Backdrifting

Model Collapse Posted 5/29/2026 I’ve heard many people talk about model collapse recently, especially regarding Large Language Models.

The Journalist/Academic Leaked Data Divide Posted 3/13/2026 I am presently flying back from a workshop where academics, journalists, and NGOs discussed how to build collaborations between the three when studying leaked documents, and particularly when stu…

A Machine Learning Crash Course Posted 2/28/2026 I am currently teaching a masters level course on network science.

Bayesian Network Science Posted 1/26/2026 I am currently teaching masters students to perform statistical network analysis, especially predicting the structure of a network from observational data, calibrating network models to real-world data, and reject…

Section 230: A Primer Posted 12/13/2025 Senator Whitehouse (D, RI) announced that he’s moving to file a bill to repeal Section 230, the singly most important piece of Internet legislation, which goes on the chopping block a few times a year.

RPI’s Vaccine-Autism Study Posted 9/23/2025 The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention intend to award a no-bid contract to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to study whether childhood vaccination induces autism.

Word Prominence: A Primer Posted 6/9/2025 A common task in natural language processing is determining what a text (a book, speech, tweet, email) is about.

Academic Funding on Fire Posted 5/17/2025 I’m now a postdoc involved in applying for research funding, and have more insight into the process than I did as a graduate student.

Dungeon Generation with Binary Space Partitioning Posted 5/11/2025 It’s a lazy Sunday afternoon, and I’ve been thinking about procedural dungeon generation.

What is NP?

Open Academic Publication Posted 10/28/2023 I’m currently at a workshop on open practices across disciplines, and one topic of discussion is how to change the academic publishing process to be more accessible to both authors and readers.

When is a network “decentralized enough?”

AntNet: Networks from Ant Colonies Posted 08/07/2023 Ant nests look kind of like networks - they have rooms, and tunnels between the rooms, analogous to vertices and edges on a graph.

Geolocating Users via Text Messages Posted 7/28/2023 A recent research paper, Freaky Leaky SMS: Extracting User Locations by Analyzing SMS Timings (PDF), purports to geolocate phone numbers by texting them and analyzing response times.

We don’t need ML, we have gzip!

Bloom Filters Posted 4/8/2023 Sticking with a theme from my last post on HyperLogLog I’m writing about more probabilistic data structures!

HyperLogLog: Counting Without Counters Posted 3/20/2023 I recently learned about HyperLogLog, which feels like cursed counter-intuitive magic, so I am eager to share.

Algorithmic Complexity Posted 3/6/2023 This is a post about Big-O notation and measuring algorithmic complexity; topics usually taught to computer science undergraduates in their second to fourth semester.

Hex Grids and Cube Coordinates Posted 2/10/2023 I recently needed to make a graph with a hex lattice shape, like this: I needed to find distances and paths between different hexagonal tiles, which proved challenging in a cartesian coordinate system.

Image Dithering in Color!

Image Dithering Posted 1/16/2023 Dithering means intentionally adding noise to a signal to reduce large artifacts like color banding.

SQL for Scientists Posted 12/03/2022 My lab group recently asked me to give a tutorial on using SQL databases in science.

Torrent Health Monitoring Posted 8/21/2022 Distributed Denial of Secrets publishes most of our datasets via torrent.

Distinguishing In-Groups from Onlookers by Language Use Posted 6/8/2022 This post is a non-academic summary of my most recent paper, which can be found here.

Git and Code Versioning for Scientists Posted 5/10/2022 I recently gave a talk to the Joint Lab on using git to write code collaboratively with other scientists.

What is Distributed Denial of Secrets?

Predicting Friendships from SMS Metadata Posted 3/30/2022 We know that metadata is incredibly revealing; given information about who you talk to, we can construct a social graph that shows which social circles you’re in and adjacent to, we can predict your

The Distributed Denial of Service at Distributed Denial of Secrets Posted 10/9/2021 A few days ago, the Distributed Denial of Secrets website went down under a distributed denial of service attack.

Dimensional Analysis, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Reverse-Engineered the Bomb Posted 10/5/2021 I’m in a Complex Systems and Data Science PhD program.

Communal Ownership Online Posted 7/30/2021 We often think of online communities as a “shared digital commons”.

The Efficacy of Subreddit Bans Posted 7/1/2021 Deplatforming is a moderation technique where high profile users or communities are banned from a platform in an effort to inhibit their behavior.

Tor with VPNs (Don’t!)

Reimagine the Internet Day 5: New Directions in Social Media Research Posted 5/14/2021 This week I’m attending the Reimagine the Internet mini-conference, a small and mostly academic discussion about decentralization from a corporate controlled Internet to

Reimagine the Internet Day 4: Building Defiant Communities Posted 5/13/2021 This week I’m attending the Reimagine the Internet mini-conference, a small and mostly academic discussion about decentralization from a corporate controlled Internet to realize a…

Reimagine the Internet Day 3: Adversarial Interoperability / Competitive Compatibility Posted 5/12/2021 This week I’m attending the Reimagine the Internet mini-conference, a small and mostly academic discussion about decentralization from a corporate cont…

Reimagine the Internet Day 2: Misinformation, Disinformation, and Media Literacy in a Less-Centralized Social Media Universe Posted 5/11/2021 This week I’m attending the Reimagine the Internet mini-conference, a small and mostly academic discussion about…

Reimagine the Internet Day 1: Pioneering Alternative Models for Community on the Internet Posted 5/10/2021 This week I’m attending the Reimagine the Internet mini-conference, a small and mostly academic discussion about decentralization from a corporate c…

OurTube: Distributed Labor as Alternative to Advertisement Posted 5/5/21 Social media companies, particularly YouTube, have been called out for using suggestion algorithms that lead to radicalization.

Hosting Under Duress Posted 3/26/21 I have an article in the latest issue of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, writing on behalf of Distributed Denial of Secrets.

Color Filter Array Forensics Posted 2/1/21 Digital Image Forensics is a field concerned with identifying whether images are original or have been edited, and if the latter, what kinds of edits have been made.

Peer-to-Peer Network Models and their Implications Posted 11/21/20 Let’s take the following as a given: Mainstream social media is harmful because it puts a single company in control of the human social experience and places them in the role of cultural c…

RAIDs: Combining Hard Drives for Fun and Profit Posted 10/22/20 After writing about decentralized data storage and torrents, I’ve had data storage on my mind.

Distributed Hash Tables and Decentralized Data Storage Posted 10/21/20 This post is mostly theoretical computer science (data structures, distributed systems) leading up to future posts that can talk about the design of decentralized communities with an e…

Network Science for Social Modeling Posted 9/24/20 This post is meant to be very approachable and an academic background is not expected.

What is a Supercomputer?

Torrents: Decentralized Data Storage Posted 8/13/20 This post is explanatory in the vein of past posts on memory allocation and lambda calculus, rather than introducing new social or technical theory Torrents allow your computer to download files from many

Trustless Pursuance: Decentralized Architecture Posted 7/7/20 In a rapid series of events, Distributed Denial of Secrets was banned from Twitter for our BlueLeaks release, along with any links to our website, the leaked documents in question, or magnet li…

Information Paradigms and Radical Interfaces Posted 6/16/20 One of my non-social-org interests is the design of interfaces for viewing and interacting with information that can change our perception and thought-processes surrounding that information.

Alternative Social-Media Platforms Posted 6/12/20 This post is an informal discussion related to a research project I’ve been involved in and the broader context of alternative media platforms, deplatforming, and community building.

Splintering a Pursuance Posted 5/22/20 The primary goal of the Pursuance Project that differentiates it from any other group-based task-management software is the emphasis on organic collaboration, and the trivial creation of new Pursuances that allow com…