Michael Ekstrand

no you're putting a citation to @dimension20.bsky.social in the drafting doc for a future paper.

I desperately want to be at this. I have repeatedly raised questions about the accreditation process for Pokémon professors (it seems to not exist) and the IRB process for the research they conduct.

Recommending With, Not For TORS paper on the need for participatory approaches to designing and evaluating recommender systems and other information access systems.

New paper time! 📄🎉

With @afsanehrazi.bsky.social, Aleksandra Sarcevic, @drchole.bsky.social, @robin-burke.bsky.social, and Katherine Wright, we write about how #RecSys for social good needs participatory design & evaluation. Coming soon to arXiv & ACM TORS. md.ekstrandom.net/pubs/tors-co...

i have been thinking a lot about how the entire concept of “the deal” is antithetical to transparency, fair play and rule of law, as larry notes. the deal is necessarily nonstandard, ad hoc and dependent on the whims of the dealmaker

… wut?

The @knightcolumbia.org team writes: "The settlement narrows Columbia’s autonomy with respect to admissions, the hiring and promotion of faculty, and curriculum—all aspects of what the Supreme Court has called the “essential freedoms” of the university."

Me: Some things could be made better if midterms go a certain way, but none of that is a given (or even relatively likely), none of that happens unless people DO something, and the damage being done right now will take generations to fix. Them: Silence. Me: Amazing weather we’ve been having…

Trump Went to War With the Ivies. Community Colleges Are Being Hit.

the trump administration is selling its war on higher education as a strike against the elites who have disadvantaged ordinary americans. in actuality, the administration is destroying advanced education for *everyone* in pursuit of its effort to deskill the american public

Only a few more days to submit your paper to the BEYOND Workshop at #recsys2025

TIL progressivism means uncritically cheerleading whatever disruptive new tech comes along, regardless of how it retrenches wealth.

For the other universities watching, the lesson is PLAY OFFENSE. Do not accept the terms of conflict you've been presented. Relentlessly communicate your intention and vision. Engage and challenge those who misrepresent your intentions.

all of this.

ikr? Sure is great that we’re putting the excrement of Computers But Wrong everywhere.

TIL you can write object-oriented shell scripts in ksh93.

the psychic damage from cursed knowledge lessens if I share it, right? web.archive.org/web/20240419...

A bibliographic database entry for Pedagogy of the Oppressed, with a generated TLDR reading "A single, unpressurized, gravity/centrifugal, entirely internal lubricating system is described for can end seamers and similar apparatus."

Sure…

So the house can just be filled with copies all going "so what did I time travel back to find??"

Hot dog spill shuts down highway in Pennsylvania commuters' wurst nightmare A truckload of hot dogs has spilled across a Pennsylvania highway after a crash, clogging the road toward the end of the morning rush hour.

The whole thing is a work of art.

A multi ethnic plural democracy where people have access to the things we know make a high quality of life middle density walkable communities with high quality public goods like parks , pools, and schools

Pride Versioning - Pride Versioning 🏳️‍🌈 0.3.0 Forget semantic versioning, use PRIDE VERSIONING 🏳️‍🌈

oh look new version scheme just dropped. pridever.org

Thinking about it, I think LensKit's "SemCalVer" versioning is — not deliberately — mostly PrideVer compatible too.

I was just informed that our Country’s “Jobs Numbers” are being produced by a Biden Appointee, Dr. Erika McEntarfer, the Commissioner of Labor Statistics, who faked the Jobs Numbers before the Election to try and boost Kamala’s chances of Victory. This is the same Bureau of Labor Statistics that overstated the Jobs Growth in March 2024 by approximately 818,000 and, then again, right before the 2024 Presidential Election, in August and September, by 112,000. These were Records — No one can be that wrong? We need accurate Jobs Numbers. I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY. She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified. Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes. McEntarfer said there were only 73,000 Jobs added (a shock!) but, more importantly, that a major mistake was made by them, 258,000 Jobs downward, in the prior two months. Similar things happened in the first part of the year, always to the negative. The Economy is BOOMING under “TRUMP” despite a Fed that also plays games, this time with Interest Rates, where they lowered them twice, and substantially, just before the Presidential Election, I assume in the hopes of getting “Kamala” elected – How did that work out? Jerome “Too Late” Powell should also be put “out to pasture.” Thank you for your attention to this matter!

Unquestionably the most dangerous and corrupt attack on the independence of US economic data in American history. Trump is firing the head of the BLS, a longtime civil servant confirmed 86-8 by the Senate, simply because the job numbers came in below his expectations today

GitHub - mdekstrand/dumptruck: Manage dump-style backups. Manage dump-style backups. Contribute to mdekstrand/dumptruck development by creating an account on GitHub.

Needed to do some backups for which my usual Kopia isn't a good fit, so, uhh, wrote a little dump-style encrypted, compressed backup manager. Pretty happy with it tbh, even if it is a shell script. github.com/mdekstrand/d...

Spent some time today updating the list of #RecSys research using LensKit, and we're now at 105 known research products using LensKit for Python! lenskit.org/research/

As a friendly reminder, if you use LensKit in your research, please cite the CIKM'20 paper to help track usage.

they spent all their remaining R&D budget on the biscuits and gravy.

Racism and our elites not wanting us to develop the expectation that our governments should help us

Observe how quickly they yanked public supports away from us during early covid when they saw us learning that things like free healthcare and child subsidies were possible

I'm in this picture and I'm not sorry—I refuse to under-season my prose

Enterprise. I can see the case people are making for Voyager, I might also submit The Animated Series, something of the camp and chemistry of TOS didn’t translate IMO.

Tegan, a black lionhead rabbit, sitting in front of her Sunny rower. One ear is up and alert, the other is not visible.

Tegan had another run in with Mark Antony.

By far Gene Roddenberry's most outlandish idea about the future was that workplaces would be essentially frictionless meritocracies where upper management is both totally competent and humbly willing to accept feedback. Makes warp travel seem realistic.

GitHub - mdekstrand/dumptruck: Manage dump-style backups. Manage dump-style backups. Contribute to mdekstrand/dumptruck development by creating an account on GitHub.

Needed to do some backups for which my usual Kopia isn't a good fit, so, uhh, wrote a little dump-style encrypted, compressed backup manager. Pretty happy with it tbh, even if it is a shell script. github.com/mdekstrand/d...