Hell yeah

Tools use us and construct our being. Even a hammer requires us to mine iron, chop down trees, mill wood, and smelt the ore. Entire worlds come together for the hammer. We do these acts for our tools. And AI shapes our water, electricity, and policies on intellectual property. *We* are the tool.

Blessed

Some much needed nuance around that dumb chart. And “griftastructure” is just… chef’s kiss.

Teen Vogue produced some of the best political reporting in the nation and we’re not even a year into this cursed presidency

"Sensation does not equal causation" and beware of the AI "griftrastructure." New post! www.frank.computer/blog/2025/11...

This will be someone's dream position. Maybe yours?

I've gotten a few new connections/follows from VIS, Smashing Conf, and various talks recently (hello!! ❤️), so I thought I'd share my most-popular blog post (by a large margin): "Stop saying that AI is just a tool and it only matters how it is used."

One of the best resources of our field! I've used it often. And check it: you can even search for which PDFs are accessible too. How awesome is that? We've come leagues and leagues in recent years. I love the VIS community so much 🥹

I'm at VIS! Come say hi. And if you caught the AccessVis workshop, I hope you had a great time and learned a bunch.

Don't miss our @dig.cmu.edu authors and their work at IEEE VIS this week. Visit the link in the post below for details. @frank.computer, @perer.org, @domoritz.de #cmuhcii #ieeevis #VIS2025 #DataVisualization #AccessibleVisualization #a11y #DataViz #DataVis @ieeevis.bsky.social

i should be able to click a button at the beginning of a sports season that says “i’m normal” and i don’t get served any ads for crypto or gambling

I don't understand why so many people are saying "good luck finding a man without a Nazi tattoo!!!" like bro how many of you are there

“Let him among you who is without a Nazi tattoo cast the first stone.” -The Bible

stealing paintings from museums will soon be considered just another tool in the artist's toolbelt

Dismantling the Institutional Review Board (IRB), that oversees all human subjects research, is bad. Really bad.

Take note of all these people turning out for protests in small towns in red states. Remember them the next time you’re inclined to write an area off because “they voted for this.”

Everything is Gamergate. If you do not understand what Gamergate is or how that has not only shaped the internet but our entire current reality. Keep this in mind, and protect yourself accordingly. www.cnn.com/2025/03/23/u...

So, the official White house page is blocked by 259,855 users via lists. In three hours.

To say people make a rational assessment of the threat environment around Covid… is just not true. Most people refuse to talk about or read anything about Covid. Long Covid has surpassed asthma as the most common childhood illness, and it’s rarely spoken of. jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

With the continuous rise of prices for games, systems, and tech, and as companies like Xbox announce further increases for services like Game Pass, some disabled individuals are choosing to forgo AAA gaming altogether. Read my latest Access Granted report here: accessgranted.ghost.io/as-prices-in...

ICYMI – For my first original Access Granted report, I spoke with disabled players unable to afford the continuous rising prices of games, systems, and tech. If these trends continue, they say the disabled community will undoubtably be alienated from gaming. Read more here:

one of my favorite things of all time i think about this often

It is rational to fear what covid does to the body. And this ableist machismo, separating "fear" and rational thinking, isn't helpful here. They aren't dichotomous. It is rational to mask in order to avoid covid, long covid, spreading covid, and causing others to have long covid.

Oh look, a columnist for the NYT telling me that masking in public stems from fear instead of rational assessment of the threat Nothing to see here

Unreasonably excited to present THEORY IS SHAPES at alt.vis this November! Read on to find out what the "BLT Sandwich Theory of Visualization Consumption" (and other shape-based shenanigans) can teach us about theorycrafting in research 🥪🧲🧊♾️

This is incredible, modern day micro-medici over here

I actually enjoy the feeling of thoughts forming in my brain, of working through certain problems, and so on. My reasons for resisting genAI, even after every other ethical and moral conundrum, is selfish. Why would I give what I love doing, like writing fiction and worldbuilding, to a machine?

I’m cool with using LLMs for stuff like “writing regexes” but why would I use them to do things my brain actually likes doing and finds rewarding? why would I outsource eating a really good hamburger to someone else? that’s my fucking hamburger

Learning about Visa Chart Components at #smashingconf - open-source accessible data visualisation web components design.visa.com/data-visuali...

"it's pretty clear that the bluesky team doesn't view their userbase as either their customers or their product – more as a sort of incidental consequence of operating their little proof-of-concept"

happy sunday, remember that you are completely expendable to your employer and that when you die they will forget you ever existed within weeks and easily replace you

Beautiful, short thread by Sawyer (whose work I adore) on why voting simply cannot be the only way forward. Made me think of this: "I researched every Democratic attempt to stop fascism in history. the success rate after fascists were elected was 0%."

But when I go into the booth next month to flip the switch again, the switch that to my eyes has produced no light in many years, do not condescend to lecture the faithless on how it is the only way out of a darkness that is deeper than this country has seen in recent memory.

I do not think it is unreasonable for people to criticize faith in American democratic processes at this moment. I do not think it is at all unreasonable to believe that these processes are not currently helping, nor are they likely to help in a timely fashion - assuming they function at all.

A lot of people don't have faith in this approach and criticize it. Before I post my views, I think it is worth saying that replying to criticism of an exhortation with, "Well, what's your plan?" is a veiled ad hominem; it shifts the rhetorical focus away from the criticism to the critic.

“Either we have copyright law or we don’t. Either plagiarism and the theft of intellectual property are anathema to higher education or they aren’t. We’re either modeling academic honesty and integrity to our students or we aren’t.” —@thetattooedprof.bsky.social www.chronicle.com/article/some... 1/n

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

Since you folks seem to like lengthy threads, let's look at visualizing distributions. I'll visualize one data set 16 ways and give some other examples of each chart type. #dataViz

Like… it's kind of right there, no?

I definitely don’t worship peepee poopoo, but I am a pragmatist about learning how to use peepee poopoo that can’t be unpeed before they poop us.

I am trying so hard not to doompost about academic job hunting... I have to look professional if I want a job but I am also... not feeling great about myself. Terrible spot to be in!! I need to post self-deprecating things so I can free these brain worms!

This is a "repost" from my mostly-offline lab mate, when I was asked "what is 'theory' in HCI?"

i wish i could quote a post *and* the post above it in the same post without relying on taking a screenshot anyway, i hope that someday i can become this powerful

This is such a great excuse for conferences not being accessible. They don't pay anyone to work on accessibility and they make it impossible to get anything done.  they don't see disabled people in their field because we can't attend, so they keep not seeing disabled people in their field. 

I signed up to help a conference locally, volunteering as the accessibility chair... and I don't get tickets to the conference? I literally don't even get a badge? I have to pay to help?? What is academia doing? I am a PhD student who pays for my family's health insurance. I have 0 money.

This short paper by @jonathanzong.com has been brought up in more discussions in my day to day than any other piece. I love it immensely and it's something that anybody who is doing work with people (disabled, marginalized, or not) should at least read and consider.

I like this analogy: the computer interface as the 'theatre of the screen', with an understanding of theatre (like all art) as 'a lie that tells the truth'. www.clunyjournal.com/p/history-of...

I do not want to enable location services. I do not want to create an account. I do not want to sign up for special offers and news about your product. I would like to engage in a simple transaction where I give you money in exchange for a good.

hey @nytimes.com: there is no counterpoint here. There are no credible legal experts who would EVER say that the US military has any right or authority to blow civilian craft out of the Caribbean and kill their crews from afar without any provocation. There is no other side to this question.