Michael Ekstrand
@md.ekstrandom.net
Info sci prof @ Drexel, trying to keep the machines (esp. RecSys & IR) from learning bigotry and discrimination. ADHDS9. Usually self-propelled. Opinions those of the Vulcan Science Academy. 🐰x2. 🏡 https://md.ekstrandom.net 🧪 https://inertial.science
writers learn how academia works challenge
Dominique Baker@bakerdphd.bsky.social · 6h agoOK STOP. He's a postdoc with a multi-million dollar grant from Stanford. Which they gave. To a postdoc. And they won't renew the grant, because his Harvard friend just got a grant, and wants to hire him but he said no. And Stanford refuses to believe he said no.
"You may not deadname superintelligence but you should deadname trans people" is now 100% real US policy
The Chronicle Review is just publishing Quillette's desk rejections now
Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks.org · 2d agoChecking in on how things are going over at the Chronicle Against Higher Education:
i think cox should spend less time weeping about polarization and more time working to convince his co-partisans not to abandon pluralism and liberal democracy
PBS News@pbsnews.org · 3d agoUtah Gov. Spencer Cox has emerged as a prominent voice calling on Americans to step back from the political hostility gripping the country. The Republican governor is expanding on that message in a new book. https://to.pbs.org/3VmTJnx
We had Intelligence. Now we have Super Intelligence. I assume the next version will be Intelligence⁶⁴
Joe Konstan introducing the John T. Riedl Lasting Impact Award at #RecSys2026, recognizing work with a durable impact on the field. Happy to be a part of the committee who selected the first recipient and to carry forward John’s memory and legacy.
your average Bluesky adventuring party has: - 1 sports person who is also a political sicko - 1 adhd chaos crafter who is also a political sicko - 1 sff writer who is also a political sicko - 1 romance author who is also a lawyer who is also a political sicko - 1 gardener recovering from being a po
Gobsmacked by the elite levels of not knowing ball in the Senate today, thinking an NBA team is called the Hawkeyes then, refusing to Google it, then accusing a guy of treason because you didn’t know the Iowa Lady Hawkeyes aren’t in the NBA. Somehow I don’t trust these people to Save Girls Sports.
I'm recruiting 1-2 PhD students to join our lab in Fall 2027, through either Computer Science or Information Science at the University of Colorado Boulder! Looking for people with interests in NLP plus [healthcare | literary studies | narratives | social media | etc.]. Join us! 🏔️☀️
CLS Lab — Culture, Language, & Systems | University of Colorado Boulder
The Culture, Language, & Systems Lab at CU Boulder studies the language systems that transmit and shape modern culture, from internet platforms to literary archives to language models.
cls-lab.com
Love this concluding highlight from @mmitchell.bsky.social’s keynote at #RecSys2026: “let’s build systems that leave people better able to see, think, and say no”.
When they get back in power, Democrats need to go all-in on higher education. We need a campaign of reinvestment in public universities across the country that makes the Morrill Land-Grant Act look like nothing by comparison *and* a GI Bill of Rights-style program of tuition grants.
The New Republic@newrepublic.com · 7d agoTrump is banning students majoring in degrees that don’t make enough money from taking out college loans. Degrees for social work, art, religious studies, teaching aides, and music will be hit the hardest. trib.al/kQdKbY1
Don’t know what you’re doing at #recsys2026 this morning? Come check out my tutorial on reproducibility! md.ekstrandom.net/pubs/recsys-...
Continuous Automated Reproducibility
Upcoming RecSys tutorial on practical tools and workflows for reproducible recommender systems experiments.
md.ekstrandom.net
is this what it looks like to roll a 28 to troll the mathematicians?
Siobhan Thompson@vornietom.bsky.social · 6d agowhat do you folks think is bigger, 100% or infinity
Such a great day at the grouplens 30 year reunion at the University of Minnesota. Great to reconnect with so many smart people.
The combined undergraduate and graduate student populations of all Ivy League schools is about 140,000 students. The CUNY system alone is 250,000.
Larry Glickman@larryglickman.bsky.social · last wk.Elite universities mea culpas about the “loss of trust” in higher education so often fail to consider the force of the longterm propagandistic attack on universities, given extensive play in conservative media, that long preceded Trump, but which he has massively accelerated.
Arnold speaks here with greater conviction and moral clarity than a lot of pastors I've heard.
Mekka Okereke@mekka.mekka-tech.com · last yr.Everyone lifts. You're not special. And in bodybuilding, non-MAGA folk win disproportionately. Schwarzenegger himself is famously anti-MAGA. Yes, he's a Republican. But he's very clear on what he thinks of MAGA, fascism, and white nationalism.
It’s an intense but fun start to the new academic year. Kamelot + Visions of Atlantis + Frozen Crown in Glenside last night, leaving for GroupLens reunion and RecSys this afternoon.
tfw you roll a 38 to hit 😳, but forget your class feature that should have made it a crit 😢.
gratitude of the day/week: rabbit’s skin thingy was not cancerous. picture of rabbit with her octopus (by @bugsnbuns.bsky.social) for pet tax.
It really can’t be stressed enough that the freaky AI doom cult stuff that is so influential in Silicon Valley is an AMERICAN phenomenon. The AI industry in Europe and in Asia is not, from all I’ve heard, taking this weird millenarian stuff seriously. But much of US Big AI? It very much is.
unpleasant broad@wordbringer.eu · last wk.I cannot stress enough how much even the AI people in Europe just are not like this. I can't imagine anyone giving this the time of day. There is a specifically American cult that aims to end democracy using the computer.
Is it normal for arXiv submissions to be "on hold" for nearly a week now? Our forthcoming RecSys Research & Practice Note has been stuck in the queue since last week 😢.
What AI scales about science are the parts that are most broken and gameable. With the exception of combinatorial problems like protein folding, we need more thinking and less rote computation.
Berna Devezer@devezer.bsky.social · 2w agoI think it's also the case that we will not be starved of understanding because of AI, but because we've been increasingly devaluing understanding in favor of results and outputs that AI fits right into the current state of scientific production.
