"Right now, in some underfunded lab, a scientist is chasing a question that sounds pointless, and a team somewhere else is a decade into a problem that may take another decade to crack... If we stop making that bet, we will pay for it in cures no one will know to miss."

On Juneteenth, we honor the generations of Black New Yorkers whose struggle and determination brought us closer to justice. At Foley Square, Lorenzo Pace's sculpture stands as a powerful tribute to that legacy.

In the centre of Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, stands a statue of Patrice Lumumba. He was thirty-five when he became the first prime minister of an independent Congo, in June 1960.

Anthropic just shut access to Fable & Mythos, their most powerful models. I wrote up what happened + the policy and psychodrama behind it (with all the links & receipts) here — the thread below is the TL;DR 🧵 blog.geomblog.org/2026/06/the-...

This is very kind, and I only saw it six days after it was posted. When I write things down or give non-research talks, it feels like shouting into the void. I have no idea if anyone hears it, cares or values any of it. So comments like this are genuinely surprising and inspiring

I don’t know why we don’t talk about this more. But I’m glad it resonated; and good luck with the final stretch

Just read through this blogpost "Contextualising Cryptography" by @senykamara.com. It hits some of the issues I have been facing in choosing the right problems for my research, even before starting my phd (advisor reveal post coming up soon). senykamara.substack.com/p/contextual...

Agents prioritize task completion rather than whether they should act. This is a consequence of how they are trained. My student @victorojewale.bsky.social has been investigating this and just wrote a (prize winning) paper arguing why (and how) we need a notion of "informed abstention". Link below.

WATCH: Last night I had the chance to sit down for an extended conversation with Jon Stewart to talk about the state of voting rights & democracy in this country. Class was very much in session! Thank you @thedailyshow youtu.be/SCse1FFEKLM

Join us! simons.berkeley.edu/workshops/go...

Universities are amazing places. I can walk a few blocks from my office and spend the morning hearing @biella.bsky.social and @steveklabnik.com back-to-back at a humanities workshop about technology at a humanities workshop about technology. humanities.brown.edu/events/AILab...

“Silicon Valley would not exist without [taxpayer-] funded research.” www.thenation.com/article/soci...

Michael Rabin just died. His contributions to theoretical CS are absolutely incredible (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael...). The Miller-Rabin primality test was the best method I knew for primality testing all the way upto 2002 when Agrawal, Kayal, and Saxena finally proved that PRIMES is in P.

Yay, SIGMOD just published the paper I wrote with @muratdemirbas.bsky.social and Lingzhi Deng, it's about strengthening Raft's consistency and time-to-recovery lnkd.in/ef6qUJzw

My department is looking to hire a professor of practice in CS, with a focus on AI. Job posting below. If you have questions I'll do my best to answer them, else find someone who can! We are in Providence, easy commute access from Boston. jobs.chronicle.com/job/37970844...

I tend to get dogpiled every time I say this but: as someone *who likes bluesky and benefits from being here* we have a problem. The network is shrinking, not growing. It's shrinking a lot: only about 1.1m people a day even like a post. This time last year it was 1.6m.

Strongly recommend people try this. It's not only instructive, it's also fun.

While Washington wages war on science, NASA just sent humans to the Moon's vicinity for the first time since 1972. Bravo #TeamNASA — proof that public science, when it's funded and trusted, still does extraordinary things.

What's an AI time horizon, how is it measured, and how fast is it growing? emptysqua.re/blog/review-...

Last second but the deadline to apply for the Community Privacy Residency in Germany is tomorrow. This is a 3-week residency for researchers, builders & organizers to co-design open-source tools for communities w/ a focus on countersurveillance & community infrastructure community-privacy.github.io

🔥 🌐 Workshop announcement: 🌐🔥 AI and the political economy of information filtering May 25-27, 2026 Workshop website: maxkasy.github.io/home/informa... Registration: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

I'm glad someone is calling out this trend. It's particularly pernicious in tech.

A student once emailed me to say they weren't sure they could justify staying in academia unless they knew they were providing a meaningful service. That email led to a workshop, a community and this post about why so many of us feel a malaise they can't name open.substack.com/pub/senykama...

This is very grim “This erodes roughly one-fifth of the average worldwide decline in maternal mortality achieved since 1985.”

OK, I'm obsessed with this study in @science.org It took Reddit "Am I The Asshole" posts & asked LLMs if the poster was the asshole. Aaand (surprise) AI was more likely to tell people they were NOT the asshole ... even when humans said yeah YTA 🧪 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Excited to be co-chairing RAID 2026 (raid2026.org) alongside Tiffany Bao this year! Looking for a security venue to submit your research? The deadline is just around the corner—April 16, 2026. CFP: raid2026.org/call.html Looking forward to seeing you in Lancaster this October (11–14)!

I’ve had a longstanding policy of always doing whatever @friedler.net says and it hasn’t led be astray yet. So goes for these recommendations. CC: Congress

New for @undark.org On: "The Birthday Paradox," the transatlantic slave trade, ancestral bonds, and the hidden power of statistics. "Family is family, whatever our genetic relationship. Impressively, the birthday paradox study captures this possibility." undark.org/2026/02/27/o...

Super excitedly looking forward to this workshop on Software, Community, Territory at Brown's humanities center @cogutinstitute.bsky.social : @biella.bsky.social , @steveklabnik.com , @ohrg.org , and all kinds of other amazing people. humanities.brown.edu/events/AILab...

NEW with @lhn.bsky.social: The US claims to have struck more than 9,000 sites in Iran, but the war is taking place in an information void. Iranian volunteers are mapping confirmed strikes and warning citizens about potential strike targets, as the country enters its 26th day without the internet

A short little “did you know” fun historical fact on West African griots. #TAIKinspires #DidYouKnow #AfricanHistory #Griot #OralTradition #WestAfrica #AfricanCulture #UntoldStories #Storytelling #CulturalHeritage #IndigenousKnowledge #HistoryMatters

I wrote about the ICML LLM witch hunt and why it's paradigmatic of the absurd bureaucratic scaling of peer review.

If you're a tech worker who's interested in reading Marx's Capital with other tech workers, there's a free online course that's starting later this month cftw.ohrg.org

What an inspiration. Her appointment as Brown University president in 2000 was a landmark moment

Them: "Instagram is rolling out end-to-end encryption via the Signal protocol. Isn't it great!!" Me: "We'll see…" *Meta deeply buries E2E encryption in Instagram as an opt-in choice.* *2+ years pass* *Meta kills encrypted Instagram DMs* Scoop by @lhn.bsky.social

Press release for our new paper! “…people across the world created inclusive political systems, even under difficult conditions…An understanding of the hallmarks of autocracy and democracy can help identify threats and pump the brakes on burgeoning totalitarian regimes.” phys.org/news/2026-03...

A scientist from Zambia who loves — LOVES! — chemistry runs a lab in South Africa that is being hailed for "extraordinary" work. n.pr/4spvLU2

Statistical Rethinking 2026 is done: 20 new lectures emphasizing logical and critical statistical workflow, from basics of probability theory to causal inference to reliable computation to sensitivity. It's all free, made just for you. Lecture list and links: github.com/rmcelreath/s...

The user is going to download WhatsApp and get whatever defaults or “strongly recommended and nudged” opt-ins they get. And security folks who know better will say things like “the user chose a threat model” while five years of backed-up data goes into the ingestion pipeline.

People are acting like AI agents + TEEs in E2E messengers. is a privacy feature. They’re out of their mind. TEEs process data and extract valuable “meaning.” What do you think Meta is going to do with all that valuable extracted data? Keep it locked up on device? Are you joking?!

The deadline for Brown AI Policy Summer School is coming up soon: March 27!

It's been a journey of nearly 3 years, but I'm very excited to announce the CNTR AISLE Portal! 🚀 cntr-aisle.org It’s a new way to review and evaluate the 1,000+ AI bills introduced in the U.S. over the last three years. Check out the Bill Library and our Profiles#AIPolicy #OpenData

Great resource for anyone engaged or interested in US AI policy and governance from @geomblog.bsky.social and his team www.brown.edu/news/2026-03...

For people who love an obscure museum, I commend the Museum of Anaesthesia in London. It's tiny, very nerdy, evinces great professional pride, and run by wonderful folks. Interestingly, one of the books on the museum reading shelf was "Fear". anaesthetists.org/Home/Heritag...

🧵 Trump administration AI policy is widely described as deregulatory. This description is misleading. What's happening is not the absence of governance but its rearrangement--intensive state intervention operating through mechanisms we don't typically call regulation. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

This was an incredible time for Bay Area hip hop. Solesides/Quannum (Blackaliscious, Lyrics Born, DJ Shadow and Lateef) were big then too. And DJ Icewater was putting out the best mixtapes

I think the problem with STEM education isn't only what it leaves out but what it trains us *not* to see. Some thoughts on why the humanities might be the missing counterweight. senykamara.substack.com/publish/post...

This was a blast, and fun to emcee. Thanks, @browndailyherald.bsky.social, for a great article on our Spotlights event! www.browndailyherald.com/article/2026...

What if we could extract the world model that television installs in its viewers? Some thoughts about media, world models and culture. open.substack.com/pub/senykama...

Can't believe we have survived an academic year: cntr.brown.edu/news/2025-04...