B! 🐝 Cavello (they/them)

The rhetoric around the “AI race” belies a dangerous assumption: the destination is fixed, and all we can control is the speed. But we can change the direction. There is not only one AI future, and we can choose a different course. www.aspendigital.org/blog/its-not...

Excited to see Seven Star Communities applications open! ⭐️ Proud to see Waskawiwin helping highlight Tribal communities creating sustainable, community-driven digital inclusion solutions. If your Tribe is doing great work, consider applying by Dec. 4!

Curious what these ads looked like? You can take a look at our ads library: emmalurie.github.io/chatgpt-ads-...

It's been a quiet rollout, but ChatGPT has been serving ads since Feb 2026. What's going on behind the scenes? Who's getting those ads and what are they for? And what are the policy implications? www.brookings.edu/articles/und...

Join us Feb 2027 for the 6th edition of the award winning accessibility jam, Games for blind gamers 6! A month long jam about making the best blind accessible game you can! Details at: gamesforblindgamers.org #GameJam #IndieDev #GameDev

Fursona non grata

LET’S GOOOO! 🚀✨ These midterms matter. PS: DC voters can drop off their ballots at ANY designated dropbox at ANY time until 8pm on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2026 www.dcboe.org/voters/find-...

At EMNLP I'm the most excited about this work which mixes theory with actual practicality. Given N models, how do you efficiently find which ones are the top-3? Evaluating everything is VERY expensive. aclanthology.org/2026.finding...

science went turbo mode but our mode of science presentation has not kept up

Me: *actively cursing past me for making problems for future me, which is now current me* Also me: Ooh, an invitation to a problem for future me! *accept*

According to #ClimateCentral's @zacklabe.com, "One of the strongest El Niños on record is unfolding on top of a much warmer climate." 🎥Watch our latest Monthly Climate Briefing for a recap: youtu.be/YHpDb-QAifs

🐟 🌍 A new @worldfish.bsky.social initiative aims to create 25,000 jobs for women and young people in the fish sector in Nigeria and Tanzania, from fish feed and hatcheries to processing and cold storage. Read more 👉 https://on.cgiar.org/4B9FYc5

Thanks so much for your support. The record of my #Matrixconf talk is here: media.ccc.de/v/matrix-con...

Wild to me that GDocs still doesn't have a dark mode on desktop. (It does on mobile!)

You can't spell Trinidad without India: from the literal name to its food. It's not really spoken enough but the Caribbean has a good relationship with its external cultural influences and how it helped shape their own identities.

The long-serving strongman leader of Serbia, Aleksandar Vucic, has conceded defeat in an election that pitted him and his right-wing party against a diverse student-led opposition movement that spent two years protesting his government.

Amazing work!

thinkign abuot egg

The latest issue of Technology and Culture has a special section on graphic narratives and the history of science and technology. (subscription required) muse.jhu.edu/issue/57935

scenic moon, tho.

The ability of the Trump administration to keep breaking the law depends on telling staffers that they will be pardoned www.washingtonsun.com/whitehouse/w...

The CDC denied a request from California, Hawaiʻi, Oregon, and Washington to validate a high-volume measles test, citing “other priorities.” 🤨

"Flu cases on the west coast are on the rise months earlier than normal, prompting US health experts to stress the importance of the annual vaccine." www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026... via Uwa Ede-Osifo @theguardian.com

The Measles Outbreaks and Exposures of 2026: a list of all the outbreaks. vaxopedia.org/2026/01/16/t... via @aboutpediatrics.bsky.social

Also, as I have recommended multiple times: Go vote with someone vulnerable to the voter fraud conspiracy theories. Friends with a trans person who will be under suspicion bc of their ID or a brown person who speaks mostly Spanish? Don't make them go to the polls alone.

Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Cristiano Zanin ordered a nationwide two-hour extension of voting in today’s presidential runoff, moving the close of polls from 5pm to 7 pm Brasília time.

Read: Serbia's long-serving strongman leader conceded defeat to a diverse, student-led opposition movement that spent two years protesting his government

Join us Feb 2027 for the 6th edition of the award winning accessibility jam, Games for blind gamers 6! A month long jam about making the best blind accessible game you can! Details at: gamesforblindgamers.org #GameJam #IndieDev #GameDev

The weirdest factoid to emerge from writing this book is that we dumped the nuclear reactor from Apollo 13, which, quite famously, did not get to the Moon, in the Tonga Trench. And then a couple decades later, we chucked an SR-71 Blackbird into the Mariana Trench. Because why not?

A sentence I just wrote for my book: "In the interim between the Ocean Dumping Ban and New York building waste-processing facilities, the city loaded train cars with sewage sludge and shipped their waste to West Texas for landfill disposal. This 'Poo-poo Choo-choo' ran from 1992 to 2001."

Ha, this reminds me in a lovely way of the beautiful viz posters @mgiraldo.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy used to make back in the NYPL Labs days in the 2010s (these are the outlines of the largest buildings in NYC from 1854)

This was such a great paper. I've been ruminating on the lack of pragmatics in LLM text (inefficient in some ways, overcompressed in others) and they've checked a bunch of issues on the "overcompressed" side (denominalization etc). Really hits why it's so frustrating.

We demonstrate this with a proof of concept in which we fine-tune a Qwen model with a length penalty. It converges towards a categorical preference for brevity in alternations ("he sent us a photo" > "he sent a photo to us"), which spills over to untrained examples.

Our hypothesis: LLMs have a pressure for information density, leading to compressed language, novel ngrams, and a preference for short alternatives in linguistic alternations, even when this is not humanlike - humans have a pressure for successful communication with other humans

There's also interesting variation across linguistic features and response settings. The biggest shifts seem to happen under iteration in chat and coding, vs. single-prompt essay responses. Post-trained models also prefer skipping the optional relativizer ("that", "which", etc).

Last month observed the largest relative warming signal in the Arctic, which is not surprising for this time of year as the sea ice reforms. The tropical (El Niño) signal is really remarkable though. [Plot shows zonal-mean temperature anomalies, where latitude = y-axis (not scaled by distance).]

Join us Feb 2027 for the 6th edition of the award winning accessibility jam, Games for blind gamers 6! A month long jam about making the best blind accessible game you can! Details at: gamesforblindgamers.org #GameJam #IndieDev #GameDev

oh ok!! i like this!!

Vote though.

Good Advice Fairy

Normalization of getting therapy! I was on the bus the other day, and two older gentleman were talking and one bid farewell: “this is my stop, I’ve got therapy today” and the other person was like “ya gotta do it!” 💖

Psyche Delhi-san, the mascot for the shopping district in hip and alternative Koenji, Tokyo, is a mysterious psychedelic creature with glowing eyes and a protruding tongue.

Finally got a replacement for hunter2 that's easier to remember

Dozens of employees at Boston Dynamics have petitioned the company to stop the sale of its robot dogs to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.