I’ll be at @chi.acm.org and @iclr-conf.bsky.social this year. Come and say hi if you’re there! Happy to talk about HCI, AI, visualization, interpretability, and interactive systems.

Scored my first hattrick (of three in a row) at soccer yesterday.

What's up with that font? From the Anthropic Mythos model card PDF.

🌎 🚀 🌖

Happy birthday 🍎

Wait, so they are considering autonomous buses for a route that previously had… checks notes…a train.

You can write your @ieeevis.bsky.social papers in @typst.app (fast, modern, and accessible alternative to LaTeX)! To make it easier, here is a template I helped make typst.app/universe/pac....

You can catch my full, open course on accessibility in visualization here: openvisualizationacademy.org/courses/acce...

Sir Ian McKellen performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More on the Stephen Colbert show. Never have I heard this monologue performed with such a keen sense of prescience. Nor have I ever been in this exact historical moment.TY Sir Ian, for reaching us once again. #Pinks #ProudBlue

YouTube just recommended this, and I can't in good conscience keep it to myself www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVpr...

I embedded a comment section from Bluesky on my blog. Check it out here, including some details on how I did it: micahcantor.com/blog/bluesky...

Okay, I’m convinced. Frying eggs 🍳 in a stainless steel pan but using butter 🧈 instead of oil. Didn’t stick!

I added IPv6 to my home network today. Not really any need but it was interesting to learn about getting a whole address block for myself, ULAs (secondary addresses for local routing), and getting local DNS to work. Timing was good since Unify just added support for ULAs within the last week.

Interesting policy in ghostty. Users cannot create issues. All user requests go into discussions first. github.com/ghostty-org/...

This year's gingerbread is the Vera Rubin Observatory! @vrubinobs.bsky.social

A really fun part of teaching visualization at @cmu.edu and @hcii.cmu.edu is to share the final projects from the class. This time, you can learn about redistricting, livability, drug prices, humanity, keyboards, and commuting. Check out dig.cmu.edu/datavis-fall....

How do I change the properties of a histogram in Excel? I saw it earlier but don't know how to get it back. If I click or double check, I can only change the styling but not the number of bins etc.

Made a site comparing the sizes of living things :) The great Julius Csotonyi spent 5 months painting over 60 illustrations for the site, no ai used > neal.fun/size-of-life/

Here is the HUXt model visualization of all the CMEs currently being tracked. The Sun is at the center. The Earth is the black dot to the right. There are two CME direct hits in the M8.1+M1.1 and M2.4 (assuming the CMEs combine) CME, and there is one glancing blow in the X1.1 CME.

I did not have that in my bingo cards to be honest: bun.com/blog/bun-joi.... I really like Bun so I hope it stays around.

Snowball flight happening right outside my office today.

Why does everyone in the US (or at least South Bay) dress like they are about to go on a hike?

The Vega-Altair team is pleased to announce the release of version 6.0.0. Check out the release at github.com/vega/altair/...

I'll present our work on Embedding Atlas (apple.github.io/embedding-at...) in the @ieeevis.bsky.social session "VIS Short Papers: Explorations in Abstract and Physical Spaces" in Room 1.14 after lunch.

I'm at VIS this week. Come and say hi.

today we landed a @svelte.dev feature i'm pretty stoked about — we call it 'forking', and it lets you run state changes offscreen and later choose whether to commit them (e.g. user hovers on a link, preload data in case they click) - docs svelte.dev/docs/svelte/... - demo svelte.dev/playground/a...

Typst 0.14 adds accessible PDFs so now is really the time to jump on it!

While providing tech support for my FIL: FIL: What's that screen? ME: The terminal. You should never use it. FIL: Never? ME: So you know how I'm allowed to watch you open the electrical panel and swap out breakers, but I'm not allowed to ever open up it myself? FIL: Ah! I understand, thank you.

Before (2012) / After (2025) Rue le Vau, Paris 20. The change here is so radical that perceiving the photos as aligned is difficult (see the orange building and the trees on the left). In 2024, this section was converted into a school street with a bike lane running through the greenery.

Zürich has passed parking reform similar to what Halifax Council has been debating this year. Residents of Zürich will pay parking fees based on the weight of their car. A goals of this reform is to reduce the number of large SUVs in the city and thus use public space more fairly and sustainably.🧵

A huge thank you to co-authors @fredhohman.bsky.social, @domoritz.de, @jeffreybigham.com, @kenholstein.bsky.social, and Mary Beth Kery! This work was done during my summer internship w/ Apple AIML, and I’m thankful to work with this wonderful team :) arxiv.org/abs/2409.18203 #UIST25 talk: Wed 11am!

LLM safety work often reasons over high-level policies (be helpful & polite), but must tackle on-the-ground cases (unsolicited money advice when stocks are mentioned). This can feel like driving on an unfamiliar road guided by a generic driver’s manual instead of a map. We introduce: Policy Maps 🗺️

It fells like too much of US politics depends on an honor system rather than clear separation of power.

🚨#datavis Job alert 🚨 Fancy working with us in London as a researcher using @observablehq.com Plot for accessible #datavis? To support people with language disability in the use of data visualization for everyday decision making. www.citystgeorges.ac.uk/about/jobs/a...

Feels surreal to have professional milestones amidst current events, but I'm sharing for folks who still want to learn about accessibility in visualization. Back in June I spoke at @datavizsociety.bsky.social's Outlier about "softerware" (below) and now our paper has been officially accepted! 🎉🎉

github.com/vega/altair hit 10k ⭐️ on GitHub recently. Congrats to the Altair team and the amazing community.

Did you know your MacBook has a sensor that knows the exact angle of the screen hinge? It’s not exposed as a public API, but I figured out a way to read it and make it sound like an old wooden door.

Please use timeful.app 📆 when getting people's availability. Ty!

🎆 Say hello to Transit 6.0! 🎆 It’s our love letter to public transportation — the brightest, boldest, and best version of ourselves yet 🌟

I used AI to take a bunch of pictures of the movie list on a flight and make me a table with ratings before the flight so I can be strategic about what to watch.

Did something happen?

www.nytimes.com/interactive/... We updated our rent vs. buy calculator.

🚀 We've just open-sourced Embedding Atlas – a tool for exploring large embedding spaces through rich, interactive visualizations 📊.

I'm hiring a researcher in my team at Apple. Please apply at jobs.apple.com/en-us/detail...

The data vis project "Mosaic: An Architecture for Linking Databases and Scalable Interactive Visualizations" received a SIGMOD Best Demo Runner Up award at the ACM SIGMOD/PODS International Conference on Management of Data in Berlin, Germany. Congrats to the Mosaic team on this recognition! 📊🎉

Today we published a technical report on the updated Apple Foundation Language models announced at WWDC. Check it out at machinelearning.apple.com/research/app... (which also links to the updated blog post).

My favorite part is that it lends itself to a really nice implementation. Each sweep shades as it goes, touching each pixel exactly once (twice, with antialiasing), and you can pack it all into a single texture: red/blue=normal vectors for relief shading, green=ambient occlusion, alpha=shadow.

Striking example showing that stacked area charts can be tricky to read.

How do language models track mental states of each character in a story, often referred to as Theory of Mind? We reverse-engineered how LLaMA-3-70B-Instruct handles a belief-tracking task and found something surprising: it uses mechanisms strikingly similar to pointer variables in C programming!

New incredible images from an incredible telescope just dropped.