I'm noticing a sharp increase in mis-parsed titles in google scholar alerts. Is Google really starting to vibe code non-essential products? 😂

It was a pleasure to speak at NetSci 2026 and to celebrate 20 years of the NetSci community! Here are my NetSci 2026 keynote talk slides: yyahn.com/talks/netsci...

New episode of my 5.0 star rated podcast Too Lazy to Read the Paper is up. This ep is called "Too Lazy to use Claude Code for Research", with awesome guest @yyahn.bsky.social We talk about agentic coding: practicalities, benefits, perils. The whole package. www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jo9...

“Viable alternatives to driving” is pretty much the only thing we need to talk about if we are serious about reducing traffic. And massive progress on that can be made if we just forego one or two unnecessary highway projects.

This paper looks cool: arxiv.org/abs/2605.23901 "We propose the Shannon Scaling Law, a unified theoretical framework that models LLM training as information transmission over a noisy channel ... The Shannon Scaling Law consistently outperforms classical scaling laws ..."

Sutton's "Bitter Lesson" keeps showing up in new corners. Latest example on data filtering for pretraining: arxiv.org/abs/2605.19407 "... with enough compute, the best data filter is no data filter." -- Btw, Welch Labs has a nice video on the "bitter lesson": www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hcs...

A knee-jerk reaction to an outbreak far away may be "close the borders so it doesn’t get here.” But (network) epidemiology taught us that once a pathogen spreads through the airline network at scale, we can't really "close the border." The best strategy is early intervention at the source.

"Developers have reduced height of proposed student housing building on West Main." - communityengagement.substack.com/p/week-ahead... The sound of our city becoming less affordable than it could be.

New paper from @aial.ie! @harshp.com, Dick Blankvoort, Adel Shaaban, @sashamtl.bsky.social & me We analysed 6 GenAI ToS--finding missing info, major power imbalances & user obligations that are impossible to meet without violating the terms arxiv.org/abs/2603.18964 & aial.ie/research/ter... 1/

My piece with @ajvicens.bsky.social on how hundreds of Americans were fired or otherwise punished following the killing of right wing influencer Charlie Kirk is part of a package that has been recognized with the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting: www.reuters.com/investigatio...

It’s Bike Month!! Check out bikecville.com to learn about a whole bunch of events happening in May in our area to support biking. And let’s work to make it so that every month is bike month in the Charlottesville area!

I wish planning commissioners would stop saying "i support affordable housing, just not here/this way/now." You don't support affordable housing! You support hypothetical housing! I'm hopping mad after this meeting.

More details on the firing of the National Science Board. The NSF now has no director, deputy director, or board. They have issued almost no new awards in 2026. The plan appears to be to completely destroyed the agency. The details are horrifying and have Russ Vought written all over them.

Last Friday, Trump fired the National Science Board. The NSB is made up of distinguished scientists whose job is to oversee the National Science Foundation, setting research priorities by thinking beyond election cycles. It was designed to be independent. We don't know what this means, but it's bad.

We've written about how social media companies and other technology firms manipulate the scientific record in their favor. In our revisions, we will need to address how they have captured the state department to literally prevent researchers who criticize them FROM EVEN ENTERING THE COUNTRY.

www.wired.com/story/mozill... Note: Firefox has lots of code in Rust, a much safer language (vs. other browsers). "New model finding security bugs" may stabilize somewhat? But I'm not really sure whether that will actually be the case. We may have to be extra vigilant in the near future.

It’s mind-boggling how easily $24M can be committed to one small piece of highway infrastructure while safe-streets projects are treated like luxuries. With $24M, a city could make safety improvements on roughly 50 corridors, assuming about $500k per corridor, completely transforming the city.

Albemarle & VDOT are pushing through a highway widening. And they can't even point to congestion to justify it. The vote is 4pm today at MPO Policy: ca-mpo.org/event/mpo-po... Expect VDOT to break its longstanding practice of not casting a tiebreaking vote in order to force this through.

Curious what people are thinking about this tool.

What are the worst ethical disasters in NLP history? (I'm teaching "ethics of NLP" tomorrow and history is good for teaching this topic.) Most are data breaches/releases (AOL search logs, OKCupid profiles, Finnish therapy records...) but what others? I'll put some other examples in thread --> 1/n

I'll be at #ICML2026 on July 10-11 in Seoul to speak at the Workshop on Culture x AI: Evaluating AI as a Cultural Technology. The workshop is currently accepting submissions, with humanities, ML, HCI, and social/cognitive sciences all welcome. Submit papers by May 1! Join us in Seoul! 🇰🇷

All federal wind power R&D at the Department of Energy is $0.137 billion. So the government is paying 7x the amount it spends on all wind power R&D just for a fee to kill one wind project. Seems bad.

It's easy to make fun of this, but I believe this IS an impressive demo of how far humanoid technology progressed. This is a massive power output sustained for ~1hr. I believe this requires not only superb control system, but also very high energy density (battery tech), heat management, etc.

I believe this (30 vehicles per 15 sec) roughly corresponds to 3-5 lanes of car traffic that each intersection can handle. And that's US Route 29 around Charlottesville right there.

China's electrification bet is paying off. Electricity now accounts for 30% of its energy consumption - 50% higher than the US or Europe. With 1/3 of global renewable energy capacity already installed, China is structurally more insulated from rising oil prices than most Western economies.

Thrilled to announce CS2Nordics: the First Nordic Conference on Computational Social Science. Copenhagen, September 21-22, 2026. We invite all CSS researchers in the Nordics as well as in the international research community to submit 2-page abstracts by June 19: nosocss.org/conference.h....

This is horrific. A U.S. citizen describes the facility in Arizona that her husband was brought to while he waited to be put on a deportation flight. Dozens of people were crammed into tiny cells, there was a "chain of people vomiting" from filthy toilets, no medical care, and only one meal per day.

Inspired by this video youtu.be/etwt75kYYhk I thought I'd explore some of the statistics around car access and deprivation with some #datavis and analysis. Usefully, the 2021 Census in the UK asked questions around car ownership as well as many aspects of 'deprivation'. So here is 📊 🧵... [1/8]

More fossil fuel infrastructure in Charlottesville. communityengagement.substack.com/p/april-14-2... When do we say we just have enough gas stations??

A fully packed cafe with three bikes locked in whatever metal rods available, empty car parking slots (no one drove). I’m not entirely sure whether this is a smart business decision… 👀

I briefly wrote about the false choice between 'safety' and 'volume' and the self-fulfilling prophecy of traffic projection. Safer streets can move much higher "people-traffic" volume; we will get the traffic that we design for. yyahn.com/wiki/blog/20...

We hope you can make it to Carver Rec Center Monday (tomorrow!) from 5:30-7:30pm to learn more about possible improvements to Rose Hill Dr and the city’s broader transportation planning efforts. More info here: connect.charlottesville.gov/RoseHillRest...

Car-dependent places force residents to spend so much more money than necessary. $775/month is just the payment. You need to add insurance, repairs, depreciation, and parking, and the true cost of owning a car easily approaches or exceeds a million dollars over a lifetime. yyahn.com/wiki/Cost-of...

No shade to the OP for admitting this, but it shocks me that people my age don’t know this. You fundamentally cannot understand how the world functions, how power works, if you don’t know history.

i am willing to be persuaded otherwise but it doesn’t seem to make logical sense that a large influx new student housing would lead landlords to raise prices rather than lower them. www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2026...

"To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago." If you think it is necessary to be on Twitter to communicate your fact-based worldview, the reality is that worldview is being smothered.

Our PhD student Kennedy Orwa, who studies applications of AI to health care, was hastily deported today to Kenya along with his 13-year-old son without opportunity to speak to legal counsel. King 5 reports that he held a valid visa that was rescinded without explanation.

The rumored Mythos model is coming, and things are getting scarier. Still, I'm glad Anthropic is doing this, at least.

So many people online right now

Charlottesville is getting an urban grocery store. I hope they prioritize ample bike parking instead of spending a lot of money on encouraging driving and increasing traffic. Urban stores can never outpark Costco. yyahn.com/wiki/Bike-parking-at-urban-grocery-stores/ buttondown.com/bikeshed/arc...

Check out Seen2Scene — training generative models on real-world, partial 3D scans made simple. Great work by Quan Meng! 🚀

Super excited to have this paper out! Check out this thread if you are curious about disruptive science and “twin papers” with simultaneously discoveries! 🧪

The Higgs mechanism was proposed in 1964 by three independent teams. But here is the puzzle🤔: the "disruption index" says Higgs's paper is among the least disruptive ever. So what is going on? In our new paper, just out in #ScienceAdvances, we take up this puzzle: doi.org/10.1126/scia... 👇 1/7

The City of Charlottesville’s E-Bike Grant Program is open again for a new voucher lottery! connect.charlottesville.gov/charlottesvi...

So, basically, we're spending almost $1M to maintain downtown *pedestrian* mall less safe and less friendly to pedestrians so that a handful of drivers can cut through faster.

Why do local businesses have a *single* parking spot where you can have 10 instead?

One more week for abstract submissions to ICSSI 2026, the International Conference on the Science of Science & Innovation! icssi.org/guidelines Boulder, CO this June 29 to July 1!

Great job opportunity working with my better half @sebastianahnert.bsky.social on an exciting new #digitalhumanities project in Cambridge, funded by @schmidtsciences.bsky.social and working with fantastic people at CESTA Stanford and DensityDesign Lab Italy. www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/researc...

The @nationalacademies.org Awards for Excellence in #scicomm have honored some of the best thinkers & creatives I know, like @chanda.blacksky.app @neillewisjr.bsky.social @cbo.bsky.social Top award: $40,000. Deadline: April 3. Explore & apply www.nationalacademies.org/programs/NAE...