iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 19/05/2026

I wondered: How much has the legalization of online sports gambling transformed watching sports on TV? We got an AI to watch fifty hours of sports to find out. Every single game had gambling ads, promotions or other references. Every single one! But some sports had far more than others.

an event plot shows minutes in a typical hour of six sports featuring a gambling reference. NCAA women's basketball is the most, but it's almost all ESPN ticker's with odds. NHL hockey is second, with forty minutes shaded, mostly from in-arena ads. NBA basketball has the third-most. NFL football, NCAA basketball and NCAA men's basketball have the least -- about 4 to 5 minutes a game.

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 17/12/2025

TikTok's algorithm knew how much Olympics content to give you four months early -- in April 2024. This chart shows quintile cohorts based on how much Olympics content users got during the Olympics (Jul/Aug). But -- amazingly -- the rank order of Olympics vids stays the same, even months beforehand.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jeremy-b-merrill-644b1412_how-does-tiktoks-algorithm-figure-out-if-activity-7407155110214250496-K9Bl?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAKoE5QBuFNKEL2yq0MZ4ZtO-_pmoGqU1l0

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Meghan Hoyer @meghanhoyer.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

We used 1,100 real users' data to help re-create TikTok’s algorithm, and then made a map, allowing you to explore the hidden divides that decide what content you see - and what you don't. Awesome work by @fox.computer, Leslie Shapiro & @jeremybmerrill.com: www.washingtonpost.com/technology/i...

washingtonpost.com

Are you in TikTok’s cat niche? What 121,000 videos reveal

We re-created TikTok’s algorithm based on 1,100 users’ feeds. Explore which topics are in your feed and see what the algorithm is least likely to show you.

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Drew Harwell @drewharwell.com · 10/12/2025

Love this @jeremybmerrill.com @fox.computer piece mapping TikTok's brain, especially the tool they made to find a content theme's diametric opposite. People who like the "Fallout" games, for instance, aren't very interested in videos about having hair www.washingtonpost.com/technology/i...

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 25/04/2025

27 crypto wallets acquired ~$1,000,000+ of the president's memecoin after top holders were invited to a special dinner with Trump. It "creates the specter of a pay-to-play deal". So who are payers? There are hints that many aren't even American. www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

washingtonpost.com

How Trump team turned a dinner invite into a crypto boon worth millions

Nearly two dozen crypto wallets acquired more than 100,000 $TRUMP meme coins, worth roughly $100 million, after the team said top buyers could join the president for dinner.

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 01/04/2025

Newsmax just went public. Its 10-K annual report says: "A diverse and inclusive workplace is not merely a strategy or business objective; it is fundamentally woven in the fabric of the Company." www.sec.gov/Archives/edg...

sec.gov

Document

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Ence Morse @ence.bsky.social · 07/02/2025

One more thing to note about the USAID cuts: Project 2025's text actually recommended *more* USAID programs to counter China’s Belt + Road Initiative. and criticized Biden for discontinuing particular Trump-era USAID programs. Speaks to how quickly all this blew up.

The next conservative Administration should restore and build on the Trump
Administration’s counter-China infrastructure at USAID, end the climate policy
fanaticism that advantages Beijing, and assess bilateral aid through the lens of
U.S. national security interests, rewarding those countries that resist China’s
debt diplomacy. It should finance programs designed to counter specific Chinese
efforts in strategically important countries and eliminate funding to any partner
that engages with Chinese entities directly or indirectly. USAID’s Bangkok-based
Regional Development Mission for Asia should focus its strategic attention on
supporting cross-border initiatives designed to counter Chinese influence.

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Ence Morse @ence.bsky.social · 06/02/2025

Who put USAID on Elon Musk's radar? @sarahellison.bsky.social and I found that Musk only began posting about the agency after ⁦right-wing influencer Mike Benz appeared on Joe Rogan, calling the organization a CIA front. More: www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

washingtonpost.com

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 07/02/2025

There’s no more Gulf of Mexico Division of the Environmental Protection Agency. It’s now the Gulf of America Division. As of Wednesday, the agency has also renamed the body of water even on obscure pages about mangrove swamps. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

A screenshot of EPA's Mangrove Swamps website, saying "Four species of tropical mangroves can be found around the Gulf of America. Their extensive root systems protect the coast from erosion and storm damage. The mangrove here (inset) is a red mangrove."

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 04/02/2025

analytics.usa.gov says the US Government's official National Strategic Dad Joke Reserve website only got 861 pageviews in the past month. I think we can do better than that.

analytics.usa.gov

analytics.usa.gov | The US government's web traffic.

Official data on web traffic to thousands of US federal government websites. Published by the Digital Analytics Program.

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 04/02/2025

... ... did you know the US government has a dad joke website? www.fatherhood.gov/for-dads/dad...

fatherhood.gov

Dad Jokes | Fatherhood.gov

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Aaron Schaffer @aaronschaffer.com · 23/01/2025

Fun fact: there used to be a different Gulf of America...in the Sea of Japan archive.org/details/grea...

archive.org

Great Soviet encyclopedia : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

v. : 29 cm

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 22/01/2025

"Gulf of America" first sprung up in a pretty unexpected place. One of the first references I can find to the idea of renaming the Gulf of Mexico? Comes from Stephen Colbert and partially sponsored by... Bing. From 15ish years ago: news.softpedia.com/news/Bing-Do...

news.softpedia.com

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Doug MacMillan @douglasmac.bsky.social · 14/01/2025

I've spent the past year obsessed with how police are using facial recognition. What I found: Police in 12 states have used these tools to find and arrest suspects when they have no other evidence, leading to wrongful arrests wapo.st/4fQYlXn 🧵 what I learned from 1,000 docs & dozens of sources ->

wapo.st

Arrested by AI: Police ignore standards after facial recognition matches

Confident in unproven facial recognition technology, sometimes investigators skip steps; at least eight Americans have been wrongfully arrested.

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 06/01/2025

more like justin trudeaun't amirite

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 19/12/2024

Elon Musk's total view count on Twitter is way way bigger (16x) than that of Congress as a whole. chart by @kevinschaul.bsky.social

A bubble chart shows one huge orange bubble for Elon Musk's 127.6 billion views and a bunch of small and tiny green bubbles for Congress's 7.1 billion views

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 17/12/2024

Elon Musk has a political megaphone unmatched in modern society. He got a total of 133 billion views since July, and ~1/3 of his posts are about politics. His typical tweet gets more than 2.4 million views in just one hour, according to our novel view-count time-series dataset. 🎁: wapo.st/3VLjlI6

A chart shows the view count trajectory of Elon Musk's and Donald Trump's tweets, titled "Views of each X post in 26 days around the election". Elon Musk has many above 100 million, while Trump's are all less than 100 million.

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Crypto is the Solution @cryptosolutions.bsky.social · 30/11/2024

The problem of single women learning to cope with the scarcity of suitable men? blockchain fixes this. #web3 #crypto #blockchain #defi

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 02/12/2024

I like this chart. It tells a story. It's a bimodal distribution, which is my favorite kind of chart. It tells me that I've got two kinds of things: A bunch of the things on the right, centered at 0.8 and some of the things on the left, around 0.1 to 0.2.

an untitled bimodal distribution, with a bit spike around 0.8 and a much smaller spike around 0.1. y-axis goes to 350 from 0.

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 29/11/2024

There's an imposter of me DMing people tips on how to make $700,000 via digital marketing. Real: @jeremybmerrill.com Fake: @jeremybmerrill.bsky.app Convincing. But it's not me.

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 13/11/2024

oh hey this was my chart that my job posted on this website, check out this chart I made last week

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 13/11/2024

TikTok's algorithm is super personalized -- and super opaque. So, my colleagues and I asked 1,000 people to send us their browsing histories, and we found: Most people get about 8% politics in their feeds, but a few get as much as 30%. gift link: wapo.st/40uSUJG

A histogram of the proportion of TikTok feeds that is about politics or social issues. The big peak is around 6-10%, with a long right tail towards 25% or 30%, and a small left tail towards 1% and 2%.

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Drew Harwell @drewharwell.com · 04/11/2024

Fascinating data here but I mostly love that women on TikTok were twice as likely as men to hear the “Freek-a-Leek" JD Vance I'm-a-Never-Trump-guy remix (which really is a banger) www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

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Drew Harwell @drewharwell.com · 29/10/2024

New: On Elon Musk’s X, Republicans go viral as Democrats disappear. We analyzed 100 top political accounts and found that Republicans are getting followed more and going viral more now that the world’s richest Trump supporter is running the show. Gift link: wapo.st/4fmNIvF w/ @jeremybmerrill.com

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Caitlin Gilbert @caitlingilbert.bsky.social · 03/11/2024

NEW: political content shown on TikTok can depend on your gender—women received ~11% more content about Harris than men did, while men (including liberal ones) were more likely to be shown videos about Trump w/ @jeremybmerrill.com @viacristiano.bsky.social www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

washingtonpost.com

What’s in your TikTok feed? As elections near, it may depend on gender.

A Washington Post analysis of six months of feeds points to gender differences in how the hugely popular platform serves up political news.

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Mike Stucka @mikestucka.bsky.social · 13/10/2023

The wonderful people at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution are hiring a political data journalist to work full-time on political data, starting with 2024 elections. Minimum pay is around $80,000. Must move to Georgia but the company has a relocation stipend.

jobs.coxenterprises.com

Data Journalist, Politics

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s mission is to be the most essential and engaging source of news and information for the people of Atlanta, of Georgia and the South. To achieve that mission, we ...

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 13/10/2023

If accelerationism is increasing every day, should we call it jerk-ism? en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerk_(p...

en.m.wikipedia.org

Jerk (physics) - Wikipedia

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 10/10/2023

logging back into this website (and to Threads, and to Facebook) was a mistake.

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Spencer M Ross @srossmktg.com · 06/10/2023

Reading about the part where "the initial data leak was limited, with the threat actor releasing 1 MILLION LINES OF DATA FOR ASHKENAZI PEOPLE." [caps mine]

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 02/10/2023

Which "champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends"-style toast is better? 1. ChatGPT's "Confetti for my loyal friends, bitter truth for my deceitful friends" Or 2. My algorithm's: "focus for my real friends, real cuss for my faux friends"

jeremybmerrill.com

Real tricks for my meh friends, a real croc for my faux friends

‘Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends’ is clever. Let’s find more phrases like that with NLP.

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 27/04/2023

the German equivalent of "Vive le Roi" or "Long Live the King"... is it "Kaiser Permanente"?

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 05/10/2023

Idk that pie shop in Charlottesville and the too-good-for-the-South Jewish deli in Richmond would both be dangerous

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 05/10/2023

Much blame for AI that supposedly detects media bias belongs at the feet of "media bias fact check" -- some random folks' crappy opinion displayed in an infographic that ML engineers (true to form!) repeatedly mistake for ground-truth training data.

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 05/10/2023

AI to ✌️detect media bias✌️ continues to be the stupidest idea.

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 02/10/2023

Sham trials for the real president Real trials for the sham president (but he says they're sham trials)

A screenshot of an email that says, with sham trial highlighted,
President Trump has delivered his remarks on the SHAM TRIAL taking place in New York – a continuation of the greatest witch hunt in the history of our country.

New York Democrats are trying to bring down the Trump Organization and impose the “corporate death penalty” upon President Trump and his family.

Just as President Trump is defending his family and his reputation from these corrupt tyrants, he will proudly defend the American people from the sick and twisted people destroying our country.

Please watch President Trump’s statement on the sham trial taking place in New York.

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 02/10/2023

jeremybmerrill.com

Real tricks for my meh friends, a real croc for my faux friends

‘Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends’ is clever. Let’s find more phrases like that with NLP.

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 30/09/2023

I sometimes wonder if I could sing of arms and a man, who, leaving Troy at the crack of dawn, set off for Italy, fleeing his fate.

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 30/09/2023

If you're thinking of the Roman empire instead of singing the song about the kings of Rome to the tune of the Flintstones theme, you're telling on yourself.

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Lenny Bronner @lennybronner.com · 29/09/2023

Diane Feinstein and John McCain are the only two Senators to die in office in the last decade. A large decrease compared to the early/mid 20th century: 10 senators died during the just the 65th congress. Once common, Senate deaths in office are now rare www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 28/09/2023

"folkrock for my real friends, a real croc for my faux friends"

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 28/09/2023

Midrash for my real friends, real rash for my mid friends

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Jeremy Merrill @jeremybmerrill.com · 27/09/2023

"champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends" is a fun catchphrase, ya? I decided to get the computer to generate me more phrases like that. Here's another one the computer came up with: - "metrics for my real friends, real tricks for my meh friends" #linguistics #nlp

jeremybmerrill.com

Real tricks for my meh friends, a real croc for my faux friends

‘Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends’ is clever. Let’s find more phrases like that with NLP.

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Dr. Sarah Parcak @indyfromspace.bsky.social · 27/09/2023

WITCHES: Back your ass up! Witches, your time is almost up!

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Joey Stanley @joeystanley.com · 27/09/2023

My kid likes “Apples and Bananas” when he sings it at school. Not sure why he doesn’t like singing it with me. Maybe it’s all the extra verses I go through.

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