blocks downloads of DeepSeek from local app stores

The bge-m3 word embeddings work well for vector-based multilingual information retrieval. The easiest ways to implement this would be to use a vector database like Weaviate or Milvus. You can also use this to power a multilingual LLM RAG application using Ollama. huggingface.co/BAAI/bge-m3

“However, while television is still bound to regulations that require a modicum of truthful content, social media is a battleground of facts, lies, and deception, where governments, journalists, law enforcement, and activists are on an uneven playing field.”

There is increasing evidence that the world has warmed faster over the past 15 years than it has since the 1970s. Surface records, ocean heat content, and the Earth's energy imbalance all support an acceleration of warming, as I argue in today's @nytimes.com: www.nytimes.com/2023/10/13/o...

What is the best sampling approach for multilingual texts? In our new paper in Computational Communication Research, we (Sean-Kelly Palicki, Wouter van Atteveldt, Alice Beazer, & Isaac Bravo) find that experts know best www.aup-online.com/content/jour...   commsky polcomm polisky PolDataSky

Don’t hold your breath for the Facebook Class Action Lawsuit. Looks like we can expect a whopping 30 bucks. thehill.com/homenews/nex...

www.theatlantic.com/books/archiv... The clockwork bird can sing, but only the song with which it has been programmed. It can’t improvise. It can’t riff. It can’t surprise.

Good AI. https://huggingface.co/bigscience/bloom

I’ve been a machine learning practitioner for over 10 years. I’ve always been motivated to automate repetitive tasks and enable new opportunities for people to do creative and meaningful work. The AI trend of scraping and training on copyrighted material to replace creative work is wrong.

A further peek inside the AI ‘black box’: Transformers using Attention. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4Bdc55j80l8&t=11s&pp=ygUtUGFwZXJzIGluIDIgbWludXRlcyBhdHRlbnRpb24gaXMgYWxsIHlvdSBuZWVk

Peek inside the AI ‘black box’ with friendly animations: What are Neural Networks? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk

You can now prevent OpenAI from scraping your websites using robots.txt https://searchengineland.com/gptbot-openais-new-web-crawler-430360

Every reported mistaken arrest using facial recognition, person has been Black (businessinsider.com) Main Link | HN Post

I started reading “More than a Glitch” and became aware of the infamous racist soap dispenser. https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/automatic-soap-dispenser-sparks-racism-outrage-after-footage-shows-it-doesn-t-work-for-darkskinned-people-a3615096.html

Distinguished AI professor in Munich describes Large Language Models (GPT-4) as dark magic. Stocks boom as companies discover Faust.

5/5 stars for the Barbie movie!

I find utopian science fiction (which, despite the conflicts in Star Trek I’d still say is more utopian than not) to be way more fascinating than dystopian. It can be easy to whip up stories of a bad future. It takes real imagination & effort to imagine how an advanced ethical society could succeed

The Scrum framework fits well for computational social science research projects. Daily 15 min stand-ups, 'product' and sprint backlogs for tasks, and a cross-functional team increases productivity and keeps morale high! https://www.scrum.org/resources?field_resource_tags_target_id=All&type=297

Spent two weeks at the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science (SICSS) at LMU Munich. All materials are open-source https://github.com/compsocialscience/summer-institute/tree/master/2023/munich/materials

After the Meta 2020 US Elections Research Partnership, What’s Next for Social Media Research? To enable more independent research, Congress must pass the Platform Accountability & Transparency Act, says Laura Edelson:

Not sure if I'm early or late to this party, but hello Bluesky people!