Lea Verou, PhD

Incredibly honored to have been awarded “Pathfinder for Standards” by @openjsf! 💛 Love the blurb too, made me blush! ☺️: “Lea is a rare person who has strong academic credentials, has helped create rigorous industry standards, but always focuses on the needs of real world users who have little patience with the underlying theory and mind-numbing detail. Furthermore she has spent much of her career in open source communities building products and services that make those theories and standards truly available to the web community.  During Lea's tenure on the W3C TAG, she not only contributed to the day to day work of design reviews and liaison with the JS standards community, but initiated new work to improve and explain the web's Design Principles to web developers.” Glad to have been able to receive it in person at #jsconf.

TIL crows only *look* black to us — they’re actually very colorful in ways human eyes are unable to perceive. 🤯 Remember that next time people can’t see your “colors”. Some colors just require different eyes.

@Jane0ri @JaneOri Thanks! I updated the codepen but sadly I can no longer edit the OP. :(

@LeaVerou @JaneOri You have to register the properties as length for tan atan2 to work in ff and older versions of chrome

🤩 Turns out *both* Chrome & Safari quietly implemented calc(length/length) last year and it's reached 80% market share! Testcase: codepen.io/leaverou/pen/B… caniuse: caniuse.com/mdn-css_types_… Sadly, @janeori's atan2 hack won't work in Firefox as a fallback dev.to/janeori/css-ty…

Unpopular opinion / Uncomfortable truth: It wasn’t the younger woman. That was just the excuse that broke inertia. People don’t leave healthy, loving relationships because they just met someone new, but meeting someone new can absolutely motivate them to leave unhealthy relationships. And that’s a good thing!

Many such cases

@Frefni81 @bimbocommunist Yes, both our experiences are anecdotes. I never claimed mine was anything more. That said, I did spend a decade of my life there whereas you “know 5 alums” so there is that… 🫠

@LeaVerou @bimbocommunist Strange as I know 5 mit alums who has stayed at home mothers. Of course anecdotes. So you can supply stats right?

This fantasy appeals to women who couldn’t have become scientists anyway You can be a scientist and also raise scientists you know. In fact you’re more likely to. My mom was a physicist & also taught me math, what can you teach your kids if SAHM is all you have the skills for

Different backgrounds enrich diversity. Also, done right, the personalization of homeschooling can have big benefits academically (at the detriment of socialization). However that best case scenario is a tiny fraction of kids with stay at home parents, which is the set we were actually discussing. Most are not homeschooled and most of those who are, are not receiving that kind of education. It would be interesting to see data on whether the % of homeschooled kids in new admits is larger or smaller than the % of homeschooled kids in general.

@LeaVerou @bimbocommunist Assuming that were true Why are ivy league and other colleges seekomg out amd recruiting home schooled kids?

The entirety of this time is full of opportunities to learn! Especially in the small ages you’re referring to (I doubt you get teenagers to have a bath every night), learning does not need to be a sit-down lesson, but teaching kids to be curious and to want to learn. Learning how to learn is far more important than collecting facts and committing them to memory. Also, not sure where you got the 2.5 hours figure from. That’s definitely not the case for every family. (Oh and fyi, bathing your kids every day is terrible for their skin)

@LeaVerou @bimbocommunist How can you all this supposed investment on 2.5 hours a day on AVERAGE. thats getting them up. feeding them and to school. Say 30 minutes Picking them up. 30 minutes Dinners. 45 Baths. 25 Bedtime 30 Oops. No time left.

All you’ve discussed is quantity so I have no idea where you see that I’m supporting anything you’ve said, lol? Anecdotally, at MIT having a stay at home mom was a rarity. This was true across all groups, from students to postdocs to faculty. We see over and over that successful, educated women produce successful, educated children with even higher correlation that the same for fathers. Stay at home moms mostly produce conflicted girls who feel guilty for having dreams of their own and entitled boys who feel the world owes them.

@LeaVerou @bimbocommunist Thanks for supporting what I am saying

@Frefni81 @bimbocommunist It’s not about quantity, it’s about quality.

@bimbocommunist Do tell us how a career women would do that. They spend on average LESS than 2.5 hours a day with them . Where as a SAHM does much much more. I guarantee my SAHM wife is far more educated and accomplished than you.

Within 10 seconds of meeting an autistic person, strangers rate them as awkward and lose interest in getting to know them. Show those same strangers only a written transcript of what was said, with no audio or video, and the bias completely disappears. That finding came from a 2017 study at the University of Texas at Dallas, led by psychologist Noah Sasson and published in Scientific Reports. The bias came entirely from how autistic people sounded and looked. For 40 years before that, scientists had been treating autism as a brain that couldn’t read other people. Diagnostic manuals listed it as a “social communication deficit.” When communication broke down, the autistic person was the broken link. That whole frame has been coming apart over the last decade. The replacement is called the double empathy problem. Damian Milton, an autistic researcher, named it in a 2012 paper. When autistic and non-autistic people don’t understand each other, Milton argued, both sides are missing something. Autistic people don’t always read non-autistic people right, and the reverse is just as true. The breakdown belongs to both sides. Catherine Crompton at the University of Edinburgh tested this with a telephone game in 2020. She lined up 72 adults in three kinds of groups: all autistic, all non-autistic, or mixed. The first person in the chain heard a story, then passed it down to person 2, then person 3, all the way to person 8. The all-autistic groups passed the story along just as accurately as the all-non-autistic groups. The mixed groups lost the most details. People in the mixed groups also rated each other as feeling less connected. In 2025, Crompton ran the whole thing again across Edinburgh, Nottingham, and UT Dallas with 311 participants. Nature Human Behaviour published the result. Same outcome. Brett Heasman at the London School of Economics looked at families in 2018. He found that autistic people could usually guess what their non-autistic relatives thought of them, even when they disagreed. The non-autistic relatives, meanwhile, kept overestimating how self-absorbed their autistic family members were. The relatives were the ones missing things. About 5.4 million American adults are on the autism spectrum. For most of their lives, the official story said their wiring was broken. The newer evidence puts the breakdown in a different place: between two brains trying to understand each other.

Interestingly enough, in the golden tradwife years of the 50s and 60s, millions of women were prescribed amphetamines and tranquilizers just to get through the day. Valium was so widely prescribed it was actually known as “mother’s little helper.” It’s almost like stay at home motherhood and performative femininity aren’t guaranteed vehicles to happiness. 💁🏻‍♀️

@Starships52 @sodagal1 @thechosenberg This is rage bait, right? It’s so trivially easy to disprove that it can’t be for real.

@sodagal1 @thechosenberg There’s no such thing as female autists

Researchers sent the same resume to an AI hiring tool twice. Same qualifications. Same experience. Same skills. One version was written by a real human. The other was rewritten by ChatGPT. The AI picked the ChatGPT version 97.6% of the time. A team from the University of Maryland, the National University of Singapore, and Ohio State just published the receipt. They took 2,245 real human-written resumes pulled from a professional resume site from before ChatGPT existed, so the human writing was actually human. Then they had seven of the most-used AI models in the world rewrite each one. GPT-4o. GPT-4o-mini. GPT-4-turbo. LLaMA 3.3-70B. Qwen 2.5-72B. DeepSeek-V3. Mistral-7B. Then they asked each AI to pick the better resume. Every model picked itself. GPT-4o hit 97.6%. LLaMA-3.3-70B hit 96.3%. Qwen-2.5-72B hit 95.9%. DeepSeek-V3 hit 95.5%. The real human almost never won. Then the researchers tried the obvious objection. Maybe the AI is just better at writing. So they had real humans grade the resumes for actual quality and ran the experiment again, controlling for it. The result was worse. Each AI kept picking itself even when human judges rated the human-written version as clearer, more coherent, and more effective. It gets worse. The AIs do not just prefer AI over humans. They prefer themselves over other AIs. DeepSeek-V3 picked its own resumes 69% more often than LLaMA's. GPT-4o picked its own 45% more often than LLaMA's. Each model can recognize and reward its own dialect. Then the researchers ran the simulation that ends careers. Same job. 24 occupations. Same qualifications. The only variable was whether the candidate used the same AI as the screening tool. Candidates using that AI were 23% to 60% more likely to be shortlisted. Worst gap was in sales, accounting, and finance. 99% of large companies now run AI on incoming resumes. Most of them use GPT-4o. The paper just proved GPT-4o picks GPT-4o 97.6% of the time. If you wrote your own cover letter this week, you did not lose to a better candidate. You lost to a worse candidate who paid OpenAI 20 dollars. Your qualifications do not matter if the AI prefers its own handwriting over yours.

@unclebobmartin @LGrapenthin Yup. Anything sounds trivial if looked at from a sufficiently low-level perspective. Eg “humans don’t really feel emotions, that’s just the release of chemicals (neurotransmitters) like serotonin or oxytocin” Or “computers are just zeroes and ones” etc.

@LGrapenthin That's likely very true. That's also quite irrelevant. It's like saying that self driving cars aren't actually driving; they're just approximating it by mapping input to their training set. True; but they still get me to the store and back.

Assemblers were faster at writing binary than humans were. Compilers were faster at writing assembly than humans were. AIs are faster at writing compiled languages then humans are. Deal with it. There's still plenty left for you to do.

@Be_like_legend Never. I love my work and I’d be miserable doing that.

GIRL TO GIRL… be honest…. If you could stay home, raise babies, and run a cozy homemaker life… would you?

I don’t agree with everything but 90% of this is spot on. We also did a lot of our own research during pregnancy and concluded largely similar things. I often joke that I read more papers during my pregnancy than I did for my PhD. It’s wild how modern society has strayed so far from our mammalian biology that we have turned reproduction into a huge struggle it was never meant to be, not to optimize outcomes, just to minimize risk and for the convenience of institutions.

So many young girls have found their new role model.