"What is the ROI of UX?" is shaped like a question, but it is actually two hostile premises: 1) that UX is sufficiently marginal for its value to be openly questioned 2) that the asker has the authority to judge this question, and practitioners are merely consulted on it, as a matter of courtesy

If you've missed this piece about the different modes of empiricism in computer science versus the social sciences, I can highly recommend it. doomscrollingbabel.manoel.xyz/p/the-empiri...

A few years ago, I read an article from @johncutle.fish and @tomdkerwin.bsky.social on how leaders navigate uncertainty and ambiguity. It inspired me to write my answers down to a new section of questions every few years. This is part two! It's been fun to look back and see my thinking mature

this does help

A few years ago, I read an article from @johncutle.fish and @tomdkerwin.bsky.social on how leaders navigate uncertainty and ambiguity. It inspired me to write my answers down to a new section of questions every few years. This is part two! It's been fun to look back and see my thinking mature

My wish for 2026 for academia specifically, is to push back against fascist framings, reasoning, and industry capture in our universities. My suggestions are below. But please do anything you can if you're an academic. 🌿 Even if it's tiny. 🐁 Every pebble helps build a damn against fascist forces. 🪨

Y’know, the recent discussion about the US world dominance relying on the petrodollar has me thinking: it sure is a coincidence that, since 2012, we’ve rocketed from one horrifically energy inefficient techno-fascist bubble to another without pause. Each outpacing renewables like clockwork Huh 👀

“The neuron teaches us something uncomfortable: computation isn't a lens revealing neural truth—it's a filter that shows us only the biology that looks like a computer. Everything else gets discarded before we even begin our analysis.” Fascinating read.

I don’t want generative AI I just want my phone to be able to use context for good instead of just evil. You already know what grocery stores I go to and can predict fucking pregnancies, but “remind me to get eggs at the grocery store” is beyond the limits of advanced human technology? Skill issue

This is so real. One of my most unwavering beliefs is that humans are, at the core, good and want to do good things in the world I know it can be hard to believe. Especially given the news right now, but it’s true. A few clowns don’t change the majority

For the record, active learning strategies help people do most of the things people are fearful developers won't do if they code with AI: - make plans for testing solutions - get exposure to diverse examples - question your own thinking - deliberate practice within small worked examples

I want a giant fuckin treehouse with a massive parkour play structure in it going straight through the living room and second storey, and I also want a secret underground tunnel that goes to my laboratory where I do awesome laboratory things Practically speaking: A ballroom for hosting swing dances

Waiting for my follower count to hit 8765 so I can write the most millennial post ever (just the numbers “309”)

"Well, now China can just invade people!🤡" is the wrong take, and is again, completely US-pilled. It's centered on the idea that China can't think of what to do on its own, or considers itself limited to the set of rules determined by the US. It does not. China gained in much more important ways.

We this, we that. You know what, fuck that. The US has never been a united country. It’s a place built with the sole purpose of enabling white supremacy in the most destructive ways possible. Black, Brown and Native folks have been screaming this for centuries. Fuck outta here with ‘we.’

New Year’s Eve was a lot of fun! 🥰

We really need to come up with better metaphors for AI agents than junior developers and interns. It’s far more of a reflection of how disrespectfully we treat those roles than it is a useful metaphor for how agents behave

This is one of the nightmares of modern security. We need to know where every single one of those is, what we're trusting it to do and not do, and how to make it stop *immediately*. And every time someone wants to use a new one we need to figure out whether we can trust it as far as we can throw it

I need a deep read about how society faceplanted into as much ableism as they could justify, with individualistic brain rot narratives, IMMEDIATELY after a disabling pandemic, as a just world hypothesis piece of bullshit

today is for the ladies to have fun. its new years eve not new year's steve

Accidentally wrote a mini essay on LI: Carrot-eaters and the psychological essentialism that's smuggled in when we divide people into technical and not-technical www.linkedin.com/posts/drcath...

Emails waiting and ready to circle back now that it's the new year

Periodic reminder: We win in the end.

Once again I have managed to be out the door in ten minutes + VAT (2h45m adhd fees) How does she do it? No idea. She’ll tell you in ten minutes +/- 5 working days

It’s *really* interesting to me how this post has more than 2x the engagement on LinkedIn and almost 10x the engagement on mastodon. I’ve never seen a disparity that big before! I’m not mad, it’s just so interesting to me what does well in each platform 👀 (Bluesky seems a bit anti tech lately?)

Being 168cm in a country where everyone’s practically 190 is hilarious because my desk literally looks like the kiddy table at work and it could probably still be shorter 😭

Science is widely trusted in general, but people can use their 'pro-science' identity as a shield. By claiming that science they disagree with isn't 'real' science, they can ignore the facts without feeling like they've abandoned their principles. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Good enough wins because of what you are able to treat as externalities

Woke in a social issues context, means Black. Most people, even those quote posting this, are participating in a weird white people redefinition of the term. Because racist/fascist people hate Black people, woke has morphed into "anything racists and fascists don't like." That's disrespectful.

One downside of all you can eat places is that they often bus the table frequently. I like seeing the tables next to me go through the stages of confusion, disgust, and finally pure awe as I pack away enough sushi to knock out a linebacker

Remember: When Tylenol was poisoned *by an outsider* and killed people, the company recalled all their products & redesigned them. When Intel’s Pentium had a bug so obscure it affected 1 in _9 billion_ long division calculations, they recalled their chips. ChatGPT was made deadly *by its team*.

My two cents as a psychologist is that performance-approach strategies get you a lot further than performance-avoidance strategies, but performance coupled with innate ability models will almost inevitably melt all your approach strategies into avoidance. And avoidance doesn't work

I wish I could show people something that would help convince them that they don’t have the learning culture they think they do. I’ve seen VERY clear contest culture companies go “oh yeah we’re super pro learning and super collaborative”. You can’t just say words into the air and make it true!

Here is an example of what I mean in a simple illustration, from our New Developer project. AI Skill Threat is how acutely developers anticipated identity-based and skill-based loss and Contest Culture is how much they rated software as demanding punitive, ruthless competition norms.

People keep talking about how we need more multidisciplinary, metacognitive, social science informed tech and data workers in the AI era, but as someone with those skills, they were the things that always made me an outsider in tech cultures, and the industry isn’t actually hiring for now either.

How warm do you eat your pizza? 1. Stone Cold Sober 2. Room temperature like the cadaver I stole it from 3. Hot and steaming 4. Huahhfuhahufhufhhahfhhfhfhfhffff 5. “It’s not a burn unless it’s third degree”

It’s just infuriating to me that there is zero amount of money I can pay to ensure that a family member does not get scammed or victimised or otherwise taken advantage of Every other experience in life has a “pay more for safety” option except for the ONE thing we made necessary to access life care

New relationship level unlocked: girlfriend’s eyes are Hazel coloured

An easy way to explain this: Which is easier to do, bake a cake from scratch, or fix a cake that someone baked after they accidentally used salt instead of sugar?

Just a thing about this: a common statement in writing is that you can fix crap, but you can't fix a blank page. I have heard AI apologists claim that this is why it's fine to generate a first draft. Now, to be clear, fuck this. But also: an AI draft is a fucking blank page.

The two hardest problems in Computer Science are 1. Human communication 2. Getting people in tech to believe that human communication is important

Safety Nerds and @ruthmalan.bsky.social, you might be interested in the paper that @kissane.myatproto.social refers to: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

Happy holidays, Bluesky! I got you a megathrust earthquake, soil liquefaction, spine-tingling papers about the way our networks confound knowledge, and a PDF in a pear tree. It's my wrap on a year of trying to make sense of how we make sense of what's happening to us. www.wrecka.ge/landslide-a-...

The lack of a top sheet in European bedding is just so outrageous to me. Like why?! Put a bunch of extra letters into our flavour of spelling English, sure, but no extra sheet between you and the duvet? Absolute scandalous behaviour

Cat and Ashley work so hard to do justice to both: - the scientific rigor of their fields - the human duties of making those fields serve us equitably, honestly, without distortion or manipulation You have been misled about girls and math ability. Don’t miss this one:

Here we go: www.changetechnically.fyi/2396236/epis...

When we say "no, everything hasn't been digitized," I need you to understand that we really mean is that virtually nothing has been digitized. This is because the realm of primary sources that historians use is incomprehensibly large.