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...

Charlottesville is super lucky to have @whatthecarp.bsky.social and his e-bike library!

i don't write about this often here, but charlottesville has an e-bike library, which takes up most of my shed and sometimes parts of the house too. if you're at all curious about e-biking around the area, sign up and try some bikes while the weather's good: www.ebikelibrarycville.org

One of the most important benefits of building walkable bikable transit abundant cities is people don’t have to drive to live their life. Especially those who shouldn’t

Very cool visual story-telling website on the history of parks in Charlottesville.

Spain's renewables build-out has structurally decoupled its electricity prices from gas markets. Gas now sets the price in only 15% of hours, compared to 90% in Italy. Countries that invested early in clean power are far less exposed to fossil fuel price shocks. Those that didn't now pay the price.

Two TT jobs in technology and democracy at Northeastern’s Dublin Innovation Institute with the great @davidlazer.bsky.social urldefense.com/v3/__https:/...

Owning a car vs. not is the million-dollar decision people are not thinking hard enough. At the same time, the built environment that forces car ownership makes everyone poorer. yyahn.com/wiki/Cost%20...

This NACTO/USDOT report addresses how to downsize fire trucks in cities. nacto.org/wp-content/u...

If you are reviewing for IC2S2 and it gives you a headache from reading all 700+ paper titles/abstracts while bidding, I just built a tool for it. It uses an LLM to score how relevant each paper is to your research interests (you can define a list of keywords). 1/2

I wrote briefly about how to do peer review for students: yyahn.com/wiki/Peer%20... Also includes some other advices from others including @jessicacalarco.com @robjhyndman.com Matt Might and so on.

“Instead of producing what looks like a generic critique from a nameless LLM,” Wired reported last week, Expert Review “lists a number of real academics and authors available to weigh in on your text. To be clear: Those people have nothing to do with this process.”🤬

this is so fun because i know an LLM wouldn’t give me a response this creative. like this took the funniest shortcut possible. come have fun at youraislopbores.me

(Polio. It's polio)

Three scientists said no to you-know-who and were featured in the news (you may, somehow, be able to picture them). Nice. Good judgement. But it's hard not to be cynical about this whole situation. (I'm resisting... resisting...)

Here’s a full draft of the upcoming second edition of my “Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction”: socviz.co

This video makes me so happy! She’s back! youtube.com/watch?v=B3m3...

If you're unsure how to make your LaTeX-compiled PDFs (e.g., CV) accessible (compliant to the ADA requirements), this post may be useful. yyahn.com/wiki/Accessi... tl;dr: add metadata and use LuaLaTeX

NYU is hiring two postdocs at the Center for Social Media, AI & Politics: csmapnyu.org/jobs And a grant manager in Sociology with the Social Science Research Hub: uscareers-nyu.icims.com/jobs/15327/g... I'm part of both groups--please share with anyone who is interested!

I created a tool, snaketail, a snakemake wrapper that fixes workflow and restarts itself automatically when failed. The idea—feeding the tail (error log) to the head (system input) to self-heal—has practical values to create robust automation system! skojaku.github.io/snaketail.html

It will be 3/4 6pm at CitySpace (100 5th St NE)! www.charlottesville.gov/m/newsflash/...

👀 www.404media.co/openai-furio... futurism.com/future-socie...

Excited to join the panel "Innovation, Production, and Supply Chains in Critical Technologies" at CMU moderated by @andygarin.bsky.social and Erica Fuchs this Wednesday, 2/26 at 2pm! If you're in Pittsburgh, come say hi! www.cs.cmu.edu/calendar/197...

I'll look forward to the discussions sparked by this!

First blogpost of my cofounder post-Delhi on the deafening silence of public/political sphere as we come closer to another industrial revolution. anastasiastasenko.substack.com/p/the-countr...

Even more evidence that building new housing decreases rents: Researchers tracked the residents of a newly built luxury condo building and found that they freed up less expensive apartments nearby. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Together with @mrjimmyblack.com (and Claude) we developed a tool that helps detecting hallucinated references in academic papers! This evolved from a simple python script into a full system written in Rust to quickly go through thousands of citations. Check it out! github.com/gianlucasb/h...

the deadline to submit to the WiNS satellite & mentorship program at @netsciconf.bsky.social is this friday!!

Replacing a car with an e-bike can _literally_ make you a millionaire. I wrote about a back-of-the-envelope math: a household can save ~$100k in just 5 years by going car-light. If this difference is invested over several decades, that can become $1M+ yyahn.com/wiki/Cost%20...

We've alllllmost gotten all the Jan26 ARR reviews in, but I'm still trying to track down new emergency reviewers for papers on the following topics: 1) agents 2) jailbreaking 3) coding 4) RL 5) reasoning 6) LLM for finance 7) AMR 8) alignment If you can review any (in next 24-48h) please DM me 🙏🙏🙏

A very good visual explanation of colon cancer risk.

Happy to share our new paper published in PNAS! Using epigenetic clocks and egocentric network data, we find each additional "hassler" in your close social network is associated with ~9 months of extra biological age and 1.5% faster pace of aging.

A common but tedious task is to file a paper into my personal knowledge base (wiki/obsidian vault/whatever). just realized that this is a perfect task for subagent + skill. It can (1) use OpenAlex etc to obtain its metadata, (2) search and link keywords and other related papers. Seems to work well!

Revision now posted on the ArXiv! We collated and cleaned EVEN MORE DATA. 39M accounts, 365K starter packs, and 2.4B following relationships. All accounts, follows, and starter packs now have timestamps! Check it out at arxiv.org/abs/2505.11608.

Dozens of researchers will move to France from US following high-profile bid to lure talent. Large proportion worked at Columbia University, which had its grants cut and frozen by the administration of US President Donald Trump. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Friendly reminder: the 2026 Applied Machine Learning Conference is still accepting abstracts for talks and workshops. Visit the call for proposals page for details! I hope to see you here in Charlottesville this April!

OpenAI fired a female employee for sexual discrimination because she raised questions about the company's pivot toward automated erotica engagement slop

C'ville folks! Local luminary and lender of e-bikes Josh Carp created this very cool site, which combines videos of public meetings with searchable, linkable transcripts. meetings.cvilledata.org/meetings

Excited for the Networks of Science of Science satellite at NetSCI 2026 this year in Boston! netscisci.github.io Be sure to submit by March 4th!

events.humanitix.com/livable-cvil... Wow you can't miss this conversation @thewaroncars.bsky.social + @jamellebouie.net for Charlottesville! 😆 Thanks you @livablecville.bsky.social! This is awesome!

NEW: A baby held in immigration detention became so sick, she had to be rushed to a hospital in severe respiratory distress. “She was at the brink of dying,” a lawyer told me. But the girl didn’t go home after her 10-day hospital stay; instead, ICE put her and her mother back in lock up at Dilley.

Mitchell Hashimoto (creator of Ghostty, etc.) wrote an insightful piece on his evolving use of AI tools: "My AI Adoption Journey" mitchellh.com/writing/my-a...

No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition. Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

please remember that an “asset” that produces no value can rise in price **only if** someone else is willing to pay more for it.

Holy f