Arvind (has towel, not panicking)'s Avatar

Arvind (has towel, not panicking)

@avenk

design researcher, ritual technologist, neuroatypical in unsatisfactory ways. i sense and work towards emergent futures. let’s make the world a place of flourishing for all life.

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Latest posts by Arvind (has towel, not panicking) @avenk

Preview
Security and Privacy Analysis of Tile's Location Tracking Protocol We conduct the first comprehensive security analysis of Tile, the second most popular crowd-sourced location-tracking service behind Apple's AirTags. We identify several exploitable vulnerabilities an...

When we talk about the problems with Bluetooth-enabled physical trackers, we usually talk about AirTags, but let us save some rage for Tile, powered by this paper discussing Tile's privacy, security, and accountability problems: arxiv.org/abs/2510.003...

02.03.2026 21:28 👍 91 🔁 32 💬 5 📌 1

Nice turn of phrase.

So much of systems design is description,

And the textual spell casting machine casts a spell back on you making you think you do not have to describe.

06.03.2026 19:01 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

We should have professionalized back in 2010-2015 when we knew the field was expanding rapidly.

We could have had the chance to set norms and build culture.

Instead, we’re left with *looks around at whatever we have now*

20.02.2026 23:21 👍 1 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0

I see that we are in an era of simultaneous pollution of and enclosure of the commons

20.02.2026 22:10 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

They’re sending me emails about puzzle games that my connections have played.

The desperation is a fantastic case study in what happens to a product when they keep ignoring their user researchers for years.

18.02.2026 23:05 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

hi friends, I’m about to be low internet for the next week or so!! I would love it so much if you could tell your amazing Bay Area Eng leader folks about this job, which closes 2/24!! that way when I get back to my inbox it will be full up with lovely applications 🙏🏻❤️

17.02.2026 23:38 👍 10 🔁 13 💬 0 📌 1

Crucial paper published Friday that deserves much more attention in the #LongCOVID world: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

TLDR: 13/15 immunocompromised patients who had chronic COVID infections (>200 days) cleared the virus in under 2 weeks when given combo antivirals/monoclonals

1/

17.02.2026 18:19 👍 138 🔁 53 💬 2 📌 8
The REAL problem with duolingo
The REAL problem with duolingo YouTube video by languagejones

This is a good explainer with suggestions for things to try instead

youtu.be/sCou7ut2L-o?...

16.02.2026 18:34 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Preview
The Hippocratic Oath Personal blog of Jonathan Korman

I’m thinking about worldbuilding for a disruptive & interesting order of magically-empowered healers in genre fantasy.

1/

12.02.2026 19:01 👍 0 🔁 1 💬 1 📌 0

I work with drawing insight from text, and LLMs cannot summarize anything, at least if you want “summary” to have a stable definition; summaries are interpretations.

What they can do is produce *lossier* versions of a body of text. For many cases this does indeed look like summaries!

07.02.2026 20:52 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

I initially read “distinctiveness” as “divisiveness”,

which sounded just as plausible.

07.02.2026 00:47 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

“Anomalous results which persist despite strong management disapproval” 😘

04.02.2026 20:00 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

We will be waiting for this talk, no pressure

bsky.app/profile/haze...

04.02.2026 19:56 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Gonna start calling you Dad Hon for that.

04.02.2026 02:23 👍 4 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Post image Post image

Are female economists treated differently than males in academic seminars?

These authors wanted to know whether gender shapes how scholars are treated when presenting research.

So they built a massive dataset of 2,000+ economics seminars, job talks, and conference presentations from 2019–2023...

03.02.2026 20:54 👍 412 🔁 190 💬 9 📌 39

I live nearby, can I come by to say hi?

03.02.2026 23:45 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

Fuck yes I’ve been wanting to make this discord for literal yonks.

31.01.2026 05:48 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

We live in ruins no one else can see, and that we can’t unsee.

It’s taken me three decades of living like that to understand the farsight to be both a curse and a blessing;

I’m starting to think the only way to work with this is to build a hyperobject out of it.

31.01.2026 05:47 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

That is an even more impressive concentration of fuckery than previously estimated, which itself was quite record-breaking.

31.01.2026 05:42 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Beyond Sticky Notes (Kelly-Ann McKercher)
The Staff Designer (Catt Small)
Surveys that Work (Caroline Jarrett)

29.01.2026 09:24 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Deliberate Intervention (Alexandra Schmidt)
Mental Models (Indi Young)
Design for How People Learn (Julie Dirksen)
Badass - Making Users Awesome (Kathy Sierra)
Design Justice (Sasha Constanza-Chock)
Be Slightly Evil (Venkatesh Rao)

29.01.2026 09:01 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

Indigenous Maldivians originally came from Sri Lanka!

Those trade and migration networks were very extensive.

28.01.2026 15:04 👍 5 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
"I say, Jeeves. This character sheet's all wrong. What's this Thacko business?"

"THAC0, sir. An abbreviation of To Hit Armor Class 0. In Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Second Edition, a low number is preferable in both."

"By Grabthar's hammer, Jeeves. One doesn't know if one's coming or going."

"Indeed, sir."

"It's enough to make one pine for GURPS."

"Very nearly, sir."

"I say, Jeeves. This character sheet's all wrong. What's this Thacko business?" "THAC0, sir. An abbreviation of To Hit Armor Class 0. In Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Second Edition, a low number is preferable in both." "By Grabthar's hammer, Jeeves. One doesn't know if one's coming or going." "Indeed, sir." "It's enough to make one pine for GURPS." "Very nearly, sir."

28.01.2026 08:15 👍 546 🔁 104 💬 4 📌 3
Gödel, Escher, Bachelorette

Gödel, Escher, Bachelorette

Thanks for the helpful auto-complete, Gmail.

24.01.2026 01:38 👍 1239 🔁 262 💬 36 📌 23
Falsehood engineers believe about calendars The future can exist only in terms of events. Future and past choices about working hours locations availability et cetera do not exist. Working hours cannot end at midnight. Working hours never ex...

Ahem

sensemaya.org/falsehood-en...

23.01.2026 15:53 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

I’d say it makes it worse because we see EVERYTHING that is broken and we also know it can be better, and easily.

Just living in the shards of a pre-ruined world all the time.

22.01.2026 08:44 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

This is just devs being lazy and not unescaping special characters in a very crude security measure.

I bet no one in charge has any clue about this.

22.01.2026 08:31 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

Ugh, I feel that so hard, and I’m sorry you’re having a rough time.

I think there are a lot of us silently struggling to find a place, and I don’t know if any have better answers.

Perhaps we need a support group.

21.01.2026 12:43 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Will do!

20.01.2026 09:35 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Ah so this isn’t at an event?

I’d love intros if you feel comfortable.

20.01.2026 09:32 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0