iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

maybe if I had the mentality of my cat, all of my furniture would be cardboard boxes and it would save me a lot of decision fatigue

Settling in one place something I haven't experienced for a long time (my phd peers did get things like espresso machines and bed frames but i was always very lazy and wishy washy about it) I am currently buying FURNITURE. my cat hates all of her new trees & beds. she likes human bed

a white cat, belly up, on an earthy pastel colorblock quilt

This is the "view" from the floor my office is on, in the computer, data, & info sci building the wood paneling reminds me of swiss cheese

staircases with wood railings and sides, with an atrium showing six floors. seating and tables on second and third floors

I've also gotten into biking again! I stopped biking at Berkeley because hills and cars but Madison is flatter and has separated-from-road bike paths everywhere! The (wild?) flowers on the side of the paths are definitely paid actors too

Shahan Ali Memon @shahanmemon.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

I used to joke that going to Stanford for college w/ palm trees and manicured landscapes was like being on vacation with exams -- summers at UW-Madison have a similar feel. Some evenings are so pretty that these ducks must be paid actors to decorate these lakes also the ice cream is very creamy

ducks and a dock and a sunset on lake mendota

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Are you on academic job market for #Postdoc or #TT Assistant/Assoc. Prof/Lecturer/ #AP /Research Scholar/ #fellowship jobs for 2026-2027 in #CS/ #SocSci/ #InfoSci/ Management Science/ #Psych & similar? Like last year, I am maintaining a list (so far ~200 positions) docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

docs.google.com

2026-2027 Postdoc/TT/Research Scientist Positions in Information/CS/Social Science + Related Fields

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Dan Cohen @dancohen.org · 30/07/2026

New issue of my newsletter Humane Ingenuity: “The Breath of the Author” — The palpable presence of someone else’s mind in our best writing should give us pause about the encroachment of AI text newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/the-...

newsletter.dancohen.org

The Breath of the Author

The palpable presence of someone else's mind in our best writing should give us pause about the encroachment of AI text

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Data & Society @datasociety.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

📣 New! As AI agents are increasing used for daily tasks, their relative autonomy challenges traditional means of human oversight. Samir Passi & Ranjit Singh show why oversight can't rest on individual users alone, w specific recommendations for builders and deployers. datasociety.net/research-lib...

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Alexandra Olteanu @aolteanu.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

Wrote a brief reflection on poor conceptualizations in AI work and why they matter, something I believe is so startlingly neglected. TL;DR - Poor conceptual foundations can severely undermine the credibility and reliability of knowledge claims.

rigor-in-ai.leaflet.pub

Back-to-basics: on poor conceptualizations in AI work

TL;DR — Poor conceptual foundations can severely undermine the credibility and reliability of knowledge claims. (And, no, your metric is not your construct.)

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I'm not an organizer but past conferences have usually been non-archival, where you submit a 1-pager or extended abstract and then you give a talk on your work. But they will probably hopefully elaborate more as the deadline approaches

I have two projects involving Chinese speakers this year, and so I'm saying "I'm going to ask my mom" in project meetings more often than usual

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The turn-around time is pretty short btw, e.g. getting the review in by July 7 would be ideal. Let me know if that's okay!!

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Amazing!! tysm!! email is {firstname.lastname}@inria.fr?

Lucy Li @lucy3.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

Looking for two emergency reviewers for ACL ARR May, one paper is on educational question generation and one is on historical text!

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Lucy Li @lucy3.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

👨‍🎨 update slai = social language and ai w = wisconsin

an image of a sticker showing a badger with red and white hat hugging a jar of hazelnut spread branded as "slai"

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Melanie Walsh @mellymeldubs.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

Excited to share this. @neel2112.bsky.social, @mariaa.bsky.social, and I analyzed 500K anonymous ChatGPT convos (shared w/ consent from WildChat) to see if people were generating fiction. We found tons of stories, fanfiction & erotica. Many users iterated on the same stories for days and weeks.

Screenshot of paper abstract that reads:

AI FICTION IN THE WILD Neel Gupta Maria Antoniak Melanie Walsh

Some professional authors are beginning to use AI tools to help produce their fiction writing. Are readers using AI to generate fiction, too? Drawing on over 500,000 anonymized, English-language ChatGPT-user conversations (Zhao et al.), we find that more than one third of the conversations involve some form of fiction generation—including original stories, roleplay, fanfiction, and erotica. This AI-generated fiction is notably dominated by power users. We identify common fiction generation patterns and profiles among these users, including what we call infinite story demanders, who repeatedly request and revise variations of the same or similar narratives over extended periods of time. We show that users especially gravitate toward fanfiction and erotica, and that they are broadly drawn to generic forms, repetition, immediacy, and niche combinations of story elements. Our findings motivate two theoretical provocations. First, we argue that AI technologies may lead to a shift in the conventional relationship between the author and reader, potentially producing what we call a solipsistic reader-writer, who both generates and consumes fiction within a closed conversational loop, interacting with a machine rather than a human other. Second, we note that LLMs enable interactivity, play, and permutation in ways that are seemingly pleasurable for users, raising questions about where AI will fit into contemporary storytelling and entertainment ecosystems. We situate these developments within broader transformations in literature and media, including self-publishing, fanfiction, and pornography, and suggest that AI-generated fiction shares structural affinities with on-demand, personalized, and repetitive cultural forms.

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Waxy.org @waxy.org · 24/06/2026

The Pudding's early history of U.S. restaurant dining: don't miss the interactive map of 5,000 historical menus pulled from the NYPL's Buttolph collection pudding.cool/2026/06/m...

pudding.cool

A History of Menus is a Menu of History

What do America’s earliest restaurant menus teach us about America?

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Lucy Li @lucy3.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

wisconsin colors or nutella colors?? 🤷‍♀️

Lucy Li @lucy3.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

we will print stickers once it's colored in

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Lucy Li @lucy3.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

👨‍🎨 update on initial brainstorm sketch to actual sketch:

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Lucy Li @lucy3.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

me: "please draw a wisconsin badger hugging a jar of hazelnut spread except instead of the logo being nutella because it's trademarked it is the logo of my new research group" human 👨‍🎨:

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Lucy Li @lucy3.bsky.social · 21/06/2026

What an accomplishment (preprint!!!) for your PhD first year!! 🎉

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Maria Antoniak @mariaa.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

New work from my lab! @teagrjohnson.bsky.social built a 12-dimensional narrative framework, annotated Dolma (no small feat given its extreme diversity), and analyzed narrative features across pretraining subsections. Highlight: pretraining data space displays strong narrative organization!

Figure 6: UMAP reduction of SBERT embeddings for 20,000 randomly sampled NARRADOLMA documents, colored by PC1 score (interiority). Labels are based on manual examination. Overlays for all three PCs appear in Fig. A5.

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Fabien Accominotti @faccominotti.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

UW-Madison Sociology is hiring! We're inviting applications for an assistant professor position in the fields of demography, soc of population, and health, to begin August 2027. Come join @uwsoc.bsky.social and the great @cdeuw.bsky.social! Apply here: jobs.wisc.edu/jobs/assista...

jobs.wisc.edu

Assistant Professor of Sociology - Madison, Wisconsin, United States

Current Employees: If you are currently employed at any of the Universities of Wisconsin, log in to Workday to apply through the internal application process.Job Category:FacultyEmployment Type:Regula...

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Lucy Li @lucy3.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

tfw the articles ai retrieves are also ai-generated

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Lucy Li @lucy3.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

yes i'll admit it, i add more papers to my to-read list than i'll ever have the time to read!!!!!!

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Lucy Li @lucy3.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

tfw ur paper clicking is not human enough

a screenshot of "your ip address has been blocked please contact dl-support@acm.org"

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Manoel Horta Ribeiro @manoelhortaribeiro.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

🚨New preprint!🚨 arxiv.org/abs/2606.03095 In a randomized field experiment in a 300-level machine learning course, teaching assistants received AI-assisted feedback drafts after grading student submissions. Did AI help them provide more feedback when feedback was optional? A thread 🧵

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Michael Zimmer @michaelzimmer.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

California’s public universities spent $16.9 million on A.I. during a financial crisis, and the result has been chaos. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/m...

nytimes.com

A University System Went All In on A.I. Now It’s Tearing Itself Apart.

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Lucy Li @lucy3.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

wow sign me up for this phd

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Lucy Li @lucy3.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

that is how busy i have been