Frank Elavsky (he/him) ⌁

Even bigger announcement: Skeleton has won Best Paper (top 1%) at IEEE VIS this year!! 🎉 VIS is my home community and I am deeply indebted to many of the people in it. I take a little time to pontificate on what "best paper" means to me (or rather, what I think it should really be about):

I had my AI agent create an app called “Lunch” to help me with decision fatigue and boost my productivity. It has a few pictures of things I might like to eat. Tapping one spawns a subagent to order that item on Uber Eats and 60-90 minutes later I’m eating. It’s 600 thousand lines of JavaScript.

There's nothing left of this industry

Happy weekend www.openmarketsinstitute.org/publications...

I get cute aggression sometimes, but I also get a very similar "proud of your friends aggression" too. Does anyone else get that? I'm like, worked up right now. So proud of these two. They're so great and this work is so great. They got a best paper on this!!! AHHHH

Are algorithm audits meaningfully fixing issues in algorithmic systems? In our paper at #AIES2026 this week, @davidthewid.bsky.social and I argue that it’s time to deprioritize algorithm audits & instead shift scrutiny to the larger systems of power in which audits sit. 1/n

I am entirely serious when I say that this should be seen as a moderate position. It specifically and surgically dismantles institutions that did not exist pre-9/11 and assigns their functions much as they were assigned pre-9/11.

Hah! Such a great question. I am being obtuse here, really. The reason "sociotechnical" as a term is helpful is typically because it opens the eyes of optimistic technology-builders to see and realize that their technologies (all technologies) are socially and culturally situated. (continued...)

via lethargic.talkative.fish/@suricrasia/...

This is great, thanks for sharing your reflections! Worth noting that this is a growing community and literature about aligning HCI against reinforcing hegemonic power.

@bmitra.bsky.social is also doing some wonderful organizing on the Information Retrieval side that is quite intersectional to HCI.

I am yet again navel-gazing about HCI research www.frank.computer/blog/2026/09...

As both an academic and a writer, I am repelled by the "this looks like a long document. Would you like me to summarize it for you?" that seems to appear at the top of every pdf viewer now. NO. The *entire point* of good writing (either books or journal papers) is that every sentence has a purpose.

huge

"And I honestly wouldn’t like ideation, as this quintessentially human act, if I only ever did it alone or with a machine that simply confirms my biases and listens to my instructions." I recommend this text by @frank.computer to any creator, not only prototypers: www.frank.computer/blog/2026/03...

Lol. Lmao, even.

Never let a writer help you move

Fortnite's Audio Visualizer was an accessible mainstay. In April, Epic removed the crucial feature from Competitive, and in June, heavily nerfed the option in standard. Now, disabled players are left struggling to play. Read my latest @mothership.blog story here: www.mothership.blog/fortnites-au...

As the Trump administration ordered agencies to eradicate “illegal” diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, we identified more than 1,000 nonprofits that removed such language from the mission statements in their tax filings. (Published Dec. 2025)

If you have an election results chart, the alt text needs to communicate the results. "Election results" is not enough. The same rules apply for alt text for images of weather charts. "Weather chart" doesn't cut it and doesn't convey what the chart is actually saying to users.

Yet another reminder why inaccessibility impacts everyone. If ads followed standards, then close buttons would be obvious to perceive, clear how to operate, and easy to press.

I am making it a habit to always look for the labor story behind these nasty scandals. The consumers are almost never the only ones being harmed.

This is incredible.

Nature did a short piece on our preprint about how LLMs will affect the practice of science; my more detailed thread is below.

AI is about bringing the logic of fast fashion to new economic realms, so hey - caring about AI *is* a form of caring about fast fashion. We've got a whole book making that argument - here's a short form essay on that point: