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p. sampson

@psampson.net
458 followers 769 following 102 posts

cs phd @ penn, nsf-grfp fellow, spelman alum. 💭 people, platforms, power. they/she. 🧋 🍑 🧑🏾‍💻 psampson.net

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Reposted by p. sampson
Acyn @acyn.bsky.social · 21/05/2026
AOC: This is what drinking water in Georgia looks like after Meta began data center construction in the community.
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Lupita Nihongo @otsumamiboy.blacksky.app · 08/05/2026
The logic is that a rising tide lifts all ships. And regardless of all social advances, once again, won through Black liberation movements, we have remained in at the bottom rung of the social ladder. Black women, the backbone of our movements, the most educated demo in USA, remain in a double bind.
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 30/04/2026
“racial quotas” are when black people have representation i guess
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Willie Agnew @willie-agnew.bsky.social · 18/04/2026
I had such a great time co-organizing the CHI workshop on Standards for LLM Use in Human Subjects Research! We had a fantastic turnout and discussion, and we're looking forward to continuing this conversation to produce concrete standards.
image of workshop participants
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Soraya Nadia McDonald @soraya.press · 08/02/2026
so much of our present misery is just a giant, prolonged backlash to integration
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Norm Charlatan @normcharlatan.bsky.social · 16/01/2026
I don’t think people quite understand that the occupation by ICE in the Twin Cities has more or less erased non-white people from public life. They cannot safely exist in any space accessible to the public and moving between private places leaves folks vulnerable to kidnapping by armed masked goons.
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Miranda Bogen @mbogen.bsky.social · 16/01/2026
AI companies should be extremely careful not to repeat the many mistakes that have been made — and harms that have resulted from — the adoption of personalized ads on social media and around the web. (4/5)
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Dr. Casey Fiesler @cfiesler.bsky.social · 16/12/2025
(2) Give authors of papers the ability to edit the AI-generated summary. Ideally directly, but if that's not possible, to easily request a change. (3) Give authors the ability to opt out of having an AI summary on their paper entirely. (Or require an opt in.)
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Dr. Casey Fiesler @cfiesler.bsky.social · 16/12/2025
As someone who has ::checks notes:: 117 publications in the ACM Digital Library, can confirm I was not asked nor told about this. It doesn't appear on ALL papers, and I can't intuit a rhyme or reason to which ones. Maybe I shouldn't be, but I'm legitimately surprised there's not an opt out option.
Artificial Intelligence Tools on the ACM Digital Library
ACM uses Artificial Intelligence tools to enhance your research experience.

Currently, we offer written summaries of individual articles as well as podcast-style audio summaries of conference sessions. We will soon add chat-style interactivity to our content and search functionality. All summaries on the Digital Library are clearly labeled as AI-generated. When citing ACM content, authors should always cite the original article, not an AI-generated summary.

AI can make mistakes, and it cannot replace the experience of reading an article in full. But we do believe it will help you find, understand and use ACM content both more quickly and more deeply.

These tools were designed in consultation with a diverse group of Digital Library stakeholders and will continue to evolve as Artificial Intelligence advances. We are continuously tuning our Foundational Model to optimize readability and we conduct regular audits for hallucinations and other errors. We are very interested in your thoughts and suggestions- please leave them by clicking the "Feedback" button on the far right of this page. If you find a problem with a specific AI-generated summary, please return to that summary and click the Feedback there.
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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 16/12/2025
I wrote this brief talk on why “augmenting diversity” with LLMs is empirically unsubstantiable, conceptually flawed, and epistemically harmful and a nice surprise to see the organisers have made it public synthetic-data-workshop.github.io/papers/13.pdf
title: Cheap science, real harm: the cost of replacing human
participation with synthetic data

author: Abeba Birhane

abstract: Driven by the goals of augmenting diversity, increasing speed, reducing cost, the
use of synthetic data as a replacement for human participants is gaining traction
in AI research and product development. This talk critically examines the claim
that synthetic data can “augment diversity,” arguing that this notion is empirically
unsubstantiated, conceptually flawed, and epistemically harmful. While speed and
cost-efficiency may be achievable, they often come at the expense of rigour, insight,
and robust science. Drawing on research from dataset audits, model evaluations,
Black feminist scholarship, and complexity science, I argue that replacing human
participants with synthetic data risks producing both real-world and epistemic
harms at worst and superficial knowledge and cheap science at best
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Zohran Kwame Mamdani @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social · 14/12/2025
Statement on the Brown University shooting.
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p. sampson @psampson.net · 25/09/2025
becoming one of those computer scientists who won't stop yapping about my analog hobby of choice. (canon ae-1 · kodak ultramax 400)
Penn's Landing sign in Old City, taken at golden hour. A #firstoftheroll shot with an artsy light leak on the lefthand side.Brick rowhome style apartments in Old City, shot at late golden hour. The buildings have fun moody yellow detail, with a tree standing shadowed in the foreground. Pennsylvania Hospital rises just into view in the far background.Closeup of ivy and other greenery growing along/trailing off the pillar of a short, weathered grey/beige brick wall.The far sunlit interior of a garden in focus, shot past a wrought iron fence and long pine needles in soft focus in the foreground.
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Greg Pak @gregpak.net · 12/07/2025
the non-ironic, casual deployment of the white usage of "woke" in news articles and opinion pieces makes me want to scream
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Deb Raji @rajiinio.bsky.social · 09/07/2025
I've always felt somewhat uncomfortable with the framing of AI risk around the actions of "malicious actors". Because sometimes the malicious actor is the company that built the thing. And the model is causing harm because it was successfully steered into doing what it's creators wanted it to do.
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p. sampson @psampson.net · 23/06/2025
the research homies of all time are cooking btw 👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽
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m @keptsimple.bsky.social · 19/06/2025
y'know it's kind of a tell that they think celebrating the end of slavery is DEI
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Foz Meadows @fozmeadows.bsky.social · 18/06/2025
my hottest educational take is that schools should actively, non-punitively teach students how to admit when they don't know something, aren't sure or have made a mistake, with various teaching frameworks adapted to support this ideal, because people who can't admit fault are breaking the world
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Cat Hicks @grimalkina.bsky.social · 11/06/2025
Work can be so endlessly rigorous about the technical half of the word but the socio half just stands in for anything and everything
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Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social · 12/06/2025
the mainstream media has been steadily buying into the idea that science and academia are somehow "captured" by left and liberal ideologues, rather than the more obvious explanation that measured analysis leads people away from reactionary thought
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Nick Doty @npdoty.techpolicy.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/04/2025
anyway, if your problem with technology was those inconvenient people who do technical work, and how they ask questions, have opinions, take ethical stances, etc. then it might be especially tempting to just replace them with ai. fewer tedious coffees, for one thing.
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Lauren Tilton @nolauren.bsky.social · 12/06/2025
Important points @ach.bsky.social ACH2025 conference by Mohammad Suliman about the gaps in accessibility for research and programming. Taking notes for our new ACH Anthology!
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p. sampson @psampson.net · 11/06/2025
“fort robert e. lee” lmao give us irredeemable loser energy.
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p. sampson @psampson.net · 03/06/2025
mood.
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Mar Hicks @histoftech.bsky.social · 03/06/2025
I catch blocks if I talk about C19 but: There’s a new, more contagious strain spreading—“razor blade throat” is one symptom. But, most spread is SYMPTOMLESS. You DON’T KNOW you’re spreading it. More spread, more mutations & variants—>more disabled & dead. Put a mask on in public. We keep us safe.
Close up of a person wearing glasses and a colorful mask from the brand masklab.
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Peter Gleick @petergleick.bsky.social · 31/05/2025
There are 2 previous historical cases of countries destroying their science and universities, crippling them for decades: Lysenkoism in the USSR and Nazi Germany. The Trump administration will be the 3rd. It's not just budgets but research, institutions, expertise, and training the next generation.
Graphs showing 25 years of budgets for the National Institute of Health, NASA, and the NSF. In all cases, the proposed budget for next year is far, far below any year of the previous quarter century.
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Dan Greene @dmgreene.bsky.social · 01/06/2025
Few tech critiques have aged as well as Phil Agre saying "Oh come on. Face recognition will work well enough to be dangerous, and poorly enough to be dangerous as well." Obviously lands well beyond face rec.
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Maureen Johnson @maureenjohnsonbooks.com · 22/05/2025
The reason you're having trouble concentrating if you are here in the US is because we're basically being chased around by serial killers and being asked to disregard the fact.
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Phil Lewis @phillewis.bsky.social · 13/05/2025
40 years ago on this date, police dropped a bomb on a West Philadelphia neighborhood
phillytrib.com
MOVE bombing 40 years later: A day of reflection and remembrance
Forty years ago today, city officials made the unconscionable decision to bomb its own people.
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Melody Schreiber @melodyschreiber.com · 15/05/2025
So, you might be wondering: does it matter if Covid shots are recommended? Yes, yes it does. 1. Insurance won't cover them if they're not recommended. That's a HUGE challenge for a lot of people. 2. If more people skip the shots, manufacturers will make fewer doses, making them harder to find.
wsj.com
Exclusive | HHS to Stop Recommending Routine Covid Shots for Children, Pregnant Women
CDC currently recommends that everyone six months and older receive the vaccines
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p. sampson @psampson.net · 10/05/2025
Your Pope name is the last thing you ate + the # of letters in your first name. pope dosa viii
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Alex Hanna @alexhanna.bsky.social · 10/05/2025
Highly recommend following the work of the Southern Environmental Law Center who have tracking this and other polluting data center projects in the South www.selc.org/topic/data-c...
selc.org
Data centers across the South
There’s a data center boom in the South, with inadequate consideration of how we will provide energy to these facilities that consume 10 to 50 times the amount of energy of a typical commercial buildi...
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Yvonne Lam @yvonnezlam.bsky.social · 05/05/2025
I don't think "comfortable dealing with uncertainty" should mean "We build random shit because we didn't talk to the person who asked us to build the thing about what they want."
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p. sampson @psampson.net · 05/05/2025
Personalization is political. Very excited to share a piece I co-authored with @mbogen.bsky.social as a Google Public Policy Fellow @cendemtech.bsky.social! cdt.org/insights/its...
cdt.org
It’s (Getting) Personal: How Advanced AI Systems Are Personalized
This brief was co-authored by Princess Sampson. Generative artificial intelligence has reshaped the landscape of consumer technology and injected new dimensions into familiar technical tools. Search e...
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Kate Starbird @katestarbird.bsky.social · 04/05/2025
Thinking about devastating cuts to NSF: US gov-funded science has been the engine upon which most of the tech wealth was generated. But the oligarchs (currently hoarding much of that $) think it’s their own brilliance & not the accident of standing close to the scientific engine that made them rich.
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Devindra Hardawar @devindra.bsky.social · 04/05/2025
Happy “The Acolyte was great and I’m not afraid to say it!” day for all who celebrate! www.engadget.com/the-acolyte-...
engadget.com
The Acolyte review: Star Wars at its best
The Acolyte demonstrates what's possible when Star Wars embraces new characters and genres, while abandoning the Dark Side of nostalgia.
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Emily St. James @emilystjams.bsky.social · 02/05/2025
I do think the experience of lockdown forced every single person alive to confront some piece of themselves they didn't really want to think about, no matter how minor, and a lot of people just could not fucking handle it.
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p. sampson @psampson.net · 01/05/2025
🫥
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Greg Jericho @grogsgamut.bsky.social · 24/04/2025
"Attorney General shall initiate appropriate action to repeal or amend the implementing regulations for Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for all agencies" What's Title VI? "prohibits discrimination against or otherwise excluding individuals on the basis of race, color, or national origin"
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ACLU @aclu.org · 21/04/2025
yes, ACLU never kidding.
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I Travel Like Sound Dog @chadstanton.blacksky.app · 02/04/2025
A lot of people like to dismiss racism as insubstantial to material realities but we’re watching a nation burn trillions of dollars in wealth to entrench a racial system of domination.
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p. sampson @psampson.net · 02/04/2025
me trying to dine outdoors whilst actively aggravated that one of the biggest publications in the world felt the need to do a hit piece on masking as the CDC is being gutted in the midst of multiple public health crises
meme of Zendaya in a black trenchcoat and opaque sunglasses. she’s sitting on the patio of an Italian restaurant, hands clasped firmly on the tabletop.  she has an impassable expression towards whatever her dinner partner is saying (or she’s just hungry and ready to order!)
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Mar Hicks @histoftech.bsky.social · 01/04/2025
someone shared this on insta and I thought, i better not reshare this bc it’ll piss ppl off. anyway.
Shaking hands in agreement meme—liberals, conservatives, and an upsetting amount of leftists: 
NOT MASKING IN PUBLIC SPACES.
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cait (and adonis) @cait.bsky.social · 27/03/2025
i google the definitions of words i've known for 30 years to make sure i'm using them correctly. if you're posting information that's not accurate, that's on you
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cait (and adonis) @cait.bsky.social · 27/03/2025
we gotta start being meaner to people who refuse to do one second of research on things that can be factually verified, and just come online and lie. "if i recall correctly" you don't. i don't care if you had good intentions or meant well, you just lied. why are you lying
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