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Matthew Varona

@matthew.wiki
84 followers 174 following 8 posts

data, design, digital culture, birds PhD student at University of Toronto working on visualization/HCI/STS! they/them | matthew.wiki

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Reposted by Matthew Varona
Matthew Kay @mjskay.com · 12/07/2026
politicians want everyone to speak well of terrible people who died because many of them are terrible people who will die
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Matthew Varona @matthew.wiki · 25/06/2026
I'm at #FAccT2026 to talk about AI boyfriends! How do AI relationships start? How do people maintain these relationships in the face of OpenAI's guardrails and model updates? Come to our talk tomorrow morning to find out—and find us at the conference if you want a copy of our ZINE! Links and info 👇
The AI Boyfriends research team pictured around the ACM FAccT sign.The AI Boyfriends research team posing with our research zines!A stack of zines arranged around the ACM FAccT sticker.
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Reposted by Matthew Varona
Andrea Lathrop @cabernet.bsky.social · 13/02/2026
... what? fuglede.github.io/llama.ttf/
fuglede.github.io
llama.ttf
llama.ttf is a font file which is also a large language model and an inference engine for that model.
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Matthew Varona @matthew.wiki · 09/10/2025
Unreasonably excited to present THEORY IS SHAPES at alt.vis this November! Read on to find out what the "BLT Sandwich Theory of Visualization Consumption" (and other shape-based shenanigans) can teach us about theorycrafting in research 🥪🧲🧊♾️
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Dave Karpf @davekarpf.bsky.social · 22/01/2025
Now is a great time to read WIRED magazine’s 2015 feature story, “The Untold Story of Silk Road.” There were good reasons why Ross Ulbricht was serving a double life sentence. www.wired.com/2015/04/silk...
wired.com
The Untold Story of Silk Road, Part 1
How a 29-year-old idealist built a global drug bazaar and became a murderous kingpin.
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Erica Wilkinson @everywhereerica.bsky.social · 14/01/2025
I don't know how many of y'all are watching the migration of American TikTokers to RedNote, but it's the most fascinating thing I've EVER SEEN HAPPEN ONLINE. 🧵
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Joe Davies @joewdavies.bsky.social · 11/12/2024
If you're interested in animating gridded data into discrete bins using webgl feel free to reuse our library: github.com/eurostat/reg... The example shows a population grid of Europe being rolled out, and then groups the cells according to their populations. #stats #webgl #cartography
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Frank Elavsky (he/him) ⌁ @frank.computer · 27/11/2024
"How to make a good talk (and why are academics so bad at this)?" I wanted to give advice to an undergrad based on what I think is missing from (or wrong about) most advice out there on giving a talk. Would love to hear people's thoughts on this (especially academics hehe).
frank.computer
How to make a good talk (and why are academics so bad at this)?
Some guidance based on what I think a lot of academics fail to realize about what makes a good talk.
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Dr. Casey Fiesler @cfiesler.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
Hi, so I've spent the past almost-decade studying research uses of public social media data, like e.g. ML researchers using content from Twitter, Reddit, and Mastodon. Anyway, buckle up this is about to be a VERY long thread with lots of thoughts and links to papers. 🧵
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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 23/11/2024
The Gini coefficient is the standard way to measure inequality, but what does it mean, concretely? I made a little visualization to build intuition: www.bewitched.com/demo/gini
Many circles of different sizes, representing a visualization of inequality
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Kai Kupferschmidt @kakape.bsky.social · 20/11/2024
“The majority has spoken, and researchers are moving en masse” to Bluesky, says @shaine.bsky.social. Couldn't help myself and had to write about science twitter, X, bluesky and "the migration"... www.science.org/content/arti... 🧪
science.org
Like ‘old Twitter’: The scientific community finds a new home on Bluesky
After recent changes to Elon Musk’s X, a gradual migration turns into a stampede
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Matthew Varona @matthew.wiki · 19/11/2024
this, but microblogging websites
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