Frank Elavsky (he/him) ⌁

@frank.computer

5118 Followers 1847 Following

Assistant Professor of Data Science @ Cal Poly SLO Phd in accessibility, tool-making, vis 📊 @hcii.cmu.edu. Prev: Adobe, Highsoft, Apple, Visa. Move slo and repair things. Disabled & making a ttrpg. www.frank.computer

You can open Notepad and type whatever you want into it. You can open Paint and draw whatever you can imagine. You can publish whatever you want online with a small degree of technical know-how. This all costs nothing past the hardware, software, and connection fee. We take this for granted, to our own detriment. Being open and transparent is a radical strength, not a weakness. We should not throw this away in the pursuit of a convenient perceived inevitability.
A generative AI image of a billboard. THIS WEEK'S TL:DR Physics affects your apis - Holly Cummins If your chart needs colour it doesn't work - Frank Elavsky Motivation needs autonomy - Yanina Ledovaya Your diagram is a map, not a moodboard - Simon Brown AI Agents need real tools - Akshatha Laxmi
Increasingly, a lot of the most enthusiastic pro-AI discourse (including for science) strikes me as nihilism masquerading as optimism. We have people who perceive themselves as huge optimists that will reshape science or society for the better simultaneously lacking the imagination to see beyond their own technological determinism. It reminds me a bit of the “optimism” associated with some open science and science reform positions, who also suggest that we just need the right technology to fix the problems (though in this case, its heuristics like replication or preregistration). It’s a fundamentally non-agentic view of human scientific endeavor.
Illustration of Hiyao Miyazaki drawing with a cigarette in his mouth, saying "If life's hassles disappeared, you'd want them back."
The prototype slop zone by Frank Elavsky. Diagram. There are two axes. X axis is how technically refined an artifact is, starting low and increasing. Y axis is how intellectually refined an idea is starting low and increasing. In the upper left (high idea refinement, low artifact refinement), an annotation says, what users want genAl for (for their brilliant ideas), an arrow points to an area labeled (zone of missing skills). Then the bottom right an annotation says what genAl enables. Low fidelity prototypes fill the left side near the bottom (low technical refinement and ideation) mid-fidelity in the middle of the diagram, and high fidelity fills the upper right (high ideation, high technical refinement). A tiny slice on the top right corner (maxed on both axes) says no longer a prototype.
The notifications page of the bluesky app, but all entries are empty ghosts with no content.
The prototype slop zone by Frank Elavsky. Diagram. There are two axes. X axis is how technically refined an artifact is, starting low and increasing. Y axis is how intellectually refined an idea is, starting low and increasing. In the upper left (high idea refinement, low artifact refinement), an annotation says, 💡 what users want gnAI for (for their brilliant ideas), an arrow points to an area labeled (zone of missing skills). The in the bottom right an annotation says what genAI enables đŸ« . Low fidelity prototypes fill the left side near the bottom (low technical refinement and ideation), mid-fidelity in the middle of the diagram, and high fidelity fills the upper right (high ideation, high technical refinement). A tiny slice in the top right corner (maxed on both axes) says no longer a prototype.
Me, smiling and taking a selfie on a sunny day in front of the large-lettered CAL POLY sign.
A cortado with a 4-layer tulip pour.
A hand written note dated 9.30.25 with a quote, "We're trying to understand the mysteries of the shit we make" - frank from twitter
Dr Manhattan meme person disintegrating: "Adapt. Or you will be replaced. I work in the private sector and we never consider "not having to learn something new" to be relevant and add value. There is no job security based on what the job was when I took it and there shouldn't be for you either." Dr. Manhattan, deleting them: "peepee poopoo"
Particularly tantalizing to the designerly imagination are the ways disabled people hack existing objects and systems for our own purposes. The Microsoft Inclusive Design Toolkit uses empathy to prowl for these moments of disability ingenuity, because “the insight is in the adaptation.”
Mobile view of bars in a bar chart. Mamdani has more than triple the donors as Sliwa but his bar is hardly larger. Full description: Individual donors since the primary Size of donation legend $250 or less $250 to $2,100 $2,100 Zohran Mamdani DEM 17,981 Curtis Sliwa REP 5,684 Eric Adams IND 2,149
An obscenely tall data visualization that shows how astronomically large EA's CEO pay is over time (as high as 44m) compared to EA's median worker pay (currently 117k).
An ugly, 90s aesthetic cartoon of a frazzled looking person on a coffee mug. They are saying, "Will someone please (underlined) shoot the computer?"
r/vibecoding 9 hr. ago AssafMalkiIL What’s the point of vibe coding if I still have to pay a dev to fix it? what’s the point of vibe coding if at the end of the day i still gotta pay a dev to look at the code anyway. sure it feels kinda cool while i’m typing, like i’m in some flow state or whatever, but when stuff breaks it’s just dead weight. i cant vibe my way through debugging, i cant ship anything that actually matters, and then i’m back to square one pulling out my wallet for someone who actually knows what they’re doing. makes me think vibe coding is just roleplay for guys who want to feel like hackers without doing the hard part. am i missing something here or is it really just useless once you step outside the fantasy Upvote 113 Downvote 98
An architecture diagram that results in an image from a video game stream with a box over it labeled "screen reader accessible, customizeable interface." The diagram begins with audio, video, and stream ui data combined with game engine data going into streaming software. That is passed up to the stream as an inaccessible interface (a video feed). However, the game engine also passes up data to MARS, then to a twitch extension, and then to the accessible interface.
A cartogram showing data on a map of the US, labeled "this is made of pixels." A box shape floats over the map labeled, "this is a rich interface for assistive tech." Elavsky et al, "Data Navigator" (2023)
Thursday 6:45PM Expect smoky ribs sizzing hot dogs and cold drinks tomorrow if you ve got time come join us Screenshot of an anonymous text
A skinny teenage creature, surprisingly with blonde hair (I was naturally blonde as a kid and it darkened with age). My hair is mid-length and straight, just to my shoulders, I have a huge smile and I am wearing small, oval yellow-tinted glasses. I am wearing a two piece purple suit that is too large for me, with a pink button-up shirt underneath.
Frank argued for what he calls "softerware": visualizations that work more like clay than concrete. Instead of shipping finished, fixed objects, we give people tools they can reshape to meet their personal needs. But here's the most provocative part for me: most people have already told us what works for them. They've set their systems for dark mode, bigger fonts, motion reduction. And we routinely ignore all of that.
If you haven’t clicked that last link and thumbed through, you should (link). It gives extrapolations for general estimates for chat queries, LLM-generated images, LLM-generated videos, and also how much energy was used to train said LLMs – it’s really in depth and fascinating, to say the least.
I wouldn’t ask a robot to dance for me if I wanted to learn how to dance. That’s because I want to know how dancing feels, even while I am stumbling about and learning. Part of that stumbling (when you learn to dance) involves developing a better sense of feeling your own body. Asking a machine to dance takes away the opportunity to know your own body in the same way asking a machine to think takes away a sense of my own self-understanding. I certainly wouldn’t want an AI to go on a first date for me, I’d want to do that myself.
What’s your pitch for why people should join Bluesky? It’s a great time to shape the culture and the future of Bluesky. The people who have created starter packs, created feeds, and gotten involved in the community have seen a lot of growth—even if they previously weren’t big posters elsewhere. For creators, nobody is fully grasping that this is potentially the last social identity you have to create. Signing up now isn’t just committing to yet another micro-blogging app, it’s committing to a new era of social, to having a sort of digital passport that moves with you.
Critics without solutions are useless Plus, just saying that SPℱ has “blended babies” and we should “stop blending babies” doesn’t offer any actual, real, working solutions. Are you doing anything about it? How are you, personally, going to make up for my 200% increased dongle-production efficiency at Dongles LLC?
complete survey button
Gender Gender is not directly available through OpenAlex or Twitter. To infer gender, we extracted the official names of academics as provided by OpenAlex. We passed the names individually through an LLM (OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 Turbo model) in similar fashion as for tweets. We used the following prompt: “Based on the given name, please indicate the most likely gender association. Name: ‘<name>’. Respond as ‘Male’, ‘Female’, or ‘Unclear.” Once again, all the usual best practices of LLM prompting were applied.
Google calendar screenshot Fri 6 9am to 5pm, event titled "Uhhhhhh depression??"
And this is worrying, because language does--and should do-- so much more than that, and blurring the boundaries between language and code flattens the former more than it enlivens the latter.
LPD Libertarian Police Department By Tom O'Donnell March 31, 2014 An image of a cop leaning in an open door is blurred. Already a subscriber? Sign in. (Link) Your window is closing. Unlock this story. Subscribe. (Link on a separate modal)
Even a hammer, made of wood and iron, requires trees to be cut down and earth to be mined up. A simple hammer requires laws to be written about fair treatment of workers in multiple industries, sustainability of various biological and geological environments, and regulation about the sale and use of the hammer. “It matters how you use it,” in regards to artificial intelligence ignores the reality that it also matters how AI is made, how AI is disseminated, the waste AI produces, the damage AI causes to economies and environments, and the overall impact that AI has on human life and culture.
I often feel that my “vibes” argument isn’t popular with computer and cognitive/behavioral scientists. Computer scientists are in it for speed and scale. And LLMs help speed and scale, so vibes are a hard argument with them. And I am far too ignorant to explain myself meaningfully to a cognitive or behavioral scientist, so I don’t even try. So I understand that a lot of other people simply won’t agree or relate at all to this post, which is fine. Other people don’t gain a sense of themselves through their work, I guess? I have no idea how other people form thoughts and know what they value. But tech bros in particular I understand intimately. And they love the managerial vibes of LLMs. So to tech bros, they understand a “vibes-based” approach but fundamentally disagree with my conclusion. Tech bros want the vibes that power offers them when they have an agent perform work for them. LLMs (borrowing the Hullman framing) help tech bros solve problems because of a sort of delegation of tasks. There’s some black box effect and trust required, but working with models largely converts any or all forms of difficult, analytical work into a sort of management work instead.
“We are in a period now when it’s absolutely essential to protest,” says Hartmann, citing the Harvard professor Erica Chenoweth, who argues that just 3.5% of a population engaging in peaceful protest can hold back authoritarian movements.
AI Skills 4 Accessibility Build your AI expertise with a free course created for the disability community. Learn how to use and implement AI tools to boost productivity, streamline tasks, and create impact. 1.3B people around the world live with a disability 91% of people with disabilities see Copilot as a helpful assistive technology 87% of people with disabilities feel more productive at work with Copilot
Costco Wholesale (COST) 1,036 USD +7.48% Target Corp (TGT) 93.98 USD -24.82% A line chart showing 6 months of data, normalized to a relative 0 starting point, between Costco and Target. Costco loses a little value in January and then rises in Feb, loses a little in March, and is now above as of May 21st. Target gains value slowly until Jan 24th. An annotation on the chart notes: Jan 24th: Target drops DEI. After the 25th, Target has consistently dropped in value and not rallied. Target has been steady near -25% since April.
FEED EGGS A low-quality computer graphics egg has an open mouth. Nearby is a basket of eggs.
Flammarion Engraving, a black and white woodcut print. A missionary holds a staff and leans out, poking their head past the sphere of earth, stars, and the sun, into heaven itself. Original caption: "A medieval missionary tells that he has found the point where heaven and Earth meet..." Engraving by an unknown artist in Camille Flammarion's L'AtmosphÚre: Météorologie Populaire (1888).
They described incidents including overhearing racist remarks about other employees, a time when they felt they had to verbally break up a conflict between Barlet and another coworker, and witnessing a number of inappropriate comments from Barlet such as, “We need to get the most f***ed up disabled person to be on our marketing, the one with real multiple disabilities.” The source notes that in this particular instance, Barlet proceeded to make obscene gestures, mocking individuals with physical disabilities.
Image from Andor, where 14 security officials sit around a round table in a bleach white room. Caption: The Empire loves minimalism. Look at this room of security officials: The room is as "pure" as it could be from blemishes and disorder; no wasted color, no aliens in sight, perfect geometric symmetry, clean, precise, and almost exclusively men. What better place to control the galaxy?
Special Recognitions for Outstanding Reviews 1 recognition for CHI 2022 Papers 1 recognition for CHI 2023 Papers 1 recognition for CHI 2024 Papers 2 recognitions for UIST 2024 Papers
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Neither Young nor Jake Nelson, director of traffic safety research for AAA, would be drawn on whether US automakers—via the US version of NCAP—would adopt EuroNCAP’s button nudges. “Industry design changes in the US market are more likely to occur based on strong consumer demand,” Nelson says. “It would be ideal to see better coordination between NCAP and EuroNCAP, however, we have not observed much influence in either direction.”
I often feel that my “vibes” argument isn’t popular with computer and cognitive/behavioral scientists. Computer scientists are in it for speed and scale. And LLMs help speed and scale, so vibes are a hard argument with them. And I am far too ignorant to explain myself meaningfully to a cognitive or behavioral scientist, so I don’t even try. So I understand that a lot of other people simply won’t agree or relate at all to this post, which is fine. Other people don’t gain a sense of themselves through their work, I guess? I have no idea how other people form thoughts and know what they value.
Hayao Miyazaki said (back in 2016) in response to an AI demo of a monstrous creature that “whoever creates this has no idea what pain is” and that “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.” I passionately believe that pain, as a pre-linguistic thing we all experience, is far more important to creativity than language is. Language is something we created to escape pain, to distance ourselves from it. Language can evoke pain, but it takes real pain to stimulate what matters about human creativity. And pain is just one thing among many things that we feel before language (that are all central to creativity) - love, comfort, happiness - these are all pre-linguistic feelings too. How can someone be truly creative if they don’t understand what happiness feels like? If they don’t want to evoke the experience of happiness in someone else? If they aren’t fervently seeking joy, to escape from pain? Language has only just been a vehicle, an instrument, that we use on our journey alongside our joy and pain.
Should you use ChatGPT to understand a paper? No. If you have an assignment due, getting ChatGPT to summarize something can be tempting for completing that task. But learning isn’t just a task to complete, you need to be the one who acquires knowledge and really chews on big questions.
am bug, not feature :( meme of the sad ant carrying a bindle
The question I am asked most frequently by hearing and sighted people is “How can I make my [website, gallery exhibit, film, performance, concert, whatever] accessible to you?” Companies, schools, nonprofits, and state and federal agencies approach me and other DeafBlind people all the time, demanding, “How do we make it more accessible?” Such a frenzy around access is suffocating. I want to tell them, Listen, I don’t care about your whatever. But the desperation on their breath holds me dumbfounded. The arrogance is astounding. Why is it always about them? Why is it about their including or not including us? Why is it never about us and whether or not we include them?
Federal law prevents foreigners from donating to presidential campaigns or inaugural funds, but World Liberty’s coin sale offered a new, legal way to back Mr. Trump. “The main reason for purchasing such a token was to support Trump’s inauguration, as he was the first crypto-friendly president of the United States,” said Keer Lau, chief strategy officer at Orbiter Finance, a Hong Kong-based entity.
4 different data visualizations are shown: A waffle chart titled Category share of total, A stepped line chart titled Current vs. previous trend, A line chart with a data-baseline starting at zero titled One vs all trend, And a dumbbell chart titled Trend with categories The design is visually strong, crisp, and relatively minimal. Only grey and blue are used as colors, creating a strong visual hierarchy and visual focus.
A vast, empty space with 4 little pixels speckled near the center.
A post by someone (Name hidden) Consulting & teaching | generative modeling. 34m Or perhaps pause before presuming (in the case of me) or overgeneralizing things in the case of your straw man. I don't have an issue with you demonstrating absurdity by taking something to an extreme or creating a playful game. But that doesn't invalidate a theory and ideas or give reason to malign them or the author out of context, some of which have been validated in empirical studies including those you cited.
4 pixels are shown in an array. There are 3 gaps on the x axis where b, f, and g would be.
Jeb Bush meme where he is elated that he (theoretically) won every electoral vote prediction in every state for president against Clinton and Trump.
I talk about the gods; I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth. The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.
Me, a white man with black glasses, arm tattoo, and styled hair, standing at a podium with my laptop, smiling at something or someone off camera.
The financial opportunity is so great to overlay companies that they are willing to get sued and even willing to support their customers who get sued. They make that much money off of all this. Overlay companies like accessiBe have a whole support page where they try to assure customers that even if you get sued, we have enough money and resources to win. Zero cases lost by accessiBe customers for non-compliance. Screenshot from their website. I love how accessiBe won't mention that they might get you sued but instead argue that each of their customers who have been sued haven't lost yet. (This was definitely written by a lawyer.) And it is for this reason that overlays are the true villains: they aren’t just filling a business need, but a business fear. They are successful because doing accessibility the right way is scary. They’re taking advantage of the scarcity of knowledge and insecurity of small-to-mid business owners.
Market summary for S&P 500 5,328.91 +346 (6.95%) up today Line chart showing a steep climb up that started around 1:20pm.
A video, discovered on the cellphone of a paramedic who was found along with 14 other aid workers in a mass grave in Gaza in late March, shows that the ambulances and fire truck that they were traveling in were clearly marked and had their emergency signal lights on when Israeli troops hit them with a barrage of gunfire.
Seeing Eye to AI? Applying Deep-Feature-Based Similarity Metrics to Information Visualization S Long, A Chatzimparmpas, E Alexander, M Kay, J Hullman arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.00228
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