Didn’t expect 100 gecs to make it into my dissertation but here we are

Jesus Christ: VHB is partnering with marta to evaluate how autonomous cars could "provide new mobility to communities" in South Metro Atlanta, including Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport and the surrounding area. Atlanta politicians would do anything but expand rail transit:

How are professional visual artists dealing with generative AI in the workplace? In our #CHI2026 poster, @hhj14.bsky.social, @willie-agnew.bsky.social and I share results from a survey of 378 verified professional visual artists 🧵 Preprint here: arxiv.org/abs/2603.04537

Excited to be presenting "How Professional Visual Artists are Negotiating Generative AI in the Workplace" as a poster at CHI! We surveyed 378 visual artists. They *hate* generative AI (92% strong dislike, 99% dislike), but are facing pressure from bosses to use it. arxiv.org/pdf/2603.04537

The NSF 2027 budget has noted that they will close out the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Science Program (SBE). This is not a good thing. nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/FY-202...

Bellingcat found 31 posts with AI-generated imagery shared on social media by India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Assam and West Bengal in December that appeared to meet the United Nations’ definition of hate speech. www.bellingcat.com/news/2026/03...

When lawmakers and advocacy groups frame queer existence itself as a threat to young people, age-verification laws become ideological enforcement instead of regulatory policy. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...

This is absurd: after plans with @culdesac.bsky.social (which is building out a car-free neighborhood in Tempe, Arizona) fell through, Atlanta BeltLine officials are now planning to build only 625 residential units but 1,711 parking spaces at Murphy Crossing next to the BeltLine and marta heavy rail

The people who cancelled Jimmy Kimmel after Charlie Kirk's assassination will now control television stations that reach 80% of Americans, twice that what was legally allowed before Trump's takeover. The state capture of network television is almost complete.

Love is Blind is like an ethnography of straight culture

This is so so upsetting. So Grammerly is violating the memory of bell hooks AND making AI versions of the rest of us before we're even dead. Someone tell me who to sue, not even joking.

New for @theverge.com: i wrote about how Kansas' trans ID law and the "age verification" systems popping up everywhere tie into larger efforts to force trans people to out themselves both IRL and online

🎨💻 What is a “high-quality” or “aesthetic” image according to generative AI developers? Happy to share that our investigation of the LAION-Aesthetics Predictor has been accepted at #FAccT2026! 🧵 (1/5) Take a look at a preprint here: arxiv.org/abs/2601.09896

Bump: Please join our #CHI2026 workshop on ⭐ Participation, Procurement, and Proof of Impact in Public Sector AI Innovation ⭐! Join via Google Form (lnkd.in/enwfV3sp) 𝘰𝘳 email short SoI to [email protected] by 𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡 14 𝐀𝐨𝐄. 🏛️ 👥 Learn more: lnkd.in/ePEfZxyQ DM me for any questions!

Even if the destruction somehow stopped today, it will take years to rebuild.

Now in the brief window of time between US and European daylight savings that ruins my calendar every year

Fell really badly on a run right when I moved to Pittsburgh in 2021. Now right at the end of my PhD, I’ve fallen again on the terrible sidewalks 😭

"Stripping anonymity from the internet would constitute one of the most sweeping rollbacks of civil rights in recent history. It would allow for unprecedented levels of mass surveillance and censorship, endangering the most marginalized members of society."

ALPRs are “incredibly ripe for abuse,” EFF’s @mguariglia.bsky.social told @SFstandard.com. “No matter how many legal or bureaucratic guardrails you put on those searches, officers are going to find a way to use it for their own personal reasons.” sfstandard.com/2026/02/27/...

Having collaborated on 2 of the FAccT papers and 1 of the CHI posters I can attest to how much Willie uplifts more junior scholars 👇🏻

New — I spoke to eight trans people in Kansas about the new state law that invalidated their driver’s licenses overnight, what’s it’s like to live there right now, plus details of two DMV emails exclusively obtained by The Handbasket that shed light on the law’s chaotic and cruel rollout:

So tired of non-sensical AI integration. I don't need to "refine" the text on my slides, but I *do* need to be able to see what I'm writing behind this uncontrollable AI pop-up.

Don't be fooled by this bill's name-- this is a book banning bill that will exclude LGBTQ books from all public schools NATIONWIDE. Call your congresspeople and tell them to VOTE NO on this nakedly bigoted book banning bullshit. www.congress.gov/bill/119th-c...

The new American Football single sounds like a bad Mountain Goats B-side

Underscores how deeply unserious many so-called AI alignment “experts” are

OpenAI is a menace. Two recent stories make that clearer than ever. One day you have Sam Altman denigrating humanity to defend AI. The next, WSJ reveals OpenAI could have alerted Canadian police of a potential mass shooter, but refused pressure from employees. That person went on to kill 8 people.

Oops. Turns out Persona, Discord’s age-verification service, was secretly screening selfies against government watchlists AND accessible by the feds. It's backed by Peter Thiel. “The state wants to see everything. The corporations want to see everything. And they've learned to work together.”

EFF, CJJ, and IPVM have teamed up on a resource for journalists looking to better cover the growing police surveillance technology industry. www.eff.org/document/se...

Both this year and last I've been really impressed by the quality and consistency of reviews at FAccT relative to more HCI-focused venues S/o to all the ACs who make this possible

in america, if you go over your 3 minute allotment to speak, men with guns come to take you away.

Our Age Verification Resource Hub is the one-stop shop to answer all of your questions about online AV mandates. What’s at stake for users? How do we push back? What even IS age verification, anyway? Visit www.eff.org/age now to explore our resources and join the fight to protect the internet.

Someone has sure already made this observation but the fact they can convert all those empty warehouses into prison camps means they could have converted them into housing, community centers, job training centers or, hell, libraries or schools all along. It’s always a matter of will not resources.

“The co-founder of Palestine Action has won a legal challenge to the home secretary’s decision to ban the group under anti-terrorism laws.” Excellent news. The British government’s continued attacks on the right to protest, especially on those who speak out against genocide, must be challenged.

Spike Lee’s cameo at the end of the Oakley Super Bowl ad saying “Hey Meta film this in slo-mo” really underscored that the main use case for these “smart” glasses is men filming people without their knowledge

“The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill recently rolled out a new policy that permits university officials to record classes without notifying the instructor. It’s a practice administrators have used in the past to investigate professors but have now formalized in writing.”

Friends from Minneapolis reporting to me that things are at the point where folks are being hidden in other people's houses and we are in the "again" part of "never again" which the "never" was supposed to preclude

R1: No we're not hiring on the tenure track because our peers aren't hiring on the tenure track R1: Our peers aren't hiring on the tenure track because we aren't hiring on the tenure track R1: wtf our grad students aren't getting hired on the tenure track R1: No one could know how this happened

While this absolutely sucks, we are going to see a lot more places implementing universal global age verification over this next year, because the number of states and countries legally requiring it has gotten to the point no one can keep up anymore.

i wrote about the pup-opticon

FAMU can't use the word Black on anything posted around campus related to Black History Month, to stay in compliance with Florida state laws against DEI. Black students can't use the word Black at their Historically Black College during Black History Month.

Many of my science colleagues are not speaking out-I suspect due to the fear Phil notes, that they'll targeted for loss of funding. I hope they read this account of what happened at a faculty meeting at Frankfurt University in 1933 as the Nazi's took control 🧪 www.facinghistory.org/resource-lib...

Bad design makes work worse Pittsburgh airport has these new fancy bag scanners but they work so poorly each station has a stick they use to manually fish the trays through the machine or fish out items that fall off trays

NEW: Here's my report on Texas A&M ending its gender studies program as part of its ongoing crackdown of teaching LGBTQ topics in the classroom (i also do not use the loaded phrase 'gender ideology' passively) www.chron.com/culture/arti...

Starting February 2, many people connecting from the UK will not be able to access the porn site and many others.

I interviewed two of the mods of r/Minneapolis about their tireless work this month: “I just wanted a local subreddit to know what was happening in my city, and now all of a sudden, we’ve turned into this de facto hub of information for basically how to fight fascism.” www.wired.com/story/reddit...

We need to document how this ownership change shifts the content. Would love to see scientists studying and reporting on this as it happens, as well as everyday people documenting the changes in their feeds with TikTok diaries or something similar. I’ll assume we won’t have much if any API access.

This must be weird news to see if you’re one of the literally hundreds or even thousands of university administrators who preemptively censored faculty, scrubbed websites, changed the names of centers, etc.

The scale and speed of state censorship of campus really is amazing. More than half of America's college students attend institutions in states that have passed laws censoring higher education since 2021. From @penamerica.bsky.social pen.org/report/ameri...

New: Grok is generating far more graphic sexual content than on X. Grok’s image generator, Imagine, has been used to create explicit sexual videos of celebrities and violent sexual videos, a review of public posts shows. 70 Imagine URLs appearing to depict minors were sent to regulators today