Zach Levonian
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zwlevonian.bsky.social
Zach Levonian
@zwlevonian.bsky.social
560 followers 1.3K following 140 posts
Human–computer interaction researcher. PhD from University of Minnesota. Tacoma, WA. Mastodon: [email protected]
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zwlevonian.bsky.social
Zach Levonian @zwlevonian.bsky.social · Feb 6
Hi! My name is Zach, and I'm a computer science researcher working in industry. You can learn more about me and find my writing (peer-reviewed and otherwise) on my blog: levon003.github.io/blog/
Blog Index
Zachary Levonian’s blog, for self-published writing. Zach is a researcher and data scientist with a PhD in Human-computer Interaction.
levon003.github.io
zwlevonian.bsky.social
Reasonable take. I like the idea of more CS pedagogy focused on understanding real-world complex codebases. the-learning-agency.com/the-cutting-...
Screenshot of text: If working code no longer reliably signals comprehension, education must optimize for something else: the ability to reason about systems – how components interact, where constraints live, and how changes ripple through a codebase. For junior developers, this shift is especially important. As AI accelerates output, leveling up now depends less on writing more code and more on understanding existing systems along with their architectures and embedded trade-offs.
January 15, 2026 at 11:46 PM
zwlevonian.bsky.social
I missed this last month from @tilmanbayer.bsky.social: "AI finds errors in 90% of October's Featured Articles". Great example of human-in-the-loop LLM use for verifying Wikipedia articles. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2025-12-01/Opinion - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
January 10, 2026 at 6:25 PM
zwlevonian.bsky.social
Did a quick link roundup for Doll's Verification-Driven Development. Very interesting approach. levon003.github.io/2026/01/07/v...
January 9, 2026 at 5:08 PM
Reposted by Zach Levonian
jeffreybigham.com
i liked @odannyboy.bsky.social 's breakdown of the four visions of AI futures --
odannyboy.medium.com/the-four-hor...
The Four Horsemen of the AIpocalypse
AI is fracturing into at least four different visions of the future.
odannyboy.medium.com
January 6, 2026 at 3:24 PM
zwlevonian.bsky.social
I really can’t imagine how different my human–computer interaction PhD would have been if building reasonable-fidelity prototypes took me weeks instead of months…
mptouzel.bsky.social Max Puelma Touzel @mptouzel.bsky.social · 20d
Since lots of science research is realizing an MVP of sorts, I think there are big efficiency gains to be had there. And the barrier to better code (e.g. testing) in such MVPs that scientists would skip for the effort needed, is instead now "why not?" given the on-demand hand-holding.
December 31, 2025 at 2:48 AM
Reposted by Zach Levonian
scientificdiscovery.dev
New post!

There was a lot of innovation in medicine and biomedical research this year, and I've tried to summarize the biggest ones in this blogpost.

Medical breakthroughs in 2025. Plus a serious note at the end.
www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/medical-br...
Medical breakthroughs in 2025
... and a happy new year.
www.scientificdiscovery.dev
December 28, 2025 at 6:37 PM
zwlevonian.bsky.social
Black pill
ajordannafa.com Jordan Nafa @ajordannafa.com · 22d
UX Research is pretty much already gone and the nail is in the coffin of type A data science. Type B Data Science is still going strong
December 28, 2025 at 12:36 PM
zwlevonian.bsky.social
This but unironically
ponder.ooo ponder @ponder.ooo · 24d
love to thread a "some shit, idk, it's whatever" junk drawer object thru every function in my application
December 26, 2025 at 9:31 AM
zwlevonian.bsky.social
rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0576
LLM-generated prose undermines a social contract of sorts: absent LLMs, it is presumed that of the reader and the writer, it is the writer that has undertaken the greater intellectual exertion. (That is, it is more work to write than to read!) For the reader, this is important: should they struggle with an idea, they can reasonably assume that the writer themselves understands it — and it is the least a reader can do to labor to make sense of it. If, however, prose is LLM-generated, this social contract becomes ripped up: a reader cannot assume that the writer understands their ideas because they might not so much have read the product of the LLM that they tasked to write it.
December 23, 2025 at 2:17 AM
Reposted by Zach Levonian
manoelhortaribeiro.bsky.social
In a new blog post, I argue that CS is already an empirical discipline, even though we often act as if it is not (mostly to our students).

doomscrollingbabel.manoel.xyz/p/the-empiri...
The Empiricization of Computer Science
Scientific disciplines, like nations, have their own founding myths.
doomscrollingbabel.manoel.xyz
December 17, 2025 at 2:40 PM
zwlevonian.bsky.social
Interesting argument, worth reading. I respect Togelius for biting the bullet and explicitly arguing that "expanding humanity's collective knowledge" is more morally important than acquiring life-saving technology developments, although I think this is a (very) hard view to support.
Expanding humanity's collective knowledge is, I think, the most meaningful thing we can do. If humans could not usefully contribute to science anymore, this would be a disaster. So, no. I do not think it worth it to find a cure for cancer faster if that means we can never do science again.
December 8, 2025 at 4:42 PM
zwlevonian.bsky.social
This is particularly impressive to me because Arcadia sucks! Proof you can find value in anything 🤗
harrywallop.co.uk Harry Wallop @harrywallop.co.uk · Dec 2
Great culture can save lives. Literally.

Amazing letter in today’s @thetimes.com about Tom Stoppard
December 2, 2025 at 12:09 PM
Reposted by Zach Levonian
This has been a challenge for cs.HC: we need folks to step up and support that category. Please contact me if you are interested in moderating either DH or HC! Thanks!
November 29, 2025 at 7:27 PM
zwlevonian.bsky.social
I regularly see critiques of pleasing-but-false ideas, but I've also had to work quite hard to shape my information feed to include that kind of information. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit here: human–computer interaction researchers should build tools that make feed-shaping easier for people.
whstancil.bsky.social Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · Nov 12
When's the last time you heard someone actually critique an idea they found ideologically pleasing? It's incredibly rare and getting rarer, and it's an artifact of us all existing in informational spaces we've specifically selected to tell us what we know we already want to hear.
November 12, 2025 at 6:23 PM
zwlevonian.bsky.social
Worth reading. Some nice reflections here.
carlhendrick.substack.com Carl Hendrick @carlhendrick.substack.com · Nov 8
Are we approaching a Turing Test for Teaching? A deep dive into the evidence on AI tutoring. carlhendrick.substack.com/p/the-algori...
November 11, 2025 at 1:44 AM
Reposted by Zach Levonian
chelseaparlett.bsky.social
“look how much better my favorite model is compared compared to these other TRASH MODELS😒😒😒 when I specifically chose a DGP that matches my models assumptions and not the others’😌”
November 7, 2025 at 4:13 AM
zwlevonian.bsky.social
Feeling major #CSCW2025 FOMO this week! But I enjoyed virtual participation and I'm honored to share that I won a Best Paper Award. Here's a blog post about my study: levon003.github.io/2025/10/22/c...
CSCW best paper: “Peer Recommendation Interventions for Health-related Social Support”
Using recommendations to help people find peer support online. Adaptation of a talk at CSCW 2025.
levon003.github.io
October 22, 2025 at 10:50 PM
Reposted by Zach Levonian
ericjgeller.com
Love this story about how Wikipedia fends off censorship and disinformation: "Wikipedia’s first and best line of defense is to explain how Wikipedia works." www.theverge.com/cs/features/...
September 22, 2025 at 4:44 PM
zwlevonian.bsky.social
Created a small tool for updating a Slack channel when new papers are added to a Zotero library. Totally free using Google Cloud Run's basic tier. levon003.github.io/2025/09/19/z...
Zotero Slack Connector: a Slack bot for notifications about new papers
I created a small open-source tool for notifying a Slack channel when new papers are added to a Zotero group.
levon003.github.io
September 19, 2025 at 9:50 PM
zwlevonian.bsky.social
A quick love letter to the Internet Archive's free online book loans: it makes it so easy to verify extremely obscure facts! I'm constantly using it to verify info on Wikipedia.
Info cards for 10 books checked out from the Internet Archive. The collection of books is eclectic, and consists of mostly 20th century reference works.
September 13, 2025 at 6:32 PM
zwlevonian.bsky.social
Thinking again about AI as tarmac. (Here's Fred Turner, writing in 2017.) levon003.github.io/2024/05/19/m...
Fred Turner: Any whole-system approach doesn’t work. What I would recommend is not that we abandon technology, but that we deal with it as an integrated part of our world, and that we engage it the same way that we engage the highway system, the architecture that supports our buildings, or the way we organize hospitals. The technologies that we’ve developed are infrastructures. We don’t have a language yet for infrastructure as politics. And enough magic still clings to the devices that people are very reluctant to start thinking about them as ordinary as tarmac. But we need to start thinking about them as ordinary as tarmac. And we need to develop institutional settings for thinking about how we want to make our traffic laws. To the extent that technologies enable new collaborations and new communities, more power to them. But let’s be thoughtful about how they function.
September 8, 2025 at 6:00 PM
zwlevonian.bsky.social
This genuinely shocked me. A Qualtrics heatmap included in a 2019 Nature Comms paper, turned into a far-right meme by the Department of Homeland Security. levon003.github.io/2024/07/27/m...
August 26, 2025 at 9:44 PM
zwlevonian.bsky.social
Starting to get excited for #CSCW2025! I have a paper on peer support via recommender systems in the virtual session. Recommender systems should treat people matching as a serious design goal! levon003.github.io/2025/02/25/c...
Research paper: “Peer Recommendation Interventions for Health-related Social Support”
Can recommendation systems help people find health-related peer support online? I wrote a research paper exploring this question.
levon003.github.io
August 20, 2025 at 5:02 PM
Reposted by Zach Levonian
estellesmithphd.bsky.social
The @acm-cscw.bsky.social Starter Pack is growing ahead of #CSCW2025 ! (go.bsky.app/SPumuMT) 🔥 A warm welcome to all of our new members 🔥: @imanm02.bsky.social
@jesanovi.bsky.social @shadinz.bsky.social @jaytee-ess.bsky.social @jaewonk.bsky.social @sypark9.bsky.social
New member thread 1/x
ACM-CSCW
Join the conversation
go.bsky.app
August 19, 2025 at 3:01 PM
Reposted by Zach Levonian
ryannorth.ca
This article was a supreme delight: grab a cup of tea, set aside 10 or 15 minutes, and enjoy this story about The Hardest Working Font in Manhattan.

aresluna.org/the-hardest-...

(via @ferociousj.bsky.social)
The hardest working font in Manhattan
A story of a 150-year-old font you have never heard of – and one you probably saw earlier today.
aresluna.org
August 12, 2025 at 2:31 PM