iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Michael Ekstrand @md.ekstrandom.net · 9h

Joe Konstan introducing the John T. Riedl Lasting Impact Award at #RecSys2026, recognizing work with a durable impact on the field. Happy to be a part of the committee who selected the first recipient and to carry forward John’s memory and legacy.

A photo of a convention room, with Joe on the stage and a slide with a brief bio summary of John on the slide.

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Bree (half of Kit Rocha) @mostlybree.kitrocha.com · 19h

your average Bluesky adventuring party has: - 1 sports person who is also a political sicko - 1 adhd chaos crafter who is also a political sicko - 1 sff writer who is also a political sicko - 1 romance author who is also a lawyer who is also a political sicko - 1 gardener recovering from being a po

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Ben Collins @bencollins.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Gobsmacked by the elite levels of not knowing ball in the Senate today, thinking an NBA team is called the Hawkeyes then, refusing to Google it, then accusing a guy of treason because you didn’t know the Iowa Lady Hawkeyes aren’t in the NBA. Somehow I don’t trust these people to Save Girls Sports.

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Maria Antoniak @mariaa.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I'm recruiting 1-2 PhD students to join our lab in Fall 2027, through either Computer Science or Information Science at the University of Colorado Boulder! Looking for people with interests in NLP plus [healthcare | literary studies | narratives | social media | etc.]. Join us! 🏔️☀️

cls-lab.com

CLS Lab — Culture, Language, & Systems | University of Colorado Boulder

The Culture, Language, & Systems Lab at CU Boulder studies the language systems that transmit and shape modern culture, from internet platforms to literary archives to language models.

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Michael Ekstrand @md.ekstrandom.net · 29/09/2026

Love this concluding highlight from @mmitchell.bsky.social’s keynote at #RecSys2026: “let’s build systems that leave people better able to see, think, and say no”.

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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

When they get back in power, Democrats need to go all-in on higher education. We need a campaign of reinvestment in public universities across the country that makes the Morrill Land-Grant Act look like nothing by comparison *and* a GI Bill of Rights-style program of tuition grants.

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Michael Ekstrand @md.ekstrandom.net · 28/09/2026

is this what it looks like to roll a 28 to troll the mathematicians?

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Michael "Shapes Dude" Betancourt @betanalpha.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

The logit function quietly smiles…

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Will Quinn @willquinnart.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Daily bunny no.3455 prefers the classics

Two bunnies are standing near a record player, and one starts to play their preferred record, "Something Else" by the Kinks. Next to him, the second bunny is miffed that she can't play her preferred record, "Room On Fire" by the Strokes.

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Brad Miller @bnmnetp.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Such a great day at the grouplens 30 year reunion at the University of Minnesota. Great to reconnect with so many smart people.

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James Ryan @jdryan08.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

The combined undergraduate and graduate student populations of all Ivy League schools is about 140,000 students. The CUNY system alone is 250,000.

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Michael Ekstrand @md.ekstrandom.net · 26/09/2026

Hello, Keller, my old friend…

A selfie of me in a black fleece shirt with Keller Hall, the UMN CS building, in the background.

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Michael Ekstrand @md.ekstrandom.net · 26/09/2026

Arnold speaks here with greater conviction and moral clarity than a lot of pastors I've heard.

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Michael Ekstrand @md.ekstrandom.net · 25/09/2026

Hello, Minneapolis! It’s good to be “home”.

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Michael Ekstrand @md.ekstrandom.net · 25/09/2026

It’s an intense but fun start to the new academic year. Kamelot + Visions of Atlantis + Frozen Crown in Glenside last night, leaving for GroupLens reunion and RecSys this afternoon.

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Michael Ekstrand @md.ekstrandom.net · 25/09/2026

(You _also_ forgot to load the magic ammo that would have made it a dirty 40).

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Michael Ekstrand @md.ekstrandom.net · 25/09/2026

tfw you roll a 38 to hit 😳, but forget your class feature that should have made it a crit 😢.

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Michael Ekstrand @md.ekstrandom.net · 24/09/2026

gratitude of the day/week: rabbit’s skin thingy was not cancerous. picture of rabbit with her octopus (by @bugsnbuns.bsky.social) for pet tax.

A black lionhead rabbit loafing by a red plush octopus.

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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 24/09/2026

It really can’t be stressed enough that the freaky AI doom cult stuff that is so influential in Silicon Valley is an AMERICAN phenomenon. The AI industry in Europe and in Asia is not, from all I’ve heard, taking this weird millenarian stuff seriously. But much of US Big AI? It very much is.

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Michael Ekstrand @md.ekstrandom.net · 24/09/2026

Is it normal for arXiv submissions to be "on hold" for nearly a week now? Our forthcoming RecSys Research & Practice Note has been stuck in the queue since last week 😢.

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Alex Kale @kalealex.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

What AI scales about science are the parts that are most broken and gameable. With the exception of combinatorial problems like protein folding, we need more thinking and less rote computation.

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 23/09/2026

i think you can fairly say that the second trump administration is the most racist federal administration since woodrow wilson and honestly i'm not sure that it isn't more racist than wilson's

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Michael Ekstrand @md.ekstrandom.net · 23/09/2026

(I will say, it is frustrating that for all of the university's claims about the need to teach effective use of AI, whatever that means, the subscription they acquired for us to do that doesn't have the actually interesting bits. I have many other frustrations, but this is one.)

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Michael Ekstrand @md.ekstrandom.net · 23/09/2026

(If I could just write Rust so type/impl mismatches explode instead of just being wrong, that would be nice, but such is not the world.)

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Michael Ekstrand @md.ekstrandom.net · 23/09/2026

New, better fix in place and passes tests. Gemini 3.5 Flash then found a lingering fit-and-finish problem with the type signature of a method I was touching in the fix path. Wasn’t the problem, but over time the implementation and type got out of sync (declared type was too narrow). Worth fixing.

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Michael Ekstrand @md.ekstrandom.net · 23/09/2026

I was fixing a LensKit bug today. An annoying bug at the interaction of 2-3 different layers of logic. GPT-6 Sol didn’t find root cause correctly, but once I did and drafted a hand-crafted fix, it correctly reported that the fix introduced a new data structure inconsistency. Ok, round 2.

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Michael Ekstrand @md.ekstrandom.net · 23/09/2026

I’m a pretty good programmer (for certain technical/elegance-focused definitions of good, at least). Every damn time I point a competent model at some of my code, it finds meaningful ways to improve it, consistency issues I missed, etc. I don’t know how I feel about this.

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Carlos Scheidegger @cscheid.net · 23/09/2026

Louder for the people in the back: Jev can’t be calibrated www.alexmolas.com/2026/09/23/j... Friends don’t let friends lie about the accessibility of the DGD even in principle

alexmolas.com

Jev can't be calibrated

Jev is a useful zero-shot classifier, but its probabilities can't be calibrated for your data. Calibration depends on your data distribution, which Jev never sees, so treat its outputs as scores and r...

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Micah @rincewind.run · 22/09/2026

stand up for trans people: it is the right thing to do and it just will not hurt you, not now, not in this environment and maybe folks can start to relearn that trans people are pretty fucking cool, actually

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Michael Ekstrand @md.ekstrandom.net · 22/09/2026

shit like this inclines me to believe in a multiverse, because a universe in which these clowns (Bret, not Maris) make a living for ideas cannot be the best universe in existence. i mostly jest, but still…

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Drew Starr @thedrewstarr.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

"is a hot dog a.sandwich" was a load-bearing non-debate debate that got unfairly stigmatized as pointless ragebait when it was actually an important release valve

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Pookleblinky @pookleblinky.bsky.social · 28/02/2026

That is *all* a chatbot offers: unaccountability. A drone-strike on a nursery being just as unaccountable as a waymo running a red light, with just as little consideration at all given to it legally or ethically.

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Michael Ekstrand @md.ekstrandom.net · 22/09/2026

#DS9 Oh this is the Ferengi Mulan episode.

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Michael Ekstrand @md.ekstrandom.net · 22/09/2026

Back on my #DS9 bullshit. S2E5 Rules of Acquisition. Morn is sleeping on the promenade and Dax is taking Quark’s shirt in Ferengi poker.

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Robin Burke @robin-burke.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

On Thursday, I get to relax while @md.ekstrandom.net presents our TORS highlight paper🏅and Solé Pera, @julianeidhardt.bsky.social, @navatintarev.bsky.social and Özlem Özgöbek present our Women in RecSys winning paper. 🏆 6/8

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Robin Burke @robin-burke.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

A busy week for That Recommender Systems Lab at RecSys 2026! WHERE TO SEE US: We start off the week with Elizabeth McKinnie and @aishwarya-satwani.bsky.social at the Doctoral Symposium (not public but you can catch their posters on Monday). 1/8

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Michael Ekstrand @md.ekstrandom.net · 21/09/2026

me: needs to write lecture slides. also me: drafts Spice Girls paper titles.

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Michael Ekstrand @md.ekstrandom.net · 21/09/2026

Leaving at the end of the week for #RecSys2026, where my students & I are doing a lot of cool stuff. Read more about it from Drexel SCIS, and hope to see you in Minneapolis! drexel.edu/cci/news/202...

drexel.edu

Strong Howley College Presence Planned for RecSys 2026 - School of Computer and Information Sciences

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Michael Ekstrand @md.ekstrandom.net · 21/09/2026

Adding taint support to my HTTP client script code, and running into an interesting Q. I'm requiring URLs to be untainted, but assuming the HTTP client library properly escape values, should query parameters and headers also be taint-checked?

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Imani Gandy @angryblacklady.blacksky.app · 20/09/2026

I just honestly can't get over that Save Women Sports, an anti-trans group could only find five trans athletes competing K through 12. Five. The NCAA president testified a year and a half ago or so that there were less than 10 college level trans athletes. What the fuck are we doing, people

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