Michael Ekstrand

Average Trump scandal: many people dead after uncontroversial government program illegally cut by doge for nonexistent savings Average mamdani scandal: he’s playing BASKETBALL with his FRIENDS

As ever, three quarters of "look at this asshole" is always "look at this". Don't do PR for the fash. Don't give free advertising to the worst bastards. There is no dunk witty enough to warrant amplifying their hate.

yo my colorless green ideas woke up so grumpy today

RIP Walter❤️

I was astounded when, for the first time, I saw a speaker do this — use math to communicate, not just to signal. Flasbulb moment: 8th floor playroom, tech square. Vast minority of speakers really do this. Never seen it in a paper!

This is a fucking banger 😍

Writers Guild speaks out about tech platforms squashing the @alexgibneyfilm doc about Elon Musk: “A small handful of billionaires now own virtually every major media company, news outlet, social media platform and are demonstrating how this unchecked concentration threatens democratic discourse.”

The information school here is also hiring! "We especially encourage applications from ... the intersection of information, people, technology, and society..." jobs.wisc.edu/jobs/assista...

✈️ 🇭🇺 At #EMNLP2026 in Budapest! Excited to share two papers, hear what others are working on, and catch up with familiar faces (and meet new ones!). 🤖 Trust and distrust in GenAI 📍 Mon, 9:00–10:30 | G7–8 🩺 Cancer misinformation on Reddit 📍 Tue, 9:00–10:30 | Hall H Say hi if you are around! ☕👋

stumbled on a set of incredible 1970s illustrations in some government reports, so had to spend a day collecting them into a website to share with my friends on the computer: nickseaver.net/paperwork

hear me out: include a minigame that's basically SkiFree, but with ice skates, and you go uphill rather than down.

This is genuinely the most helpful site on the internet I swear

he almost entirely rejects the premise of politics: that through communication and rhetoric we can move publics to act collectively in particular ways.

I often start with @brennanleemulligan.bsky.social “why do we tell stories” as the epigraph/opening for my talks on AP. But today’s version is bookended by my Mizzou classmate Bill Bradley (1976-2017) It’s a good day to read his work — on comics, on pop culture, on marriage, academia, and more.

when this happens: 1. A founds band B w/ singer C. good music, improves w/ time. 2. C leaves B (b/c her creativity is stifled?). Solo music is better than w/B. 3. B hires singer D. B+D music is ok, not as good as B+C. 4. D leaves B, makes solo stuff better than her work w/B. maybe the problem is A?

Saw an old guy with the craziest drip today

The legal argument is an effort to define gender dysphoria as disqualifying for any position of power, authority, or public trust. Nancy Mace has a bill right now to expand the military ban to thousands more federal positions as mundane as air traffic control.

We come back to the idea of Execs who really don't understand art or why people make art, in any way, finding ways to absolutely annihilate those that do, in a death of a thousand cuts and then one big 400-person cut. It's heartbreaking. The western games industry kills a NIntendo every year.

if you thing longjmp is the solution to your problem, no it isn't.

oh, no. oh *hell*, no. This is like reading the first paragraph of a @dereklowe.bsky.social's "Things I Won't Work With" article, one which ends with "and they were not wearing any safety gear"

“Universities exist precisely because specialized knowledge matters. The further decisions move from those with the expertise, the more educational quality suffers, and the more students bear the consequences.”

The second Knives Out movie, whose conclusion (apologies for spoilers) is that its villain is not some dastardly schemer but just an outright idiot, struck me as a taking a bit of a cop out at the time, but the more it's sat with me, the more I think Rian Johnson was right to make THAT the reveal.

We knew this was coming, but it still hurts. This studio meant a lot (of different things) to a lot of people over the years, and my heart goes out to employees past and present dealing with big feelings.

It's hard to overstate how much Mass Effect and Dragon Age mean to me. Both franchises brought me out of years-long writing slumps, and introduced me to friends I still have today.

revisited some statistical code I was trying to implement a year ago that was broken (confidence intervals weren't confidence intervaling). pointed Claude (Opus 5.5) at it and ask wtf? Came back with 3 distinct estimation problems that together could cause the failure, and yep. What is this world?

the fact that an intermediate CA in India that sells only into the Indian market, when compromised, can generate TLS certs for literally any website on the internet, that feels like a major trust boundary problem

whee!

your own personal Senator someone to hear your prayers someone who cares

Reciprocity is so important and I wish people understood how valued it is and how necessary it is for creating trust. It *is* one of the foundational elements of trust in social groups “Don’t take more than you’re given” and “don’t give more than you can lose” are so embedded in our societies

“The internet is a store but it used to be a library” hits me like a slug to the chest

I see we're having a debate about whether it's okay to go back to "X," the site owned by a trillionaire fascist who is currently bankrolling the GOP's midterm, throttled Ukraine's war effort, and still winkingly allows vast amounts of CSAM on his service Answer: No, what the fuck is wrong with you

The first thing you see when you wake up in the afterlife

free bad idea of the day: a book on quantitative social science methods for studying crime and criminogenesis called “Crime and Measurement”.

here we find the research software developer in his natural habitat, trying to figure out why the @$#*! Python is segfaulting.