Michael Rabby

I have seen a lot of cursed stuff in my time in academia but this is among the *most* cursed.
Grammarly is generating miniature LLMs based on academic work so that users can have their writing ‘reviewed’ by experts like David Abulafia, who died less than two months ago.

The capitalist in me gives me a little hope… maybe some overload is noticing how bad CBS News has performed in the ratings once it swore off the truth.

This just gets worse the more I think about it… 🤢

The Shake Shack at Enron Field that was always out of… shakes… (at least for the one #astros game I went to there laser year).

Wow. The government just apparently crippled the tool that people are using to track contracts like these DHS ones.

I'm told this is the tool Schiff's office is using to track the ICE contracts for military-style weaponry I reported on in the piece/thread below.

www.404media.co/the-governme...

:-(

These #timberwolves #prince jerseys rule… even up here in the cheap seats

SINNERS (2025)

%#**}*+*

Ooof, Rockets… just ooof

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.

🥇

We were told to scrub "biodiversity" from our websites because of this shit.

Private equity nearly always ruins companies… here’s hoping Shipleys keeps heading further NW before that happens

Oh wow… Wiseman is a massively influential documentarian.

In real life, one in 500 kids who catches measles will die. And because measles is an asshole, some of them will die six to eight years later, of untreatable, incurable neurological conditions left as a parting gift by the virus.

How have I never seen this…

Lillard ❤️ ⌚️

Lillard ❤️

Ok I see you UCLA Faculty Association and the Council of University of California Faculty Associations, pushing your university to be better and creating the space for this to happen!

nobody posted the clip anywhere so i went and dug the whole episode up

Yep… 😰. The top law officer in our country is just… an empty vessel.

The “Quad God,” better known as Olympic gold medalist Ilia Malinin, took to Instagram stories to show support for preserving the ice rink at Portland’s Lloyd Center mall.

He shared a story on his account with a link to a petition to save the ice rink.

Read more: www.oregonlive.com/portland/202...

Oh my....

Friends from Minneapolis reporting to me that things are at the point where folks are being hidden in other people's houses and we are in the "again" part of "never again" which the "never" was supposed to preclude

Bloomington police announce arrests in sex trafficking bust: "Rashad Johnson out of Maple Grove. This is the most disturbing arrest that we've had here. He is a backgrounder for ICE, Homeland Security, and federal agencies."

Plans to invade Greenland have just been cancelled after this

This will forever be our shame 😰

I love how there is a separate half time show just for pedophiles.