applying for jobs again

I just saw a tiny girl, swiping at her phone in banal disinterest from her stroller, while her mother sprinted to drive the chariot before her, and it was like Cleopatra being spirited by her servants on the royal litter

Reading police radio transcripts. “Unsure if related to this protest, but three people have just walked up with a tuba, a trombone, and a drum. We’ll keep you updated on that.” Ten minutes later. “It’s an update on that protest. They have added a tambourine, but they remain peaceful at this time.”

Very cool work featuring several students from my lab! Analysis of how some publications (NYT) set the agenda on coverage of trans discourse for local media in some states, who lead agenda setting for other states' local media - all measured via topic modeling and transfer entropy

hot off the (virtual) press in @transstudies.bsky.social: a collaboration with @pranavgoel.bsky.social, @crazybrokeasian.bsky.social, and @diesagar.bsky.social on information flows in US local & national news about transgender people (spoiler alert: it’s complicated) doi.org/10.57814/557...

Give DDoSecrets your money!! they routinely are behind massive stories in the news and need financial support to keep doing what they do.

People three hops away in your social network are people you don't know - Your friends' friends' parents - Your partner's parents' friends - Your boss's kid's teachers - Your friend's doctor's parents - Your ex's partner's colleague List goes on and on for why this is terrible criteria

Part Two of the #ForeclosureFiles reporting explores how the Trump regime gutted the CFPB, which was investigating the type of "zombie loans" reported on in Part One www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202... Donate now to help DDoSecrets keep publishing: donorbox.org/supporting-d...

New incredible detail here: ICE says a match in its facial recognition app Mobile Fortify is a "definitive" determination of a person's status, and that this overrides birth certificates. This is an app ICE is using in the field to scan people www.404media.co/ice-and-cbp-...

right to repair, but for all the relationships and trust you broke while surveilling your friends with your glasses

signal is the birth control pill of phone encryption, it’s 99.99% effective when used correctly. the only way to be 100% assured of fail-proof safety is to never use Phone, but abstinence-only education doesn’t work, so

Baby on the T is crying because the brakes on the green line screeched too loud. Me, too, little guy

Researchers pointed a satellite dish at the sky for 3 years and monitored what unencrypted data it picked up. The results were shocking: They obtained thousands of T-Mobile users' phone calls and texts, military and law enforcement secrets, much more: www.wired.com/story/satell... 🧵👇

> It is 2025 BC. I am a soldier from one of the outlying provinces called to defend the pyramid in Memphis > It is 2025 AD. I am a soldier from one of the outlying provinces called to defend the pyramid in Memphis

so the US government just forced a tech company to delete an app it doesn’t like, which is totally normal stuff www.404media.co/iceblock-own...

📌 Save the Date! The flagship conference of the Network Science Society - 𝗡𝗲𝘁𝗦𝗰𝗶 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲 - is coming to Northeastern University’s Network Science Institute, 𝗝𝘂𝗻𝗲 𝟭-𝟱, 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲. Prepare to share ideas, discoveries & challenges in network science. Registration opens soon! 🔗 www.netsci2026.com

This may come as a surprise to people, but access journalism has caused this mess in the first place. Do the work. Screw the press creds. Be journalists.

Getting my Covid booster, “How are you?” “Living the dream - stabbing people.”

A DHS data-sharing platform used for sharing restricted intel among government agencies, law enforcement and fusion centers was misconfigured to allow access to "everyone" including tens of thousands of unauthorized government staff, contractors and foreign nationals. www.wired.com/story/a-dhs-...

This is shameful. While I doubt I'll have an impact, I've written to my alma mater (#RPI) urging them to reconsider their vaccine-autism research contract, as are many others I know.

The outrage of a no bid contract on autism to an engineering school that doesn't even have a department of epidemiology or neuroscience is only exceeded by the choice of recipient, a data scientist who last published on autism in 2020 and thinks like Wakefield. 🧪 #episky 🧵 apnews.com/article/vacc...

What's your secret to being online all the time without contracting computer madness? For me it's being pure of heart

Walking to my car, I pass two men in button-downs and overhear an adamant voice: “I have seen people levitate. I have seen someone crawl up the wall.”

Banning trans people from owning guns is a really REALLY significant escalation and I think the scariest part about it that's not being discussed at all is that the plan is to declare that trans people are mentally ill Moreover, ICE must be destroyed edition.cnn.com/2025/09/04/p...

Heartbreaking: Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point www.404media.co/4chan-and-ki...

I don’t understand how this represents a problem with the Flipper Zero rather than a stringing indictment of the car security industry. www.404media.co/inside-the-u...

Amazing talk by Markus Gaasedelen on exploring hardware reverse engineering. So cool watching someone share this level of mastery and discovery. And an incredibly heartwarming homage to quend ❤️ www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGlI...

check out my new piece, "Endoplanetary Ecologies" video of slime mold created via analog glitch video microscopy, presented in a custom designed + 3D printed housing wrapped in gold leaf

I’m at @hope.net this year - if I know you and you’re here I’d love to meet up!

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

Computers should only be able to speak through the animatronic faces of bound creatures. If you want to ask ChatGPT a question? You must enter a Chuck E Cheese and commune with the powerful rat, like the Oracle at Delphi

Excited that my article 'Levels of Legibility: Roles and the Flow of State Information in French Morocco' is now out in Social Science History! The paper shows how French administrators' internal communications transformed environmental knowledge and practices in Morocco dx.doi.org/10.1017/ssh....

Stand by this: www.politico.com/newsletters/...

Trump's new executive order about AI states that companies' models must not incorporate the idea that trans people exist as a concept. Seems bad.

The truth sandwich is baloney! New paper out. We show that the “truth sandwich” correction format (in which false information is bookended by factual information) does not enhance corrections. psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

There's amazing work on group effects in higher-order networks, but not a lot of connections to social ontology, collective action, and group selection. Led by @jstonge.bsky.social with expert guidance of @rharp.bsky.social we reviewed and formalized these connections. arxiv.org/abs/2507.02758

A 2023 NHB paper concluded that corrections of science-relevant misinformation are, on average, ineffective. Our response (in press) challenges this conclusion, showing why corrections *are* effective, and why considering measurement is important: 🔗 osf.io/preprints/ps... (1/5)

New paper hot off the press www.nature.com/articles/s41... We analysed over 40,000 computer vision papers from CVPR (the longest standing CV conf) & associated patents tracing pathways from research to application. We found that 90% of papers & 86% of downstream patents power surveillance 1/

Announcing speaker, @emma.best at hope.net!

📢BREAKING: Just left the courthouse for our NIH grant termination case Judge ruled terminations are “VOID & ILLEGAL” As a plaintiff, I felt a wave of relief & hope; he acknowledged the discrimination & harm Closed by asking, ‘Have we fallen so low? Have we no shame?’

The French government says it plans to require age-verification — face-scanning, biometrics and ID uploads — to access Bluesky. Users will have to submit to the process each time they open the app. It’s hard to express how dangerous this is and the damage it will do to this community.

No more machine learning, only machine yearning. We are teaching computers how to love.

Great talk by @erikweis.bsky.social on applying the stochastic block model to group detection in geographic settings

meet me at the Naha City crab shrine in 10 minutes if u crave carcinisation

Another week, another research ethics controversy. TL;DR Researchers released a public dataset of 2B+ messages from 4M+ users on 3k+ "public" Discord servers. Usernames/IDs are anonymized. But let's unpack this one... 🧵 www.404media.co/researchers-...

We believe the tiny ad on page 28 of the Spring issue may have been missed by many. HACKER PERSPECTIVE SUBMISSIONS ARE OPEN AGAIN! Send us ~2500 words on what it means to be a hacker, get $500 if printed!

1/ Earlier this month, the Head of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) for Papua New Guinea threatened DDoSecrets with legal action - "including cooperation with INTERPOL" - if we don't censor the Mineral Resources Authority data. We refuse to comply. www.documentcloud.org/documents/25...

Please stop building AI tools to deploy bots to "engage" with unknowing posters. And especially stop doing it to "engage" with "radicals" or any other group you are identifying based on ZERO EXPERTISE IN THE MATTER. www.404media.co/student-make...

Northwestern has not received any NIH funds since March. No written communication about why or what can be done. Thank you Ben Singer for raising awareness at #ATS2025