Ryan Williams

Ryan Williams

@activationlayer.org

Democracy, Technology, and Other Stuff. PhD candidate @ the University of Texas. I am friends with a pug.

392 followers1.4K following518 posts

Ryan Williams reposted

oh cool

Justin Hendrix@justinhendrix.bsky.social

"Major US banks are detecting ​unauthorized third-party AI ‌agents operating inside customer accounts, ​with some agents ​attempting to take ⁠actions that appear ​to be independent ​of user instructions, Axios reported on Thursday, ​citing people ​familiar with the matter."

Ryan Williams reposted

Atmosphere update: atproto apps are growing 20% month over month, and last week we passed 1,000 daily active apps.

This rules.

kepano@stephango.com

This is Pele, my new rendering library for diagrams and charts, compatible with the latest Mermaid syntax. - 100-500× faster than mermaid.js - 6× smaller bundle - No dependencies - Easy to theme - Responsive to device width - Open source (MIT) Try it at pele.run

Ryan Williams reposted

I will be presenting "Data Annotation as Measurement" at #AIES2026 in Poster Session 3 (today @ 3:15PM CEST)! ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AI...

Emma Harvey@emmharv.bsky.social

✨New Work✨ forthcoming at #AIES2026: 1️⃣ "Data Annotation as Measurement" by me, @allisonkoe.bsky.social, and @kizilcec.bsky.social explores how data annotation can go wrong, and how measurement theory can help improve it. 🔗: arxiv.org/pdf/2608.07297

what if you treated - how content reaches you and - how the accounts in a feed relate to you and your local network as primitives of the reading experience instead of curiosities? I think we haven't scratched the surface of what atproto is capable of.

Ryan Williams reposted

My support for bluesky/atproto is pretty much explicitly a "political" project. It is bad for a small number of (mostly right-wing) people to literally own all the sources of media. Open-source algorithms + the ability to move your account without negative network effects opposes this.

Ryan Williams reposted

Replying to @roguethought.bsky.social

Agriculture technology agriculture industrial systems too. Soil improvements projects investments. Agenda objectives strategies innovation. Transport infrastructure sector investments.

Awesome poster!

Uma Gunturi@umagunturi1.bsky.social

Attending #TADA2026 at UC Berkeley today! Catch me presenting our poster (#27) on counter-storytelling at 11:45 am in Krutch Auditorium! Our poster explores how people use personal stories on Reddit to challenge stereotypes. w @mariaa.bsky.social @maartensap.bsky.social @jiminmun.bsky.social

Ryan Williams reposted

#TADA2026 is now up on lea.ac! Full schedule, filterable by people you follow, a custom feed, and more! (This is not part of the official TADA organization, just an experiment. Try it out and let us know what you think! Also a nice way to follow along virtually if you can't attend in person!)

Adam Visokay@avisokay.bsky.social

Looking forward to the Text as Data conference on Monday at UC Berkeley! I will be presenting our new paper "Multi-Perspective LLM Annotations for Valid Analyses in Subjective Tasks" which is a joint effort with Navya Mehrotra and @gligoric.bsky.social. 🧵

Ryan Williams reposted

Replying to @avisokay.bsky.social

We show how multi-perspective LLM annotations can better support analyses when labels are subjective and vary across people.

Ryan Williams reposted

I’ve wanted to run a marathon for years. This month I’m finally doing it! Thanks to all the woodland creatures who have supported me during training! 🦌🐿️

Ryan Williams reposted

Caffeine doesn't replace lost hours of sleep, it only masks the fatigue signals to your brain so you don't realize how tired you actually are. You still suffer the cognitive and physiological deficits from the sleep deficiency, you just can't tell. Which is good actually and fine I've decided

I’ve wanted to run a marathon for years. This month I’m finally doing it! Thanks to all the woodland creatures who have supported me during training! 🦌🐿️

Ryan Williams reposted

New DNA publication 🚨: Susha, Iryna, Louis Knüpfling and Philip Leifeld (2026): Mandating Business-to-Government Data Sharing for Public Interest: Coalitions and their Policy Beliefs in the Shaping of the EU Data Act. Government Information Quarterly 43(4): 102188. doi.org/10.1016/j.gi...

Going to be a blast!

naitian@naitian.org

If you haven't yet registered for TADA 2026 on October 5th (day before COLM), registration is open to the public! Detailed schedule forthcoming, but lots of fantastic posters and talks. We even have a second half-day of lightning talks scheduled! tada2026.eventbrite.com

Ryan Williams reposted

the first open source system-one model now must be named Jeff.

hikikomorphism@hikikomorphism.bsky.social

I think distillation is the right frame, but what's being distilled is the chain of actions that an llm goes through as it runs multiple sequence tool calls being compressed into a single tool. Call that embeds a decision tree with Jeff routing between various next actions?

Ryan Williams@activationlayer.org

What do governments mean by “disinformation”—and what do they do about it? Today I’m launching the Global Disinformation Policy Database Explorer, a project I led at UT Austin. Explore: www.disinfo-policy.org

Ryan Williams reposted

Cellular automata are powerful but painful to author. Rules are a lookup table; neural CAs are more expressive but a black box. What if each CA rule was just code that you can read? Introducing Programmable Cellular Automata (PCA)

Ryan Williams reposted

Thank you to the dozens of student researchers who contributed through UT Austin’s Global Disinformation Lab and the LBJ School of Public Affairs. I’m excited to put this work into people’s hands.

364 policies. 132 countries + the European Union. 2000–2023. Governments can use the same word while targeting different information, behaviors, and harms. The GDPD records those differences, alongside policy instruments, institutions, and liabilities.

Ryan Williams reposted

Enough turning these animated films into live action movies. I want to see live action classics turned into animation. Gordon Gekko’s cigar exploding, turning his face black. Lawrence of Arabia imagining a sand dune as a roasted ham.

Ryan Williams reposted

You're laughing... I can't withdraw my Bonk from Kraken and you're laughing?

FinTwitter@fintwitter.bsky.social

Kraken has temporarily suspended deposits and withdrawals of Bonk due to an ongoing incident affecting the token, according to its website.