Elizabeth Sampat

we want there to be a sense of moral memory and it's just really not there. do you remember vaccine diplomacy? remember how it was going to reshape the world whether the U.S. or China donated covid vaccines first in developing countries? made basically zero different to the image of either.

one of the weird things about the world is that, in general, people forget most stuff very fast. the only hatreds that really seem to stick are when you *occupy* a country.

Referring to my larger friend group as my platonicule

The guy who runs the Vatican's IT system is secretly a miaphysite and tries to hide it from the cardinals. The cardinals, in turn, know all about it, but pretend not to notice, since opening that can of worms would mean grappling with the theological implications of DNS. They are correct in doing so

A FB memory post that says on this day 12 years ago I posted: We had a suddenly-scheduled all-hands meeting for the end of the day. Everyone was scared; at every other company I've worked at, that would mean layoffs. Not here; I guess here the entire company gets an all-expense-paid trip to Hawaii instead.

A FB memories post that says on this day 2 years ago I posted: Between PlayStation, Supermassive, and more: another thousand game developers are out of a job this week and it’s only Tuesday. The sheer volume of layoffs over the last couple of years is horrifying. I really wonder how many devs are actively employed in salaried positions right now in comparison to February 2019.

How it started / how it’s going

This would be much easier if we wanted a pet that could kill Adam and not me, because we’d just get a tank and keep shrimp and crab

This is @twoscooters.bsky.social and she uses them all on Job

Even more basically, when you post your little joke on Twitter, you are providing the richest man in the world with free labor to prop up his toxic business, which could not exist without such free labor. That’s the part I could not stomach.

Yeah, it’s one of the best episodes of television in a very long time and I desperately wish I’d thought to skip it in the rewatch.

The video game industry decided to discontinue their product, the video game, in exchange for trying to make Fortnites. They have in recent years found out this doesn't work, so they have pivoted from making Fortnites to making ????????????????? nothing I guess

i *think* but do not fully feel expert enough to know that this means he knows he has an N word tic. He knew there would be Black people there, receiving awards. He took the risk, and I think that was wrong. If there was racism on his part, I think that’s it: knowing he might subject them to it.

Something I learned and did not previously understand is that these kinds of outbursts are specifically related to intrusive thoughts. so for the word to come out, the person has to have the word pop up in their head. So we need to ask, structurally, why this word remains there, in this context.

After I heard about the incident a few hours ago, I spent some time reading about N-word tics and intrusive thoughts and what I came away with was a feeling of deepened anger about the way white supremacist society has associated “Black person” with this word so it’s there, in people’s brains

When do you think we'll stop calling networked handheld computers phones? In the expanse they're always like "hand terminals" and in Star Trek they're just radios but they're "communicators"

I don't think we will change to a longer word I think phone means networked handheld computer now

You spend a decade trying to understand the UK’s baffling relationship to class, you think you’ve finally started to get it, then you see something like this and realise you’re right back to square one.

Turns out it’s good that we decided to rewatch S1 of Paradise before the new season, because the penultimate episode was so intense that I guess we just… assumed that was it? And missed the entire finale on our first watchthrough??

The political effects of X's feed algorithm https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10098-2 Received: 16 December 2024 Accepted: 4 January 2026 Published online: 18 February 2026 Open access • Check for updates Germain Gauthier,5, Roland Hodler?5, Philine Widmer35 & Ekaterina Zhuravskaya3,4,5 m Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects'. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk's platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users' feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X's algorithm has persistent effects on users' current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.

A new paper shows that less than 2 months of exposure to Twitter’s algorithmic feed significantly shifts people’s political views to the right.

Moving from chronological feed to the algorithmic feed also increases engagement.

This is one of the most concerning papers I’ve read in awhile.

Post Danae Hudlow @danae hudlow Follow 6 I need men to understand: at some point in every conservative gal's life, she will have the experience of sitting and listening to the men around her --men who are her friends -- discuss, in a detached way, whether or not her kind of people (women) should have the right to vote. 9:45 PM Feb 18, 2026494.8K Views

Sounds rough! I avoid this ever happening to me with One Weird Trick

Ten years in the making!!!

Game On: A Feature Documentary about Brenda Romero Help Theresa Loong finish her documentary about Brenda Romero: visionary designer and mentor, shaping the future of game creation!

Brenda has been my friend and mentor for 15 years, and not a day goes by when I don’t think about SOME piece of advice or random aside or thing she said and probably forgot about that fundamentally changed the way I see the world. I’m confident this documentary is going to be a banger. Back it.

Normalize laughing derisively in men's faces when they deserve it.

Meta Plans to Add Facial Recognition Technology to Its Smart Glasses

"We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns" www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/t...

I have been informed that this post was made when I was complaining that the only good gumbo in London is gumbo I make. I stand corrected

Heartbreaking way to discover that you’re not enough for your spouse

I know it's meant in good faith but "if we just made smaller scope games and charged 20-40 dollars for them it would fix the industry" is very funny to me. indies release like 20 of those a week on steam. are you buying them? is the industry fixed? no? hm. sounds like you need a different solution

James Van Der Beek's Influencer Wife Is Peddling Vaccine Conspiracy Theories on Instagram Kimberly Van Der Beek, a wellness influencer, uses her platform to post photos of her family, their Texas compound, and Covid misinformation.

she’s a loser, you simply don’t have to give her money www.rollingstone.com/culture/cult...

Do yall know how long The New Republic had an all-white masthead? If not, you should take some time and look it up today. Really interesting stuff.

Unhappy to be in the US but happy to be in NYC

It’s difficult not to lose faith when so much of the system is rigged against support for Palestine in the UK, but god damn, this feels like a massive, vital win.

It's a fascinating thing to watch the youth reinvent lolcats from base principles.