Lindsay Popowski

Perplexity is using stealth, undeclared crawlers to evade website no-crawl directives Perplexity is repeatedly modifying their user agent and changing IPs and ASNs to hide their crawling activity, in direct conflict with explicit no-crawl preferences expressed by websites.

Perplexity is repeatedly modifying their user agent and changing IPs and ASNs to hide their crawling activity, in direct conflict with explicit no-crawl preferences expressed by websites. blog.cloudflare.com/perplexity-i...

the difference between Dem politicians like Beshear & Walz (who say supportive things about LGBTQ ppl) and the Newsoms, Emanuels & other Dem politicians/pundits throwing trans ppl under the bus isn't "strategy", it's that the latter group is transphobic

Screenshot of the workshop website. Title: Design for Hope: Cultivating Deliberate Hope in the Face of Complex Societal Challenges. Date: Saturday, October 18th, 2025, 9am-5pm (TBU). Overview: Societal challenges, such as those at the heart of CSCW research, are often complex, and responses to them frequently prioritize harm reduction and prevention as immediate goals. While these efforts are essential, they can unintentionally narrow our sense of what is possible, centering our attention on mitigating risks rather than expanding possibilities.

We're doing a follow-up (in-person) workshop @ CSCW! Positech 2: Design for Hope will explore how design methodologies can help us envision and achieve positive social futures AND how these processes cultivate hope in the face of otherwise overwhelming challenges. More: positech-cscw-2025.github.io

workshop website screenshots

headshots of workshop organizers

Following up on last year’s Positech workshop, thrilled to announce our workshop @acm-cscw.bsky.social 2025 on how design might help us cultivate deliberate hope in the face of complex societal challenges, whether in our everyday or broader aspirations 🌱

cfp 👉 positech-cscw-2025.github.io

a couple of hours before my keynote, I went through an intense negotiation with the organisers (for over a hour) where we went through my slides and had to remove anything that mentions 'Palestine' 'Israel' and replace 'genocide' with 'war crimes'

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i think it is a sign of low character to post something controversial knowing it will get angry comments and then insult the people who responded to your ragebait

AI companions aren’t science fiction anymore 🤖💬❤️
Thousands are turning to AI chatbots for emotional connection – finding comfort, sharing secrets, and even falling in love. But as AI companionship grows, the line between real and artificial relationships blurs.

As infuriating as the conservative SCOTUS is, never forget that America’s genocide against its trans population is the child of “moderate” liberal outlets like the Atlantic and the New York Times, and especially Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog, who made healthy careers out of polishing bigotry.

also an incredible researcher/mentor/collaborator/colleague but like, whatever. we know what's really important here.

what is stanford hci going to do without our funniest member next year?

I'm so excited to join the CS department at Johns Hopkins University (@jhu.edu) as an Assistant Professor! I'm looking for students interested in social computing, HCI, and AI—especially around designing better online systems in the age of LLMs. Come work with me! piccardi.me

They’re so lucky to land you!!!!!!!! Congrats congrats congrats!

I'm excited to announce that I’ll be joining the Computer Science department at Johns Hopkins as an Assistant Professor this Fall! I’ll be working on large language models, computational social science, and AI & society—and will be recruiting PhD students. Apply to work with me!

The Tainted Cup
Ancillary Justice
Jade City
The Ninth Rain
Godkiller
A Memory Called Empire
Blood Over Bright Haven

I’ve heard very good things about the raven scholar and the incandescent but I can’t yet vouch for either

Omg!!!!! Congratulations!!!! So so so well deserved ♡

@kjfeng.me and @rockpang.bsky.social are kicking off the panel on sociotechnical AI governance!

#CHI2025

As Mariam Kaba said, "hope is a discipline."

As Václav Havel said (well before he helped liberate his country from totalitarianism), “Hope is … is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something is worth doing, regardless of how it turns out.”

BREAKING: We're sending an open letter to universities across the country, offering support and urging them to reject pressure to punish international students and faculty for exercising their First Amendment rights.

Schools must hold firm against the Trump administration's censorship attempts.

Dear President Levin and Provost Martinez: In light of the recent arrest of a former student at Columbia University and the ongoing threats to fundamental freedoms posed by the current administration, I urge you both to clearly and publicly denounce these dangerous attacks on First Amendment rights. Silence or neutrality in this critical moment risks complicity. Students and faculty urgently need reassurance that Stanford will vigorously protect our community members against threats of arrest, censorship, or sanctions for engaging in constitutionally protected expression. You have consistently emphasized the importance of free speech and academic freedom as foundational to our institution. Now is the time to unequivocally reaffirm those commitments. Our community must know that Stanford stands firmly behind them, ready to use every resource available to safeguard their right to express themselves freely, without fear of intimidation. I urge you to act swiftly and decisively to demonstrate our unwavering dedication to protecting constitutional rights, especially as threats against these freedoms escalate. I have cc’d the Stanford Daily on this correspondence because I believe our entire community should be engaged in encouraging decisive action from our administration at this crucial moment. Sincerely, Hakeem Jefferson Assistant Professor of Political Science Faculty Director of the Program on Identity, Democracy, and Justice at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law

I just sent our university president and provost an urgent request to defend First Amendment freedoms at Stanford, given this administration’s willingness to punish those who disagree with it.

I urge you to do the same with your university leaders.

Hard to overstate just how much of the tech industry’s horrifically dystopian present grew right out of its transparently misogynistic past

Zuck positioned these changes as a return to history practice but, for these policy changes, that is untrue. The specific examples I called out above have been prohibited on the site since I wrote the first set of hate speech standards in 2009. 🧵 8/11

Dismantling the fact-checking infrastructure is going to be super handy when things start going wrong in the new administration and they want to redirect blame onto the left.

My advisor warned me that academics trend towards bitterness. He encouraged me to intentionally resist this, remember where I came from, and never forget the privilege of getting to spend a life working with knowledge and ideas. He too said that bitterness and resentment is easy.

How do people *really* read Wikipedia? 📖 👀

We explored how readers navigate, fall into rabbit holes, and engage with information in a chapter for the ‘Handbook of Computational Social Science,’ edited by @tahayasseri.bsky.social. Stay tuned for the full book! 📚

Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2501.00939

The future (imo) will be filled with a constant ache and continual search for — with increasingly diminished capacity for discovery / identification of — authenticity.

Boycott Coca Cola BDS

Why boycott Coca-Cola? Because it's implicated in Israeli war crimes. According to research by WhoProfits, the Central Beverage Company, known as Coca-Cola Israel, which is the exclusive franchisee of the Coca Cola Company in Israel, "operates a regional distribution center and cooling houses in the [Israeli] Atarot Settlement Industrial Zone." Furthermore, its subsidiary, Tabor Winery, "produces wines from grapes sourced from vineyards located on occupied land in settlements in the West Bank and Syrian Golan."

Why now? Human rights and health activists, among many others, have been campaigning against Coca-Cola and similarly complicit corporations for decades, including grassroots drives targeting the company for its complicity in Israel's gross violations of Palestinian human rights. During Israel's ongoing, livestreamed genocide, Israeli soldiers have often been pictured with Coke cans, donated to them by various genocide-enabling groups. This has provoked even more anger against the company, particularly given that Israel is starving 2.3 million Palestinians in the occupied and besieged Gaza Strip, severely limiting their access to clean water and, as a result, inducing the mass spread of contagious diseases. Given this context, Palestinian activists in Gaza and many BDS activists in the Arab world, in many Muslim-majority countries, and in some European countries as well, have called on the BDS movement to add Coke to its priority targets.

hey coca cola is officially on the BDS list now so no more buying Topo Chico or starlight coke or whatever else they make

New paper: Do social media algorithms shape affective polarization?

We ran a field experiment on X/Twitter (N=1,256) using LLMs to rerank content in real-time, adjusting exposure to polarizing posts. Result: Algorithmic ranking impacts feelings toward the political outgroup! 🧵⬇️

Academic job market post! 👀

I’m a CS Postdoc at Stanford in the Stanford HCI group.

I develop ways to improve the online information ecosystem by designing better social media feeds & improving Wikipedia. I work on AI, Social Computing, and HCI.
piccardi.me 🧵

Commit: Online Groups with Participation Commitments In spite of efforts to increase participation, many online groups struggle to survive past the initial days, as members leave and activity atrophies. We argue that a main assumption of online group de...

This paper argues that online spaces become ghost towns because it's too easy to lurk without contributing, and that asking people to regularly re-commit—or the incoming messages start getting muted—reverses the trend. arxiv.org/abs/2410.23267

It works! #cscw2024 paper by @popowski.bsky.social
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