Halfway through the day, the #RecSys2025 doctoral symposium is going well. Always fun to see what the next generation is working on.

Get it while it's hot! The recording of this lecture is now available on my web site: md.ekstrandom.net/talks/2025/v...

Technologically advance a band: The Jesus and Mary High-Tension Cable

Technologically advanced a band: Phaser Beam For My Valentine

Technologically advance a band: REO Speedtrain

Get it while it's hot! The recording of this lecture is now available on my web site: md.ekstrandom.net/talks/2025/v...

You guys, so many Romance girlies are reading "On Tyranny" that they've broken the Goodreads recommendations algorithm. 10/10; no notes. #romancelandia

looking into things for… reasons… and it looks like, if I wanted to self-host video-on-demand with current-gen codecs and adaptive streaming quality, I need to ship HEVC HLS for iOS Safari, AV1 WebM DASH for everything else, and an H264 and/or VP9 fallback? uggh?

Again Bouie from the top rope

Yep. apple.news/ATFJUEDxITbu...

Yes Indya. Immediately putting this into a future slide

A "fun" issue my professional communities are dealing with recently is where to hold conferences, if non-US people can't safely enter the US, and foreigners in the US can't safely leave it. There is no good answer, and the equilibrium is having fewer foreigners AND conferences in the US.

As usual with this issue, Harris is calling for a compromise that already exists. Every sporting body has standards for how long athletes must be on hormones before they can compete as women. The problem isn’t that we’re ignoring ‘reasonable concerns,’ the problem is that republicans are lying.

If you're in Vienna, and are wondering what Victorian romance, Ukrainian progressive metalcore, library science, Brazil (1985), the Pope, and more have to do with ethical, human-driven information access, and whether we should put LLMs into everything, come join us tomorrow evening!

one-inflated models are a thing, right?

new double feature for the schedule: KPop Demon Hunters (2025) and Sinners (2025).

I tend to watch things late and finally watched Sinners, which @mpopov.com suggested to fill this precise niche, and what a movie. I am in awe. It's also interesting that this year brought us two amazing movies on the demon-hunting and demon-summoning powers of music in completely different genres.

Hello Vienna!

<opens Dante> ahh, yes, the 0.5th circle of Hell, EWR Terminal B.

been a minute, mr. milchick. you are most definitely not a shambolic rube. that emmy is so well deserved!

I’ve also mentored for McNair. Such a valuable program.

The 2025 ACM Conference on Recommender Systems is around the corner. This is your last chance to register for the Standard fee! Join the largest community of recommender system researchers this year in Prague, Czech Republic. Register for #RecSys2025 via the link in the reply 👇

TIL that the Improvised Shakespeare Company is in town while I am at RecSys, a little sad to miss it.

i have said this before but when “getting rid of race in admissions” for the administration means “you can’t even try to reach out to underrepresented communities and encourage them to apply and if you do it is illegal discrimination against white people” then the actual goal here is segregation

“for the crime of failing to praise His Majesty forcefully enough” youtu.be/cyOpoQBEg1A

spent an hour or so building a title slide, that's the most important of the talk, right?

🔥 "The United States is now shooting itself in the foot with foolishness."

reposting with alt text because this feels incredibly significant. the right-wing disinfo machine means a lot of the people grieving Charlie Kirk never heard any of the things he said that would have tarnished his brand as Guy Who Just Wants to Have Dialogue Across the Aisle

Every pundit article: BLUESKY IS A HOTBED OF RADICALIZATION Majority of posts in my feed: Check out this cool bug/bird/random historical personage I found! Small but vivid minority of posts: Do you think Gritty and Alf are in a polycule or nah?

I think the disconnect we’re seeing online is between pundits who are imagining a Charlie Kirk in their heads and professors who have lived for a decade with the (often literal) targets he and his anti-free speech organization placed on their backs.

Last four hours!

accidentally almost searched Instacart for “kotor city pizza”. Does it get delivered by swoop?

Today on New Living Internet Translations: Do not post in anger, do not get mired in a flamewar because you’re mad online. If a comment is in your cause’s favor, then post it; if it’s not then for FFS stop. Anger can be replaced by cat pics, the maddest […] [Original post on infosec.exchange]

Show me any other industry that not just tolerates but invites is most virulent critics to its workplace, often paying hundreds of thousands to cover security costs. The Free Press does not want free speech. They want to control campus speech. In this, they are no different from Trump.

KPop Demon Hunters is Bards Vs. Warlocks: The Musical. tell me i'm wrong…

👇

TIL about DuckDB's time_bucket function and I am unreasonably happy about it.

time to turn off the bad screen

Shout out to everyone only now learning that "Albert Einstein was reclusive at the end of his career, shunning public engagements." Really meant, "For the last *20 years* of his career, Einstein opposed US racism by only speaking publicly at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).

Looking forward to this!!

The preprint for our opinions piece on a reimagined research agenda for #recsys is out. Happy to have had the best co-authors, @drchole.bsky.social and @md.ekstrandom.net #recsys2025 #beyond2025

Q. Who aligns the aligners? A. alignmentalignment.ai Today I’m humbled to announce an epoch-defining event: the launch of the 𝗖𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗔𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝗔𝗜 𝗔𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗖𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀.

Very glad to see that someone is doing the important work of aligning AI alignment. alignmentalignment.ai

When you publish a website that posts the names and photos of scholars who have written or said things you disagree with and encourage people to surveil and harass them, you are not, in fact, a “free speech” organization.

I feel like I am taking crazy pills. Charlie Kirk’s ultimate goal, which he said time and time again, would have been the suppression, through threat of violence and the use of state power, of the rights of those he disagreed with, including freedom of expression. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/o...

last night my bf was listening to me beat myself up and he was like “there are no awards for hating yourself! no one is going to give you a plaque for constantly ruminating on all the things you’ve ever done wrong! it serves no purpose in your life! doesn’t make you a better person either!”

Arnold: "Call your parents." "Hello?" "What is the optimal diet for a rabbit?" "As many carrots, bananas, and raisins as they want to eat." "Your parents are dead."

‘The regents "will not tolerate actions that damage the reputation of our institutions,"’, as they torch the reputation of their institution. Big confused hot dog man energy.

One of the points of confusion that I am seeing in the Anthropic AI case is that people are confusing statutory damages with damages in general, so here's a brief explainer on what is meant by statutory damages.

shut up and take my money.