← Feed

Posts

• View post

  Now available on my web site: preprint and reproducer code for our #RecSys2026 Research & Practice Note on Monte Carlo power analysis, with @karlhigley, Daniel Kluver, and Bart Knijnenburg, from our POPROX work. https://md.ekstrandom.net/pubs/poprox-power

• View post

  my silly Tcl project has basic HTTP client support now… https://tcl.mde.one/guardian/http.html

• View post

  prepping for the first week of the term with a fresh notebook, Hakushu single malt, and Ukrainian progressive metalcore.

• View post

  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?

• View post

  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! https://drexel.edu/cci/news/2026/September/strong-howley-college-presence-planned-for-recsys-2026/

• View post

  RE: https://hci.social/@mdekstrand/117306350391578289 time signatures? where we're going, we don't need no consistent time signatures.

• View post

  What the everlasting nope? https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1wjdpgx/psa_grammarly_will_send_unhinged_messages_to_all/

• View post

  tfw the theme you use for your lab site finally hits 1.0! and it has a modular theme architecture instead of a big repo you keep merging with! and one of the release highlights is moving from Bootstrap to Tailwind 😔.

• View post

  RE: https://mastodon.social/@firefoxwebdevs/116680726980295049 there are no docs for this in mdn or caniuse yet, so not sure on the status of actually being able to use this, but it looks interesting. is CSS going to match on the actual tag name, or on the tag adjusted by heading offset?

• View post

  This. And even “fast-moving” databases like DuckDB are careful not to break code, especially standard SQL that's worked for 40 years. (This is one of the reasons I like Duck so much — I'm confident my stuff will still work, just faster, as they innovate.) https://fagnerbrack.com/learn-sql-once-use-it-for-30-years-9aceb0bdee03

• View post

  TIL that TOML does not allow you to write `null` and this is A Problem for one of my use cases and <blargh>. the github includes in-depth discussion of why “just leave the value unset” is not enough, but nope, no `null`.

• View post

  Going to #RecSys2026? I'll be giving a tutorial, “Continuous Automated Reproducibility: Practical Tools and Workflows for Repeatable and Reproducible Research”. Don't miss it! More details to come :)

• View post

  New at my blog: keeping track of submissions and work outputs, to make it a lot easier to prepare annual / promotion review materials, compute your personal acceptance rate for your favorite conference, and more. https://md.ekstrandom.net/blog/2026/05/logbooks

• View post

  new things are coming! #lenskit #recsys

• View post

  Things like this (popping GitHub through a malicious VSCode extension) make me seriously consider going back to Emacs. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/github-confirms-breach-of-3-800-repos-via-malicious-vscode-extension/

• View post

  Always seems to blow a few students’ minds when we start talking about psychology of preference and the relationship of preference to observable #recsys data, and we get to some questions: • is the experience of utility in the moment the same as memory of that utility? • if they are different, is our goal to recommend a movie or book the user will enjoy in the moment, or one they will remember having enjoyed? • how might that difference affect system design or evaluation?

• View post

  If a blind student wants to do a CS undergrad (in US) specifically to work in assistive technology, what schools would be particularly good for that? (Feel free to boost for reach.)

• View post

  We’re still seeking applicants for a research project specialist / software engineer to help build a news #recsys platform to support user-facing research on news recommendation, personalization, etc. Happy to answer questions! Details and application info here: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/3670339186 Please boost for reach!

• View post

  Do you appreciate news? Do you want to help #recsys research? POPROX News is open for subscriptions! The Platform for OPen Recommendation and Online eXpermentation is an #NSFfunded project to help scientists and journalists explore better ways to select and present news stories. Our MVP is a daily personalized newsletter — if you'd like to receive that, and periodic surveys, sign up at https://user.poprox.ai/enroll?source=ff&subsource=memd After signup, you'll receive...

• View post

  uggh ubuntu why? 26.04 is finally bringing TPM-backed disk encryption, but it requires some weird snap-based kernel thing. instead of, you know, just a normal systemd initrd like debian, fedora, arch, and everyone else use. https://documentation.ubuntu.com/release-notes/26.04/changes-since-previous-interim/#resolute-tpm-fde-limitations

• View post

  sometimes the low-tech startup is what the moment requires. https://wheelfront.com/this-alberta-startup-sells-no-tech-tractors-for-half-price/

• View post

  This is an interesting read about how database designs fall over in the face of AI agents: https://arpitbhayani.me/blogs/defensive-databases/

• View post

  New one today: someone found the folder where I publish pre-release CI builds of LensKit, and reported it to the Drexel bug bounty for IP leak / dependency confusion / reverse engineering risk.

• View post

  “In contributor poker, you bet on the contributor, not on the contents of their first PR.” — on PRs, community and AI-generated contributions in Zig. https://kristoff.it/blog/contributor-poker-and-ai/

• View post

  A discovery / fresh articulation I had in class today: one of the things I love about #recsys is the direct connection between math and human experience. Here's a statistical property, and here's why naïvely using it would turn your recommender into a door-to-door missionary for the Good News of Bananas.

• View post

  Very thoughtful essay on #AI, science, research software, the hard work of learning, and what the actual meaningful outputs of academic research work are (spoiler: not the jupyter notebooks of data analyses). https://ergosphere.blog/posts/the-machines-are-fine/

• View post

  RE: https://toot.cafe/@baldur/116334435779311989 Yeah. It's… bad, and also software quality has been a long-standing problem with ebs and flows. Some of the BS in Claude Code reminded me of when I was doing Groovy metaprogramming, and finding the language had 2–3 different subsystems implementing similar capabilities, completely differently. Except worse.

• View post

  current python frustration: the maze of twisty weight storage formats, not all alike. Spent some time researching how to save parameters for LensKit models & pipelines with something other than pickles, and came away somewhat sad about the current state of play. I think I can make a pretty workable solution on HDF5, though. https://github.com/lenskit/lkpy/issues/690#issuecomment-4194748854

• View post

  Any friends have experience with Microsoft Loops? It’s been suggested to me as a possible research lab wiki / knowledge base solution (within Drexel’s existing software subscriptions).

• View post

  Well this is interesting. Looks a lot like the kind of things 'jj' has been working to bring to version control. https://github.github.com/gh-stack/