YY Ahn

A chart showing how the relative sizes of federal grant funding in the US, with arts and humanities getting an infinitesimal portion.

To offer some context, here's a graphic our fabulous intern Aidan Nuttall put together in 2023.

When we compared our per capita humanities research funding against 42 other countries, there was only a single country that spent less (South Africa), and most countries spent 10x-250x more.

this is so fun because i know an LLM wouldn’t give me a response this creative. like this took the funniest shortcut possible. come have fun at youraislopbores.me

(Polio. It's polio)

Three scientists said no to you-know-who and were featured in the news (you may, somehow, be able to picture them). Nice. Good judgement.

But it's hard not to be cynical about this whole situation. (I'm resisting... resisting...)

Data Visualization A Practical Introduction

Here’s a full draft of the upcoming second edition of my “Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction”: socviz.co

My first science video in 3 years YouTube video by Physics Girl

This video makes me so happy! She’s back!

youtube.com/watch?v=B3m3...

Accessible PDF from LaTeX How to make LaTeX Curriculum vitae|CVs produce tagged, screen-reader-friendly PDFs -- relevant for ADA Title II compliance (deadline April 2026).

If you're unsure how to make your LaTeX-compiled PDFs (e.g., CV) accessible (compliant to the ADA requirements), this post may be useful.

yyahn.com/wiki/Accessi...

tl;dr: add metadata and use LuaLaTeX

NYU is hiring two postdocs at the Center for Social Media, AI & Politics:
csmapnyu.org/jobs

And a grant manager in Sociology with the Social Science Research Hub:
uscareers-nyu.icims.com/jobs/15327/g...

I'm part of both groups--please share with anyone who is interested!

I created a tool, snaketail, a snakemake wrapper that fixes workflow and restarts itself automatically when failed.

The idea—feeding the tail (error log) to the head (system input) to self-heal—has practical values to create robust automation system!

skojaku.github.io/snaketail.html

Ah.. no worries! Yes, that's frustrating part that to fix anything, you need to fix other things, and then to fix any of those other things, you need to fix yet other things, ...

But I do feel that having fire dept have some smaller fire engines and allow narrow streets can be an important step

How American Fire Departments are Getting People Killed YouTube video by Not Just Bikes

I think the video I linked was useful for me on that front... I think it's primarily a historical legacy of big fire engines becoming the standard while the highway engineering standards become the way cities design their streets too? www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2dH...

yeah a great headline 😂

It will be 3/4 6pm at CitySpace (100 5th St NE)!

www.charlottesville.gov/m/newsflash/...

👀

www.404media.co/openai-furio...

futurism.com/future-socie...

Excited to join the panel "Innovation, Production, and Supply Chains in Critical Technologies" at CMU moderated by @andygarin.bsky.social and Erica Fuchs this Wednesday, 2/26 at 2pm! If you're in Pittsburgh, come say hi!

www.cs.cmu.edu/calendar/197...

I'll look forward to the discussions sparked by this!

First blogpost of my cofounder post-Delhi on the deafening silence of public/political sphere as we come closer to another industrial revolution. anastasiastasenko.substack.com/p/the-countr...

Using detailed address-level microdata, we trace movement chains originating with the initial residents of The Central and document three main findings. First, we show the building generated a substantial number of local vacancies. We identify 180 specific addresses that became vacant because of moves into The Central. Scaling to account for data coverage suggests the new tower induced more than 500 local vacancies in the three years after construction, by setting off chains of moves. Second, while The Central units were expensive on a per-square-foot basis, the homes vacated by movers were significantly cheaper. Homes left behind by those moving into The Central were about 40% less expensive. Unlike much of the prior literature, which track the changing neighborhood characteristics of movers

Even more evidence that building new housing decreases rents: Researchers tracked the residents of a newly built luxury condo building and found that they freed up less expensive apartments nearby.
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Together with @mrjimmyblack.com (and Claude) we developed a tool that helps detecting hallucinated references in academic papers! This evolved from a simple python script into a full system written in Rust to quickly go through thousands of citations. Check it out!

github.com/gianlucasb/h...

the deadline to submit to the WiNS satellite & mentorship program at @netsciconf.bsky.social is this friday!!

Cost of car ownership One day, a PhD student mentioned the unexpected high cost of car repair—often over a thousand dollars, regardless of how cheap your car is. This got me...

Replacing a car with an e-bike can _literally_ make you a millionaire.

I wrote about a back-of-the-envelope math: a household can save ~$100k in just 5 years by going car-light. If this difference is invested over several decades, that can become $1M+

yyahn.com/wiki/Cost%20...

We've alllllmost gotten all the Jan26 ARR reviews in, but I'm still trying to track down new emergency reviewers for papers on the following topics:
1) agents
2) jailbreaking
3) coding
4) RL
5) reasoning
6) LLM for finance
7) AMR
8) alignment
If you can review any (in next 24-48h) please DM me 🙏🙏🙏

A very good visual explanation of colon cancer risk.

Happy to share our new paper published in PNAS!

Using epigenetic clocks and egocentric network data, we find each additional "hassler" in your close social network is associated with ~9 months of extra biological age and 1.5% faster pace of aging.

A common but tedious task is to file a paper into my personal knowledge base (wiki/obsidian vault/whatever). just realized that this is a perfect task for subagent + skill. It can (1) use OpenAlex etc to obtain its metadata, (2) search and link keywords and other related papers. Seems to work well!

Revision now posted on the ArXiv! We collated and cleaned EVEN MORE DATA. 39M accounts, 365K starter packs, and 2.4B following relationships. All accounts, follows, and starter packs now have timestamps! Check it out at arxiv.org/abs/2505.11608.

Dozens of researchers will move to France from US following high-profile bid to lure talent Large proportion worked at Columbia University, which had its grants cut and frozen by the administration of US President Donald Trump.

Dozens of researchers will move to France from US following high-profile bid to lure talent. Large proportion worked at Columbia University, which had its grants cut and frozen by the administration of US President Donald Trump. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Call for Proposals | Applied Machine Learning Conference A two-day conference bringing together data scientists, AI engineers, and ML practitioners in Charlottesville, VA. April 17-18, 2026.

Friendly reminder: the 2026 Applied Machine Learning Conference is still accepting abstracts for talks and workshops. Visit the call for proposals page for details! I hope to see you here in Charlottesville this April!

Exclusive | OpenAI Executive Who Opposed ‘Adult Mode’ Fired for Sexual Discrimination Ryan Beiermeister, who served as the vice president leading OpenAI’s product policy team, had raised concerns about the upcoming launch of erotic content.

OpenAI fired a female employee for sexual discrimination because she raised questions about the company's pivot toward automated erotica engagement slop

C'ville folks! Local luminary and lender of e-bikes Josh Carp created this very cool site, which combines videos of public meetings with searchable, linkable transcripts. meetings.cvilledata.org/meetings