Sophia Liu

i'm dead that explains why we have one of those at home - thanks, dad

wearing this pin at the pin palace lab

Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole web yet? “I saw the whole earth as an icon, mainly,” he said, “one that did indeed replace the mushroom cloud as the main image for understanding our world.”

It seems like the only alternative we've really discovered, as a civilization, is centralized curators (e.g. via traditional print publishing). That does seem better in some ways, but worse in many others. But "ranking and feeds" is quite a large design space. Twitter's feed experience (especially pre-2020) surfaces very different writing than Tumblr's feed experience. So, rather than "we're stuck with this bad solution", a better frame is to ask: "what's under explored in this design space? when people complain about 'ranking' and 'feeds', what are they really complaining about? HMW address those problems?" etc etc I think "ranking and feeds" can be great, actually, both personally and civilizationally! Just requires some imaginative design work. And, certainly, new technical work—e.g. LLMs allow traditional ranking to be much more content aware; ATProto and its ilk can solve lock-in; etc.

we're running a study on how people use wikipedia! no experience necessary, just curiosity. please consider signing up & sharing with your network! docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAI…

An artist turned a bug’s random wandering into art by tracing its path.

fun fact that the editors of the Whole Earth Catalog loved management science (and ayn rand!) wrote a bit about it for the Whole Earth Redux

Also, this is a cool look into what @maxkasy's call for democratic control of "the means of prediction" (from his recent book of the same name) could look like in practice. Tweeting this while writing a paper for @postdiscipline's Berkeley course... Book: press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book…

By giving non-technical community members the ability to deliberate and design their own AI agents, Botender places collective self-governance directly in stakeholders’ hands. 🤲🤖💜 I am so proud to be a part of this work and looking forward to attending my first CHI!

@gilduran76 the sociopolitical history of silicon valley is really really interesting... i just made a visualizer for that corner of @Wikipedia the same day this article came out. as a CS major at berkeley, i think about "the californian ideology" all the time. sophiawliu.github.io/fieldtrip/#/mu…

My friends are trying to explain Twitter to me. I find it baffling.

If you're 13 right now here's what you should do: Spend all your time reading philosophy, sci fi, poetry, and history. Go to museums and look at every damn thing in there. Watch all the classic films and maybe every single movie made in the 90s. Learn how to write prose, document your thoughts and observations as thoroughly as you can. Go outside, play sports, learn how to play an instrument. Paint. Listen to all kinds of music. Live life as humanly as you possibly can, and bring that love and energy back to whatever it is you decide to do in the future.

My student Michael Cuna is on the econ job market this year. He has an excellent paper showing the impact of the hidden curriculum on educational outcomes, particularly in the case of first-gen students. The paper also demonstrates the potential for AI tools to close these gaps. Please do not hesitate to reach out to me or the rest of the committee if you have any questions.

I LIVE IN CLASSIC ROCK YOUTUBE COMMENT SECTIONS!!! youtube.com/watch?v=TMiAQP… (not X formerly known as orijfga0)

Growing up in Silicon Valley, I believed tech was meant to democratize opportunity and accelerate human progress. The early ethos of the Valley wasn’t just about building profitable products, but about shifting the trajectory of lives and societies. There was idealism, for sure, but also a serious belief that technical breakthroughs should serve human success. But somewhere along the way, parts of the industry traded vision for vanity. As capital flooded into tech, incentives shifted. Virality began to outpace value. The goalposts moved from solving hard, important problems to maximizing engagement, retention, and monetization. Today some of the brightest minds are pulled towards optimizing ad clicks and frictionless dopamine loops. Why? (Insert disclaimer: The issue isn’t the people). Innovation isn’t dead. (Insert disclaimer again: Many technologists are building remarkable human-centered tools.) It’s worth asking again and again: What is worth building? And who is it truly for?

@shmu_h so john steinbeck core

yesterday we camped at a winery near pasa robles (halfway to UC Santa Barbara!)

I'm on an hci research / personal mesearch tour — road-tripping, giving talks, and making friends across southern california! Thank you soooo much to the @StanfordHCI lunch for having me today!

my notes on Terry Winograd & Lucy Suchman's conversation @StanfordHAI yesterday! such an honor and a privilege to hear them speak on AI, data, our roles in the world as computer professionals, technology designers, humans… tysm Nava @StanfordHCI for organizing!

so incredibly proud of @tweet_phia for leading this piece, and giving an awesome presentation (that you can watch!) at ACM Hypertext -- Friction & (user) Agency are values we feel are really needed as we design for a future inundated by (AI) Agents 🩵 youtube.com/watch?v=iIqjUK…

@shmu_h shm 🥹, thank you for believing in me, always! you're my blueprint for mentorship