Tootfinder

An extremely overdue blog post about the last NSR camp and the games I ran and played there, including a lot of thoughts on playing D&D 4E again many years later
https://seedlinggames.com/blogging/discourse/nsr_camp_2.html

The Enemy from Within: A Study of Political Delegitimization Discourse in Israeli Political Speech
Naama Rivlin-Angert, Guy Mor-Lan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15524 https://

The Enemy from Within: A Study of Political Delegitimization Discourse in Israeli Political Speech
We present the first large-scale computational study of political delegitimization discourse (PDD), defined as symbolic attacks on the normative validity of political entities. We curate and manually annotate a novel Hebrew-language corpus of 10,410 sentences drawn from Knesset speeches (1993-2023), Facebook posts (2018-2021), and leading news outlets, of which 1,812 instances (17.4\%) exhibit PDD and 642 carry additional annotations for intensity, incivility, target type, and affective framing…

Unpacking Generative AI in Education: Computational Modeling of Teacher and Student Perspectives in Social Media Discourse
Paulina DeVito, Akhil Vallala, Sean Mcmahon, Yaroslav Hinda, Benjamin Thaw, Hanqi Zhuang, Hari Kalva
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.16412

Unpacking Generative AI in Education: Computational Modeling of Teacher and Student Perspectives in Social Media Discourse
Generative AI (GAI) technologies are quickly reshaping the educational landscape. As adoption accelerates, understanding how students and educators perceive these tools is essential. This study presents one of the most comprehensive analyses to date of stakeholder discourse dynamics on GAI in education using social media data. Our dataset includes 1,199 Reddit posts and 13,959 corresponding top-level comments. We apply sentiment analysis, topic modeling, and author classification. To support th…

the golang discourse reminds me of the term “balge”, short for “by and large good enough”, used to describe software that gets the job done but has misbehaviours and limitations that often cause problems
https://dotat.at/random/info.eagle.current.status

Cognitive Castes: Artificial Intelligence, Epistemic Stratification, and the Dissolution of Democratic Discourse
Craig S Wright
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14218

Cognitive Castes: Artificial Intelligence, Epistemic Stratification, and the Dissolution of Democratic Discourse
Artificial intelligence functions not as an epistemic leveller, but as an accelerant of cognitive stratification, entrenching and formalising informational castes within liberal-democratic societies. Synthesising formal epistemology, political theory, algorithmic architecture, and economic incentive structures, the argument traces how contemporary AI systems selectively amplify the reasoning capacity of individuals equipped with recursive abstraction, symbolic logic, and adversarial interrogati…

Anyone who follows me has probably gathered that I've become a fan of Discourse after running a few Discourse instances. They are currently requesting feedback.
I was pleased to see that they used a survey vendor that appears to have meaningful a11y — I didn't look for aria labels so I won't speak to that, but what I did notice is that there is explicitly-labeled support for keyboard-only interaction on every page, and I really appreciated that thoughtfulness.

Das metadaten.community-Forum war down. Ursache war die Integration von Plugins, in den Discourse-Core (https://meta.discourse.org/t/bundling-more-popular-plugins-with-discourse-core/373574) in Verbindung mit einem bei uns konfigurierten sonttäglich…

Has anyone provided helper functions with and for one of their :nixos: #NixOS modules? 🤔
https://discourse.nixos.org/t/providing-helper-functions-in-and…

Providing helper functions in and for a module
Some (of my) module options would benefit greatly from helper functions for defining option values. An example would be populating services.jupyterub.kernels, which can get quite verbose if you include things like wrapping in an FHS env or custom virtualenv management. Sure, types.submodule exists, but such a submodule is rather suitable for perfectly similar structures with just different values. Instead, something like this would be helpful: { pkgs, config, lib, ... }: { services.jupyterhu…

DiscoSG: Towards Discourse-Level Text Scene Graph Parsing through Iterative Graph Refinement
Shaoqing Lin, Chong Teng, Fei Li, Donghong Ji, Lizhen Qu, Zhuang Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.15583

DiscoSG: Towards Discourse-Level Text Scene Graph Parsing through Iterative Graph Refinement
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) now generate discourse-level, multi-sentence visual descriptions, challenging text scene graph parsers originally designed for single-sentence caption-to-graph mapping. Current approaches typically merge sentence-level parsing outputs for discourse input, often missing phenomena like cross-sentence coreference, resulting in fragmented graphs and degraded downstream VLM task performance. To address this, we introduce a new task, Discourse-level text Scene Graph pars…

Sociotechnical Imaginaries of ChatGPT in Higher Education: The Evolving Media Discourse
Yinan Sun, Ali Unlu, Aditya Johri
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14692 https://

Sociotechnical Imaginaries of ChatGPT in Higher Education: The Evolving Media Discourse
This study investigates how U.S. news media framed the use of ChatGPT in higher education from November 2022 to October 2024. Employing Framing Theory and combining temporal and sentiment analysis of 198 news articles, we trace the evolving narratives surrounding generative AI. We found that the media discourse largely centered on institutional responses; policy changes and teaching practices showed the most consistent presence and positive sentiment over time. Conversely, coverage of topics su…

Honestly the worst thing about AI and the main reason we should get rid of it is the endless discourse of it is “useful” or not.
I’d like to have Internet arguments about flat vs skeuomorphic design or which JavaScript framework is best or how Jony Ive says “Aluminium” again.

The War on Women -- When we said women and people who loved them needed to vote ... (Joyce Vance/Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance)
https://joycevance.substack.com/p/the-war-on-women
http://www.memeorandum.com/250720/p18#a250720p18

"Populism, platforms, and the challenges of science communication"
https://elephantinthelab.org/populism-platforms-and-the-challenges-of-science-communication/
"Teresa Völker interviewed Jeanette Hofmann about the rol…

Over the past few months, we have seen the Trump administration engage not only in medical misinformation, but in active censorship of scientific discourse.
Since he took the helm at HHS, Kennedy’s unscientific views on vaccines and some other medical matters
-- coupled with the agency’s widespread research and staff cuts,
-- have prompted protests from scientists inside and outside HHS plus lawsuits.
Medical experts say Kennedy’s policies are helping “sow distrust in …

#AI is a marketing term; before we discuss "AI is fake" vs "AI is real" we need to unfold what we *mean* by AI.
For example, "artificial general intelligence" is fake and can't hurt you. Layoffs excused by "AI efficiency" are real and can hurt you.
Linkedin discourse is fake - but it CAN hurt you.

Democracies should stop focusing on efficiency: Lack thereof and friction are important parts of what defines a healthy democracy. Efficiency will always sacrifice participation, representation and meaningful political discourse. The focus on it is a path into authoritarianism. In the essay ...

“I am disappointed in the AI discourse” https://steveklabnik.com/writing/i-am-disappointed-in-the-ai-discourse/

Cross-Layer Design of Vector-Symbolic Computing: Bridging Cognition and Brain-Inspired Hardware Acceleration
Shuting Du, Mohamed Ibrahim, Zishen Wan, Luqi Zheng, Boheng Zhao, Zhenkun Fan, Che-Kai Liu, Tushar Krishna, Arijit Raychowdhury, Haitong Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14245

Cross-Layer Design of Vector-Symbolic Computing: Bridging Cognition and Brain-Inspired Hardware Acceleration
Vector Symbolic Architectures (VSAs) have been widely deployed in various cognitive applications due to their simple and efficient operations. The widespread adoption of VSAs has, in turn, spurred the development of numerous hardware solutions aimed at optimizing their performance. Despite these advancements, a comprehensive and unified discourse on the convergence of hardware and algorithms in the context of VSAs remains somewhat limited. The paper aims to bridge the gap between theoretical so…

How I found out that Discourse now offers "AI" summaries of threads: in the 400 post long thread on iNaturalist about the use of LLMs on iNaturalist, one participant clicked the "AI summary" button of Discourse and then cited from it.
Unsurprisingly, that summary was wrong, completely misrepresenting a person's stated opinion by 180⁰, kinda proving a point there! 🤣

Sometimes I’m posting about Syndicalism. Suddenly, I’m deep into LGBTQIA rights, because yes, my brain’s got tabs open everywhere.
Mid-rant, autism brain hits and it’s like, nope, time to fire up YouTube on the Debian box, because special interests top all discourse. The playlist is always oddly specific.
Then, work panic: my boss exists, bills exist. Pretend to be productive, start the loop again.

Understanding Online Polarization Through Human-Agent Interaction in a Synthetic LLM-Based Social Network
Tim Donkers, J\"urgen Ziegler
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.15866

Understanding Online Polarization Through Human-Agent Interaction in a Synthetic LLM-Based Social Network
The rise of social media has fundamentally transformed how people engage in public discourse and form opinions. While these platforms offer unprecedented opportunities for democratic engagement, they have been implicated in increasing social polarization and the formation of ideological echo chambers. Previous research has primarily relied on observational studies of social media data or theoretical modeling approaches, leaving a significant gap in our understanding of how individuals respond t…

Unequal Voices: How LLMs Construct Constrained Queer Narratives
Atreya Ghosal, Ashim Gupta, Vivek Srikumar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15585 https://…

Unequal Voices: How LLMs Construct Constrained Queer Narratives
One way social groups are marginalized in discourse is that the narratives told about them often default to a narrow, stereotyped range of topics. In contrast, default groups are allowed the full complexity of human existence. We describe the constrained representations of queer people in LLM generations in terms of harmful representations, narrow representations, and discursive othering and formulate hypotheses to test for these phenomena. Our results show that LLMs are significantly limited i…

The hackathon FIRSTCON25 takes place physically at 37th ANNUAL FIRST CONFERENCE on Sunday 22nd June in Copenhagen.
GCVE.eu topic has been added to the hackathon.
🔗 About the hackathon https://discourse.ossbase.org/c/hackathon-firstcon25/12
🔗 GCVE.eu topic

hackathon@FIRSTCON25
FIRST is the global Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams and this category is for the hackathon at FIRSTCON25

Today, Maker Forums Discourse came under fairly heavy spam attack. It took me almost two hours to clean up and shore up our defenses a bit against the next wave.
This attack came from IPs all over the globe, not just from a few poorly-administered ASNs in the developing world as has sometimes happened in the past. One account name made it clear that this was a Fiverr job. 😭
Shout out to

AI tools are already helping marginalized communities daily - translations, image descriptions, text simplification.
You can/should hate Big Tech while recognizing real impacts - anything else isn't meaningful discourse.
#AI #CCC

Some good venting by Steve Klabnik about the sorry state of significant chunks of the AI debate today:
"What is breaking my brain a little bit is that all of the discussion online around AI is so incredibly polarized. This isn’t a “the middle is always right” sort of thing either, to be clear. It’s more that both the pro-AI and anti-AI sides are loudly proclaiming things that are pretty trivially verifiable as not true."

Passing the Turing Test in Political Discourse: Fine-Tuning LLMs to Mimic Polarized Social Media Comments
. Pazzaglia, V. Vendetti, L. D. Comencini, F. Deriu, V. Modugno
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14645

Passing the Turing Test in Political Discourse: Fine-Tuning LLMs to Mimic Polarized Social Media Comments
The increasing sophistication of large language models (LLMs) has sparked growing concerns regarding their potential role in exacerbating ideological polarization through the automated generation of persuasive and biased content. This study explores the extent to which fine-tuned LLMs can replicate and amplify polarizing discourse within online environments. Using a curated dataset of politically charged discussions extracted from Reddit, we fine-tune an open-source LLM to produce context-aware…

Identifying Algorithmic and Domain-Specific Bias in Parliamentary Debate Summarisation
Eoghan Cunningham, James Cross, Derek Greene
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14221

Identifying Algorithmic and Domain-Specific Bias in Parliamentary Debate Summarisation
The automated summarisation of parliamentary debates using large language models (LLMs) offers a promising way to make complex legislative discourse more accessible to the public. However, such summaries must not only be accurate and concise but also equitably represent the views and contributions of all speakers. This paper explores the use of LLMs to summarise plenary debates from the European Parliament and investigates the algorithmic and representational biases that emerge in this context.…

Discipline and Resistance: The Construction of a Digital Home for TikTok Refugees on Xiaohongshu
Xiaoyu Xiong, Yuting Peng, Summer Kwong, Anqi Huang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14465

Discipline and Resistance: The Construction of a Digital Home for TikTok Refugees on Xiaohongshu
This study examines how TikTok refugees moved to Xiaohongshu after TikTok was about to be banned in the United States. It utilizes Foucault's idea of heterotopia to demonstrate how Xiaohongshu became a crisis space for cross-cultural discussions across the Great Firewall. Through Critical Discourse Analysis of 586 user comments, the study reveals how Chinese and international users collaboratively constructed and contested a new online order through language negotiation, identity positioning, a…

""The [newly formed] Debcrafters’ […] team will take the lead on syncing & merging packages from Debian, reviewing proposed migration issues, upstreaming Ubuntu deltas, and take ownership of major transitions […]""
Makes me wonder how many similar efforts Canonical/Ubuntu already announced over the years to improved the interaction with Debian – and what became of them.

I am at the same position as this post lines out. I’m neither hard core pro or anti LLMs. I think they are useful in specific contexts e.g. distilling and querying big chunks of text based information. They are not a hail mary solution to every problem.
„A lot of people like Rust and hate Go, and a lot of people like Go and hate Rust. That’s fine. That doesn’t bother me. But there’s something different about [AI discourse] that is driving me up a wall.“

So I also read this post about the AI discourse (https://steveklabnik.com/writing/i-am-disappointed-in-the-ai-discourse/).
I do think that it is helpful to be precise in our grievances so let me articulate more precisely a complaint that the post…

summarizing the discourse today

After all, they called Joe Biden, the former Senator from CapitalOne and a devout Catholic, a socialist and communist.
One of the differences between the Right and Left in the USA is that the Right is dedicated to the idea of political tribal solidarity and social binaries, while the Left puts an overriding emphasis on its own diversity, that of the Right, and that of society.
It is part of how they manage to maintain themselves in power.

Ticket sales for #NixCon2025 are open! 🎉 🎆
https://discourse.nixos.org/t/ticket-sales-started-for-nixcon-2025/64756

Yes, well, your son and Trump at Deutsche Bank. And that sudden retirement that ushered in Kavanaugh.
'Democracy Is At Risk': Retired SCOTUS Justice Anthony Kennedy Expresses Grave Concerns Over 'Tone Of Our Political Discourse' - Above the Law
https://abovethelaw.com/2025/06/democracy-is-at-risk-retired-scotus-justice-anthony-kennedy-expresses-grave-concerns-over-tone-of-our-political-discourse/

Social Media Reactions to Open Source Promotions: AI-Powered GitHub Projects on Hacker News
Prachnachai Meakpaiboonwattana, Warittha Tarntong, Thai Mekratanavorakul, Chaiyong Ragkhitwetsagul, Pattaraporn Sangaroonsilp, Raula Kula, Morakot Choetkiertikul, Kenichi Matsumoto, Thanwadee Sunetnanta
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12643

Social Media Reactions to Open Source Promotions: AI-Powered GitHub Projects on Hacker News
Social media platforms have become more influential than traditional news sources, shaping public discourse and accelerating the spread of information. With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI), open-source software (OSS) projects can leverage these platforms to gain visibility and attract contributors. In this study, we investigate the relationship between Hacker News, a social news site focused on computer science and entrepreneurship, and the extent to which it influences de…

When topics of discourse prove difficult to approach, stories can help us on our way. This famed short story about a graceful city with an unexpected abberation helps me reflect on where I want to apply my capacity for writing, sketching and teaching.

https://axbom.com/omelas/

#DigitalEthics

#CFP: Seeking Chapters on Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Power, & Knowledge; Proposals Due July 1, 2025
https://ift.tt/qmNO1fC
Seeking chapters drawing on Foucault’s history of sexuality to analyze transgende…

#CFP: Seeking Chapters on Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Power, & Knowledge; Proposals Due July 1, 2025
Seeking chapters drawing on Foucault’s history of sexuality to analyze transgender themes in Indian film, television, and web series. We seek a diverse group of contributors from countries throughout the world. Chapters will be included in The Handbook of Indian Trans Cinema, alongside other chapters applying Foucauldian insights into power, knowledge, and discourse. (See Theme 13 below.) Proposals are due July 1, 2025.

from my link log —
Intra-procedural lifetime and borrowing analysis in Clang.
https://discourse.llvm.org/t/rfc-intra-procedural-lifetime-analysis-in-clang/86291
saved 2025-07-15

keeping up with the discourse on x dot com

Constructed Realities? Technical and Contextual Anomalies in a High-Profile Image
Matthias Wjst
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12237 https://

Constructed Realities? Technical and Contextual Anomalies in a High-Profile Image
This study offers a forensic assessment of a widely circulated photograph featuring Prince Andrew, Virginia Giuffre, and Ghislaine Maxwell - an image that has played a pivotal role in public discourse and legal narratives. Through analysis of multiple published versions, several inconsistencies are identified, including irregularities in lighting, posture, and physical interaction, which are more consistent with digital compositing than with an unaltered snapshot. While the absence of the origi…

Thanks @… for posting this on discourse 3 years ago #nix to trigger a mismatch a bit earlier than $currentDate

Detecting Narrative Shifts through Persistent Structures: A Topological Analysis of Media Discourse
Mark M. Bailey, Mark I. Heiligman
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14836

Detecting Narrative Shifts through Persistent Structures: A Topological Analysis of Media Discourse
How can we detect when global events fundamentally reshape public discourse? This study introduces a topological framework for identifying structural change in media narratives using persistent homology. Drawing on international news articles surrounding major events - including the Russian invasion of Ukraine (Feb 2022), the murder of George Floyd (May 2020), the U.S. Capitol insurrection (Jan 2021), and the Hamas-led invasion of Israel (Oct 2023) - we construct daily co-occurrence graphs of n…

Language bubbles in online social networks
Alessandro Bellina, Donald Ruggiero Lo Sardo, Emanuele Brugnoli, Fabio Saracco, Pietro Gravino, Vittorio Loreto, Gabriele Di Bona
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13068

Language bubbles in online social networks
Social media platforms have become essential spaces for public discourse. While political polarisation and limited communication across different groups are widely acknowledged, the connection between social network fragmentation and the language features and quality used by various communities has received insufficient attention. This study aims to fill this gap by examining the social structure and linguistic richness of the Italian debate on Twitter/X. We analyse tweets and retweets from Ita…

DS@GT at CheckThat! 2025: Exploring Retrieval and Reranking Pipelines for Scientific Claim Source Retrieval on Social Media Discourse
Jeanette Schofield, Shuyu Tian, Hoang Thanh Thanh Truong, Maximilian Heil
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06563

DS@GT at CheckThat! 2025: Exploring Retrieval and Reranking Pipelines for Scientific Claim Source Retrieval on Social Media Discourse
Social media users often make scientific claims without citing where these claims come from, generating a need to verify these claims. This paper details work done by the DS@GT team for CLEF 2025 CheckThat! Lab Task 4b Scientific Claim Source Retrieval which seeks to find relevant scientific papers based on implicit references in tweets. Our team explored 6 different data augmentation techniques, 7 different retrieval and reranking pipelines, and finetuned a bi-encoder. Achieving an MRR@5 of 0.…

Do the rich pay their fair share? Enumerating the price of flying (and abolishing) premium air travel
Megan Yeo, Sebastian Nosenzo, Daniel S. Palmer, Alexei K. Varah, Lucas Woodley, Ashley Nunes
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12507

Do the rich pay their fair share? Enumerating the price of flying (and abolishing) premium air travel
Premium air travel is often associated with a disproportionately large carbon emissions footprint. This association reflects the increased space and amenities typically found in premium cabins that existing discourse suggests makes their carriage more fuel, and consequently carbon, intensive. One increasingly popular solution is disincentivizing the use of premium cabins in favor of all-economy cabins. How effective might such a policy be. To what extent. And how may the revenue impact affect t…

This is good.
#ai

Proud to be acknowledged for my scholarly contributions to Ghibli Studies

Online Anti-sexist Speech: Identifying Resistance to Gender Bias in Political Discourse
Aditi Dutta, Susan Banducci
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11434 https://

Online Anti-sexist Speech: Identifying Resistance to Gender Bias in Political Discourse
Anti-sexist speech, i.e., public expressions that challenge or resist gendered abuse and sexism, plays a vital role in shaping democratic debate online. Yet automated content moderation systems, increasingly powered by large language models (LLMs), may struggle to distinguish such resistance from the sexism it opposes. This study examines how five LLMs classify sexist, anti-sexist, and neutral political tweets from the UK, focusing on high-salience trigger events involving female Members of Par…

Testing Hypotheses of Covariate Effects on Topics of Discourse
Gabriel Phelan, David A. Campbell
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05570 https://

Testing Hypotheses of Covariate Effects on Topics of Discourse
We introduce an approach to topic modelling with document-level covariates that remains tractable in the face of large text corpora. This is achieved by de-emphasizing the role of parameter estimation in an underlying probabilistic model, assuming instead that the data come from a fixed but unknown distribution whose statistical functionals are of interest. We propose combining a convex formulation of non-negative matrix factorization with standard regression techniques as a fast-to-compute and…

StorySpace: Technology supporting reflection, expression, and discourse in classroom narrative
Benjamin Watson, Janet Kim, Tim McEneany, Tom Moher, Claudia Hindo, Louis Gomez, Stephen Fransen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02156

StorySpace: Technology supporting reflection, expression, and discourse in classroom narrative
The StorySpace project studies the role new interface technologies might play in high school education. With this approach in mind, StorySpace is specifically designed to support and enhance classroom narrative, an already well-established classroom activity. StorySpace strives to achieve this through adherence to three design goals. The first is to trigger student reflection and interpretation. The narrative medium created by StorySpace should represent the topic of classroom discussion and le…

We’re closing in on this month’s release of OmniFocus 4.7, with planned dates, mutually-exclusive tags, and improved repeats!
Updated test builds are now available, adding new settings for Forecast counts and summary dots, adding support for keyboard modifiers when using drag-and-drop in Forecast on iPad and visionOS (bringing parity with the support already on Mac), and making other improvements and bug fixes.

I gotta say I find a lot of AI discourse around higher ed very confusing:
"if ChatGPT can write your essays is college even worth it?"
Did people think math teachers were assigning problem sets because *they* couldn't figure out the answers?
https://bsky.app/prof…

Artificial Intelligence and Civil Discourse: How LLMs Moderate Climate Change Conversations
Wenlu Fan, Wentao Xu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12077 https://

Artificial Intelligence and Civil Discourse: How LLMs Moderate Climate Change Conversations
As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into online platforms and digital communication spaces, their potential to influence public discourse - particularly in contentious areas like climate change - requires systematic investigation. This study examines how LLMs naturally moderate climate change conversations through their distinct communicative behaviors. We conduct a comparative analysis of conversations between LLMs and human users on social media platforms, using fiv…

Morgen um 10 Uhr findet die nächste metadaten.community-Stunde statt: https://metadaten.community/t/11-metadaten-community-stunde/855
Eine herzliche Einladung an alle Interessierten, insbesondere an Menschnen, die mit

Anyone using #JupyterHub (services.jupyterhub.enable=true) on :nixos: #NixOS? Then you should have run into the database migration issue here:

JupyterHub database migration
I am struggling hard to get my JupyterHub working again. After an update (longer ago), JupyterHub often requires a manual database migration and refuses to start: ❯ journalctl -efu jupyterhub ... Jun 04 22:10:41 yann-desktop-nixos jupyterhub[1038575]: Found database schema version 0eee8c825d24 != 4621fec11365. Backup your database and run `jupyterhub upgrade-db` to upgrade to the latest schema. ... Jun 04 22:10:42 yann-desktop-nixos systemd[1]: Failed to start Jupyterhub development server. …

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.04104 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csLG_…

Position: We Need Responsible, Application-Driven (RAD) AI Research
This position paper argues that achieving meaningful scientific and societal advances with artificial intelligence (AI) requires a responsible, application-driven approach (RAD) to AI research. As AI is increasingly integrated into society, AI researchers must engage with the specific contexts where AI is being applied. This includes being responsive to ethical and legal considerations, technical and societal constraints, and public discourse. We present the case for RAD-AI to drive research th…

I could imagine the exact same discourse if American Eagle and Sweeney did a "Sydney has OK jeans" and she gave a OK hand symbol.
it sucks that dog whistles exist. It sucks you don't get to choose them. It sucks you don't get to ignore them, esp if you are a marketing team who's job it is to pick the right words.

An Angry Judge in the Abrego Garcia Case (Joyce Vance/Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance)
https://joycevance.substack.com/p/an-angry-judge-in-the-abrego-garcia
http://www.memeorandum.com/250712/p21#a250712p21

Fair Play in the Newsroom: Actor-Based Filtering Gender Discrimination in Text Corpora
Stefanie Urchs, Veronika Thurner, Matthias A{\ss}enmacher, Christian Heumann, Stephanie Thiemichen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13169

Fair Play in the Newsroom: Actor-Based Filtering Gender Discrimination in Text Corpora
Large language models are increasingly shaping digital communication, yet their outputs often reflect structural gender imbalances that originate from their training data. This paper presents an extended actor-level pipeline for detecting and mitigating gender discrimination in large-scale text corpora. Building on prior work in discourse-aware fairness analysis, we introduce new actor-level metrics that capture asymmetries in sentiment, syntactic agency, and quotation styles. The pipeline supp…

Building a Media Ecosystem Observatory from Scratch: Infrastructure, Methodology, and Insights
Zeynep Pehlivan, Saewon Park, Alexei Sisulu Abrahams, Mika Desblancs-Patel, Benjamin David Steel, Aengus Bridgman
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10942

Building a Media Ecosystem Observatory from Scratch: Infrastructure, Methodology, and Insights
Understanding the flow of information across today's fragmented digital media landscape requires scalable, cross-platform infrastructure. In this paper, we present the Canadian Media Ecosystem Observatory, a national-scale infrastructure designed to monitor political and media discourse across platforms in near real time. Media Ecosystem Observatory (MEO) data infrastructure features custom crawlers for major platforms, a unified indexing pipeline, and a normalization layer that harmonizes he…

Virtualizing RAN: Science, Strategy, and Architecture of Software-Defined Mobile Networks
Ryan Barker
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09878 https://

Virtualizing RAN: Science, Strategy, and Architecture of Software-Defined Mobile Networks
Virtualising the Radio Access Network (RAN) is widely touted as the corner-stone of affordable 5G and a prerequisite for AI-native 6G. Yet current discourse often isolates spectrum policy, cloud engineering and organisational readiness into silos. This paper delivers an integrated analysis that spans science, technology, business strategy and culture. I first review spectrum-auction economics and show-via a comparative study of T-Mobile US and Verizon-that mid-band contiguity leveraged through …

I am slowly but surely enjoying Reiner Keller's "Sociology of knowledge approach to discourse". I highly appreciate the level of care towards what is identified/extracted and taken for real. However, as with any other sociological framework, the position of the analyst remains problematic.
Even if one masters the analytical practice, communicating it remains problematic, as language must be used to do so. Traditionally, sociologists attempt to find a new form of language, which often becomes increasingly abstract and incomprehensible.
I wonder what the alternative would be: expressing analytical insights in every possible language or discursive logic (which is practically impossible), or at least in those connected to the analysis. Language translation or 'elif' could be examples of this. However, I also consider 'speaking in your terms' when communicating with individuals from different backgrounds.
#ADSK #Sociology #DiscourseAnalysis

It's interesting how the "I use AI and it's great and the future" blog posts have escaped LinkedIn and now just pour fire on an overheated discourse.
Question is a bit: Why now?

If you happen to resemble a fascist, talk like a fascist, parade around like a fascist, and suppress like a fascist, congratulations! You’ve just unlocked the exclusive, ultra-elite "Insta-Blocked" club membership—no application needed, no trial, just instant social media exile.
Because why waste time on subtlety when you can just hit the block button and pretend the problem vanished? Welcome to the future of discourse: if you fascist, you get ghosted faster than a bad Tinde…

Walmart heiress Christy Walton is facing backlash, and Walmart is facing some calls for a boycott from Trump supporters
after placing a full-page ad in The New York Times urging Americans to attend town halls and engage in civic discourse.
While the "No Kings Day" ad did not mention Donald Trump by name, its emphasis on values like honoring commitments to allies, defending against dictators, and respecting trading partners was widely interpreted as a critique of Trump…

Walmart Faces MAGA Boycott After Heiress Funds 'No Kings' Ad
While the "No Kings Day" ad did not mention Trump by name, its emphasis was widely interpreted as a critique of his agenda.

Combating Homelessness Stigma with LLMs: A New Multi-Modal Dataset for Bias Detection
Jonathan A. Karr Jr., Benjamin F. Herbst, Ting Hua, Matthew Hauenstein, Georgina Curto, Nitesh V. Chawla
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13187

Combating Homelessness Stigma with LLMs: A New Multi-Modal Dataset for Bias Detection
Homelessness is a persistent social challenge, impacting millions worldwide. Over 770,000 people experienced homelessness in the U.S. in 2024. Social stigmatization is a significant barrier to alleviation, shifting public perception, and influencing policymaking. Given that online and city council discourse reflect and influence part of public opinion, it provides valuable insights to identify and track social biases. This research contributes to alleviating homelessness by acting on public opi…

Don’t understand all the people posting “[that PAC-Man AI article] was probably written by AI” meaning it as a serious contribution to the discourse.
Even if it was (it wasn’t) it wouldn’t change anything—the author of an article is responsible for its contents.
Their editor is responsible for signing of on it.

Everyone thinks #AI can do someone else's job. Designers want to get rid of PMs. PMs think they no longer need devs. Devs can't wait to generate designs. And managers are anticipating getting rid of us all.
Alas, in the few cases the tools work at all, they get you no more than 80% of the way there. Without experts to identify where that 20-100% gap is, you have nothing.
I've …

The Product Picnic
Writing on UX and product management to connect today's discourse with classic insights that the industry forgot.

It’s 1984 - Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance
https://joycevance.substack.com/p/its-1984

Gleich um 11 Uhr findet die 10. metadaten.community-Stunde statt: https://metadaten.community/t/10-metadaten-community-stunde/812
Es sind alle herzlich eingeladen, die sich über die Arbeit mit

Quantifying Visualization Vibes: Measuring Socio-Indexicality at Scale
Amy Rae Fox, Michelle Morgenstern, Graham M. Jones, Arvind Satyanarayan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06786 h…

Quantifying Visualization Vibes: Measuring Socio-Indexicality at Scale
What impressions might readers form with visualizations that go beyond the data they encode? In this paper, we build on recent work that demonstrates the socio-indexical function of visualization, showing that visualizations communicate more than the data they explicitly encode. Bridging this with prior work examining public discourse about visualizations, we contribute an analytic framework for describing inferences about an artifact's social provenance. Via a series of attribution-elicitation…

FASCIST-O-METER: Classifier for Neo-fascist Discourse Online
Rudy Alexandro Garrido Veliz, Martin Semmann, Chris Biemann, Seid Muhie Yimam
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10789

FASCIST-O-METER: Classifier for Neo-fascist Discourse Online
Neo-fascism is a political and societal ideology that has been having remarkable growth in the last decade in the United States of America (USA), as well as in other Western societies. It poses a grave danger to democracy and the minorities it targets, and it requires active actions against it to avoid escalation. This work presents the first-of-its-kind neo-fascist coding scheme for digital discourse in the USA societal context, overseen by political science researchers. Our work bridges the g…

Language of Persuasion and Misrepresentation in Business Communication: A Textual Detection Approach
Sayem Hossen, Monalisa Moon Joti, Md. Golam Rashed
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09935

Language of Persuasion and Misrepresentation in Business Communication: A Textual Detection Approach
Business communication digitisation has reorganised the process of persuasive discourse, which allows not only greater transparency but also advanced deception. This inquiry synthesises classical rhetoric and communication psychology with linguistic theory and empirical studies in the financial reporting, sustainability discourse, and digital marketing to explain how deceptive language can be systematically detected using persuasive lexicon. In controlled settings, detection accuracies …

The fact that most people—even the punditocracy—seem to willfully not remember who was president in 2020 explains a lot of current political discourse on numerous subjects
https://skywriter.blue/pages/did:plc:swgxwbir4rrimj57pf75jckf/post/3lrbbdbrl…

In the responses to my #rp25 talk this year I got a lot of "Now digital rights organizations are libertarian? When did that change?" and I am sorry to say that digital rights discourse has been imbued with if not based on libertarian belief systems since the beginning. That is the heritage we need to move beyond.

Social and Political Framing in Search Engine Results
Amrit Poudel, Tim Weninger
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13325 https://arxiv.org/p…

Social and Political Framing in Search Engine Results
Search engines play a crucial role in shaping public discourse by influencing how information is accessed and framed. While prior research has extensively examined various dimensions of search bias -- such as content prioritization, indexical bias, political polarization, and sources of bias -- an important question remains underexplored: how do search engines and ideologically-motivated user queries contribute to bias in search results. This study analyzes the outputs of major search engines u…

KI4Demokratie: An AI-Based Platform for Monitoring and Fostering Democratic Discourse
Rudy Alexandro Garrido Veliz, Till Nikolaus Schaland, Simon Bergmoser, Florian Horwege, Somya Bansal, Ritesh Nahar, Martin Semmann, J\"org Forthmann, Seid Muhie Yimam
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09947…

KI4Demokratie: An AI-Based Platform for Monitoring and Fostering Democratic Discourse
Social media increasingly fuel extremism, especially right-wing extremism, and enable the rapid spread of antidemocratic narratives. Although AI and data science are often leveraged to manipulate political opinion, there is a critical need for tools that support effective monitoring without infringing on freedom of expression. We present KI4Demokratie, an AI-based platform that assists journalists, researchers, and policymakers in monitoring right-wing discourse that may undermine democratic va…

BIPOLAR: Polarization-based granular framework for LLM bias evaluation
Martin Pavl\'i\v{c}ek, Tom\'a\v{s} Filip, Petr Sos\'ik
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11061 https:…

BIPOLAR: Polarization-based granular framework for LLM bias evaluation
Large language models (LLMs) are known to exhibit biases in downstream tasks, especially when dealing with sensitive topics such as political discourse, gender identity, ethnic relations, or national stereotypes. Although significant progress has been made in bias detection and mitigation techniques, certain challenges remain underexplored. This study proposes a reusable, granular, and topic-agnostic framework to evaluate polarisation-related biases in LLM (both open-source and closed-source). …

Density-aware Walks for Coordinated Campaign Detection
Atul Anand Gopalakrishnan, Jakir Hossain, Tu\u{g}rulcan Elmas, Ahmet Erdem Sar{\i}y\"uce
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13912

Density-aware Walks for Coordinated Campaign Detection
Coordinated campaigns frequently exploit social media platforms by artificially amplifying topics, making inauthentic trends appear organic, and misleading users into engagement. Distinguishing these coordinated efforts from genuine public discourse remains a significant challenge due to the sophisticated nature of such attacks. Our work focuses on detecting coordinated campaigns by modeling the problem as a graph classification task. We leverage the recently introduced Large Engagement Network…

Fact: It is my birthday.
Fact: I run a free & ad-free newsletter about keeping tech/UX design accountable, called Product Picnic.
Conclusion: legally, you have to subscribe to it. The word of the birthday boy is law!
https://productpicnic.beehiiv.com/

The Product Picnic
Writing on UX and product management to connect today's discourse with classic insights that the industry forgot.

The Discourse Is Broken -- That's not necessarily a good thing. (Charlie Warzel/The Atlantic)
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/07/sydney-sweeney-american-eagle-ads/683704/?gift=bQgJMMVzeo8RHHcE1_KM0Rqh-RBCXaXmzfBoTU_lwXk&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
http://www.memeorandum.com/250730/p51#a250730p51

Winning and losing with Artificial Intelligence: What public discourse about ChatGPT tells us about how societies make sense of technological change
Adrian Rauchfleisch, Joshua Philip Suarez, Nikka Marie Sales, Andreas Jungherr
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06876

Winning and losing with Artificial Intelligence: What public discourse about ChatGPT tells us about how societies make sense of technological change
Public product launches in Artificial Intelligence can serve as focusing events for collective attention, surfacing how societies react to technological change. Social media provide a window into the sensemaking around these events, surfacing hopes and fears and showing who chooses to engage in the discourse and when. We demonstrate that public sensemaking about AI is shaped by economic interests and cultural values of those involved. We analyze 3.8 million tweets posted by 1.6 million users ac…

Learning the Topic, Not the Language: How LLMs Classify Online Immigration Discourse Across Languages
Andrea Nasuto, Stefano Maria Iacus, Francisco Rowe, Devika Jain
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06435

Learning the Topic, Not the Language: How LLMs Classify Online Immigration Discourse Across Languages
Large language models (LLMs) are transforming social-science research by enabling scalable, precise analysis. Their adaptability raises the question of whether knowledge acquired through fine-tuning in a few languages can transfer to unseen languages that only appeared during pre-training. To examine this, we fine-tune lightweight LLaMA 3.2-3B models on monolingual, bilingual, or multilingual data sets to classify immigration-related tweets from X/Twitter across 13 languages, a domain character…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.09030 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCY_…

Authoritarian Recursions: How Fiction, History, and AI Reinforce Control in Education, Warfare, and Discourse
This article develops the concept of authoritarian recursion to theorize how artificial intelligence (AI) systems consolidate institutional control across education, military operations, and digital discourse. Rather than treating these domains in isolation, it identifies a shared recursive architecture in which algorithmic systems mediate judgment, obscure accountability, and reshape the conditions of moral and epistemic agency. Grounded in critical discourse analysis and sociotechnical ethi…

Catching Stray Balls: Football, fandom, and the impact on digital discourse
Mark J. Hill
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01642 https://arx…

Catching Stray Balls: Football, fandom, and the impact on digital discourse
This paper examines how emotional responses to football matches influence online discourse across digital spaces on Reddit. By analysing millions of posts from dozens of subreddits, it demonstrates that real-world events trigger sentiment shifts that move across communities. It shows that negative sentiment correlates with problematic language; match outcomes directly influence sentiment and posting habits; sentiment can transfer to unrelated communities; and offers insights into the content of…

Toxicity in State Sponsored Information Operations
Ashfaq Ali Shafin, Khandaker Mamun Ahmed
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10936 https://…

Toxicity in State Sponsored Information Operations
State-sponsored information operations (IOs) increasingly influence global discourse on social media platforms, yet their emotional and rhetorical strategies remain inadequately characterized in scientific literature. This study presents the first comprehensive analysis of toxic language deployment within such campaigns, examining 56 million posts from over 42 thousand accounts linked to 18 distinct geopolitical entities on X/Twitter. Using Google's Perspective API, we systematically detect and…

Identifying Fine-grained Forms of Populism in Political Discourse: A Case Study on Donald Trump's Presidential Campaigns
Ilias Chalkidis, Stephanie Brandl, Paris Aslanidis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19303

Identifying Fine-grained Forms of Populism in Political Discourse: A Case Study on Donald Trump's Presidential Campaigns
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of instruction-following tasks, yet their grasp of nuanced social science concepts remains underexplored. This paper examines whether LLMs can identify and classify fine-grained forms of populism, a complex and contested concept in both academic and media debates. To this end, we curate and release novel datasets specifically designed to capture populist discourse. We evaluate a range of pre-trained (larg…

Bridging the Narrative Divide: Cross-Platform Discourse Networks in Fragmented Ecosystems
Patrick Gerard, Hans W. A. Hanley, Luca Luceri, Emilio Ferrara
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21729

Bridging the Narrative Divide: Cross-Platform Discourse Networks in Fragmented Ecosystems
Political discourse has grown increasingly fragmented across different social platforms, making it challenging to trace how narratives spread and evolve within such a fragmented information ecosystem. Reconstructing social graphs and information diffusion networks is challenging, and available strategies typically depend on platform-specific features and behavioral signals which are often incompatible across systems and increasingly restricted. To address these challenges, we present a platform…

Replaced article(s) found for cs.CY. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.CY/new
[1/1]:
- Capturing Dynamics in Online Public Discourse: A Case Study of Universal Basic Income Discussions...
Rachel Kim, Veniamin Veselovsky, Ashton Anderson

How Growing Toxicity Manifests: A Topic Trajectory Analysis of U.S. Immigration Discourse on Social Media
Una Joh, Yiqi Li, Jeff Hemsley
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21418 https:/…

How Growing Toxicity Manifests: A Topic Trajectory Analysis of U.S. Immigration Discourse on Social Media
In the online public sphere, discussions about immigration often become increasingly fractious, marked by toxic language and polarization. Drawing on 4 million X posts over six months, we combine a user- and topic-centric approach to study how shifts in toxicity manifest as topical shifts. Our topic discovery method, which leverages instruction-based embeddings and recursive HDBSCAN, uncovers 157 fine-grained subtopics within the U.S. immigration discourse. We focus on users in four groups: (1)…

Retweets, Receipts, and Resistance: Discourse, Sentiment, and Credibility in Public Health Crisis Twitter
Tawfiq Ammari, Anna Gutowska, Jacob Ziff, Casey Randazzo, Harihan Subramonyam
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22032

Retweets, Receipts, and Resistance: Discourse, Sentiment, and Credibility in Public Health Crisis Twitter
As the COVID-19 pandemic evolved, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) used Twitter to disseminate safety guidance and updates, reaching millions of users. This study analyzes two years of tweets from, to, and about the CDC using a mixed methods approach to examine discourse characteristics, credibility, and user engagement. We found that the CDCs communication remained largely one directional and did not foster reciprocal interaction, while discussions around COVID19 were deepl…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01642 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csSI_…

Catching Stray Balls: Football, fandom, and the impact on digital discourse
This paper examines how emotional responses to football matches influence online discourse across digital spaces on Reddit. By analysing millions of posts from dozens of subreddits, it demonstrates that real-world events trigger sentiment shifts that move across communities. It shows that negative sentiment correlates with problematic language; match outcomes directly influence sentiment and posting habits; sentiment can transfer to unrelated communities; and offers insights into the content of…

Dimensional Characterization and Pathway Modeling for Catastrophic AI Risks
Ze Shen Chin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06411 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06411

Dimensional Characterization and Pathway Modeling for Catastrophic AI Risks
Although discourse around the risks of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has grown, it often lacks a comprehensive, multidimensional framework, and concrete causal pathways mapping hazard to harm. This paper aims to bridge this gap by examining six commonly discussed AI catastrophic risks: CBRN, cyber offense, sudden loss of control, gradual loss of control, environmental risk, and geopolitical risk. First, we characterize these risks across seven key dimensions, namely intent, competency, entity, p…

Politics and polarization on Bluesky
Ali Salloum, Dorian Quelle, Letizia Iannucci, Alexandre Bovet, Mikko Kivel\"a
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.03443 ht…

Politics and polarization on Bluesky
Online political discourse is increasingly shaped not by a few dominant platforms but by a fragmented ecosystem of social media spaces, each with its own user base, target audience, and algorithmic mediation of discussion. Such fragmentation may fundamentally change how polarization manifests online. In this study, we investigate the characteristics of political discourse and polarization on the emerging social media site Bluesky. We collect all activity on the platform between December 2024 an…

Analyzing German Parliamentary Speeches: A Machine Learning Approach for Topic and Sentiment Classification
Lukas P\"atz, Moritz Beyer, Jannik Sp\"ath, Lasse Bohlen, Patrick Zschech, Mathias Kraus, Julian Rosenberger
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03181

Analyzing German Parliamentary Speeches: A Machine Learning Approach for Topic and Sentiment Classification
This study investigates political discourse in the German parliament, the Bundestag, by analyzing approximately 28,000 parliamentary speeches from the last five years. Two machine learning models for topic and sentiment classification were developed and trained on a manually labeled dataset. The models showed strong classification performance, achieving an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) of 0.94 for topic classification (average across topics) and 0.89 for sentime…

Distributed and Decentralised Training: Technical Governance Challenges in a Shifting AI Landscape
Jakub Kry\'s, Yashvardhan Sharma, Janet Egan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07765

Distributed and Decentralised Training: Technical Governance Challenges in a Shifting AI Landscape
Advances in low-communication training algorithms are enabling a shift from centralised model training to compute setups that are either distributed across multiple clusters or decentralised via community-driven contributions. This paper distinguishes these two scenarios - distributed and decentralised training - which are little understood and often conflated in policy discourse. We discuss how they could impact technical AI governance through an increased risk of compute structuring, capabili…

Resistance Technologies: Moving Beyond Alternative Designs
Iness Ben Guirat, Jan Tobias M\"uhlberg
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05223 https://arxiv.org/…

Resistance Technologies: Moving Beyond Alternative Designs
The discourse about sustainable technology has emerged from the acknowledgment of the environmental collapse we are facing. In this paper, we argue that addressing this crisis requires more than the development of sustainable alternatives to current online services or the optimization of resources using various dashboards and AI. Rather, the focus must shift toward designing technologies that protect us from the consequences of the environmental damages. Among these consequences, wars, genocide…

Exploring Public Perceptions of Generative AI in Libraries: A Social Media Analysis of X Discussions
Yuan Li, Teja Mandaloju, Haihua Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07047

Exploring Public Perceptions of Generative AI in Libraries: A Social Media Analysis of X Discussions
This study investigates public perceptions of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in libraries through a large-scale analysis of posts on X (formerly Twitter). Using a mixed-method approach that combines temporal trend analysis, sentiment classification, and social network analysis, this paper explores how public discourse around GenAI and libraries has evolved over time, the emotional tones that dominate the conversation, and the key users or organizations driving engagement. The findin…