Ethan Cecchetti
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ethancecchetti.bsky.social
Ethan Cecchetti
@ethancecchetti.bsky.social
120 followers 190 following 22 posts
Assistant Professor, PL-Security Researcher, and Bitcoin Unenthusiast at Wisconsin–Madison | Cornell PhD | Ultimate Frisbee player | Aspiring-to-be-more-avid cyclist

Mastodon: discuss.systems/@EthanCecchetti
Web: cecchetti.sites.cs.wisc.edu
Posts Replies Media Videos
ethancecchetti.bsky.social
Gotta max out those bathrooms. Each one adds a TON to the sale price! No need to look at what's in them.
windows98support.bsky.social matt @windows98support.bsky.social · 3h
Oh shit waddup
December 1, 2025 at 9:50 PM
Reposted by Ethan Cecchetti
lukesteuber.com
presented without comment
Offit told me that Kennedy is a "liar" and a "terrible human being." I asked him to explain. "It doesn't matter what I say," Offit said. "He thinks the medical journals are in the pocket of the industry, he thinks that the government is in the pocket of the industry, he thinks I'm in the pocket of industry, and he's wrong." Offit continued: "If he has data showing he's right, then fucking publish it. He can't, because he doesn't have those data." I asked Offit if he saw a way to reverse the public's rising distrust in science. "I don't think there is any way to regain that trust other than have the viruses do the education, and the bacteria do the education, and then people will realize they paid way too high a cost," he said.
December 1, 2025 at 2:28 AM
ethancecchetti.bsky.social
I actually thought this was @theonion.com before I looked more carefully at the post.
November 26, 2025 at 2:40 AM
Reposted by Ethan Cecchetti
scalzi.com
You know, I'm not sure I ever really read the Pond Rules at our local nature preserve all that closely before
POND RULES: No swimming, jumping or gallivanting. Do not disturb the pond witch. No fishing with dynamite. Sacrifices to water gods on alternate Wednesdays only - NO EXCEPTIONS! Taunt the crows at your own risk. If a hand comes out of the water to beckon you, turn and walk away. Do not feed the weretrout. Is the water burning with cold unholy fire? Report it to the ranger! They’re not ducks. Run. Have fun!
November 25, 2025 at 1:24 AM
Reposted by Ethan Cecchetti
punkrockscience.bsky.social
Today’s xkcd made me cry.

In a good way.

xkcd.com/3172/
November 24, 2025 at 11:46 PM
Reposted by Ethan Cecchetti
angryblacklady.blacksky.app
"Veridian Dynamics. We’re the future of food, developing the next generation of food and food-like products. Tomatoes… the size of this baby, lemon-flavored fish, chickens that lay 16 eggs a day (which is a lot for a chicken), organic vegetables chock-full of antidepressants."
nikigrayson.com niki grayson @nikigrayson.com · 8d
no it isn’t!!! fuck you!!!
November 23, 2025 at 9:04 PM
Reposted by Ethan Cecchetti
benadida.com
The International Association for Cryptologic Research has used heliosvoting.org – my online voting system – for a number of years.

This year, a trustee lost their secret key. The election has to be re-run.

Below, a few thoughts that didn't fit in the NYT piece.

www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/w...
Cryptographers Held an Election. They Can’t Decrypt the Results.
www.nytimes.com
November 22, 2025 at 2:40 AM
Reposted by Ethan Cecchetti
kenwhite.bsky.social
Al odors are particulate.

So, like, if you smell shit, that’s shit in your nose, man.
colindickey.com Colin Dickey @colindickey.com · 10d
Man, everything is so bleak, anyone got a fun fact or little bit of trivia they want to share
November 21, 2025 at 4:42 AM
Reposted by Ethan Cecchetti
justinwolfers.bsky.social
It's a revealing moment...

J.D. Vance welcomes a two-legged robot helping on the job site. But if that helper is a person named Jose, he calls it a threat. Same tasks, same productivity boost.

The inconsistency reveals this isn’t about economics.
November 16, 2025 at 12:52 PM
Reposted by Ethan Cecchetti
fishkin.bsky.social
The incredible shrinking attack on U.S. universities continues.

Cornell has signed an agreement—but unlike the UVA agreement, instead of pledging to follow the gov't's highly questionable July "guidance" on discrimination, Cornell simply agrees to hand it out to faculty as a "training resource"!
Both parties affirm the importance of and their support for civil rights. Cornell affirms its committment to complying with federal civil rights laws and agrees to include the DOJ's "Guidance for Recipients of Federal Funding Regarding Unlawful Discrimination" of July 29, 2025 as a training resource to faculty and staff so long as that Guidance remains operative.
November 7, 2025 at 5:32 PM
Reposted by Ethan Cecchetti
meredithmeredith.bsky.social
📣THREAD: It’s surprising to me that so many people were surprised to learn that Signal runs partly on AWS (something we can do because we use encryption to make sure no one but you–not AWS, not Signal, not anyone–can access your comms).

It’s also concerning. 1/
meredithmeredith.bsky.social Meredith Whittaker @meredithmeredith.bsky.social · Oct 20
PSA: we're aware that Signal is down for some people. This appears to be related to a major AWS outage. Stand by.
October 27, 2025 at 10:38 AM
Reposted by Ethan Cecchetti
deardean22.bsky.social
The photo:

The comments you will laugh at:
October 23, 2025 at 4:25 AM
Reposted by Ethan Cecchetti
emilymbender.bsky.social
I'd love to see someone try to estimate just how much time and money has gone into research that is either fully undermined by reliance on LLMs or fully pointless --- because obvious if you start from an understanding of what LLMs actually are.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Screen cap from linked article, with heading Significance and then text: Large Language Models (LLMs) are used in evaluative tasks across domains. Yet, what appears as alignment with human or expert judgments may conceal a deeper shift in how “judgment” itself is operationalized. Using news outlets as a controlled benchmark, we compare six LLMs to expert ratings and human evaluations under an identical, structured framework. While models often match expert outputs, our results suggest that they may rely on lexical associations and statistical priors rather than contextual reasoning or normative criteria. We term this divergence epistemia: the illusion of knowledge emerging when surface plausibility replaces verification. Our findings suggest not only performance asymmetries but also a shift in the heuristics underlying evaluative processes, raising fundamental questions about delegating judgment to LLMs. Sentence starting with "While models often" is highlighted in blue.
October 18, 2025 at 10:11 AM
Reposted by Ethan Cecchetti
missingthept.bsky.social
With their press badges confiscated Pentagon reporters will have to break stories the old-fashioned way, being accidentally added to Pete Hegseth’s Signal chats.
phillewis.bsky.social Phil Lewis @phillewis.bsky.social · Oct 15
“The Defense Department has confiscated the badges of the Pentagon reporters from virtually every major media organization in America,” the Pentagon Press Association said
Oct. 15, 2025 PENTAGON PRESS ASSOCIATION STATEMENT Today, the Defense Department confiscated the badges of the Pentagon reporters from virtually every major media organization in America. It did this because reporters would not sign onto a new media policy over its implicit threat of criminalizing national security reporting and exposing those who sign it to potential prosecution. The Pentagon Press Association's members are still committed to reporting on the U.S. military. But make no mistake, today, Oct. 15, 2025 is a dark day for press freedom that raises concerns about a weakening U.S. commitment to transparency in governance, to public accountability at the Pentagon and to free speech for all. PPA
October 16, 2025 at 2:13 AM
Reposted by Ethan Cecchetti
mirandayaver.bsky.social
New Yorker cartoons nail it again.
October 6, 2025 at 5:18 PM
Reposted by Ethan Cecchetti
reichlinmelnick.bsky.social
Judge Young then proposes that maybe Americans just don't care because there aren't many immigrant Palestinians among us and Gaza is far away. He then concludes this section with a robust defense of WHY people should care about what this admin is doing, which I'm reproducing in full.

Read it all.
Finally, perhaps we don't much care. After all, these Plaintiffs, a group of non-citizen pro-Palestinians are relatively small compared to the much larger interest groups who have every right vigorously to espouse the cause of the State of Israel. Palestine is far away and its people are caught up in the horrors of a modern war with heavy ordinance wreaking massive indiscriminate destruction, a war that is not one of our making. Why should we care about the free speech rights of their compatriots here among us? Here's why: The United states is a great nation, not because any of us say so. It is great because we still practice our frontier tradition of selflessness for the good of us all. Strangers go out of their way to help strangers when they see a need. In times of fire, flood, and national disaster, everyone pitches in to help people we've never met and first responders selflessly risk their lives for others. Hundreds of firefighters rushed into the Twin Towers on 9/11 without hesitation desperate to find and save survivors. That's who we are. And on distant battlefields our military “fought and died for the men [they] marched among.” Frank Loesser, “The Ballad of Roger Young”, LIFE, 5 March 1945, at 117. Each day, I recognize (to paraphrase Lincoln again) that the brave men and women, living and dead, who have struggled in our Nation's service have hallowed our Constitutional freedom far above my (or anyone’s) poor power to add or detract. The only Constitutional rights upon which we can depend are those we extend to the weakest and most reviled among us.
September 30, 2025 at 6:08 PM
Reposted by Ethan Cecchetti
jazzreads.bsky.social
So exhausting..
September 28, 2025 at 6:41 PM
Reposted by Ethan Cecchetti
carlbergstrom.com
I like this. Since under RFK Jr, Covid shots are now for people with underlying conditions that put them at risk, Michigan’s chief medical executive Dr. Natasha Bagdasarian states that not having the most recent Covid shot constitutes such an underlying condition.

www.michigan.gov/mdhhs/inside...
In her recommendation, Bagdasarian stated, "Any person over the age of six months without contraindication who has not received a dose of a Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved or-authorized 2025-2026 COVID-19 vaccine may be considered to have an underlying condition that puts them at high risk for severe outcomes from COVID-19 and is thus eligible to receive an age-appropriate dose."
September 19, 2025 at 6:09 PM
Reposted by Ethan Cecchetti
reckless.bsky.social
We cannot make the headlines blunter people www.theverge.com/policy/77979...
Republicans are honoring Charlie Kirk’s memory by declaring war on the First AmendmentThe guardians of ‘free speech’ sure had a change of heart.
September 17, 2025 at 11:30 PM
Reposted by Ethan Cecchetti
carlbergstrom.com
1. What does a Cold War-era game theory problem known as the silent duel have to do with high-risk research strategies, publication in Cell/Nature/Science glamor journals, and the academic job market?

Kevin Gross and I tackle these questions in our latest arXiv preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2509.06718
How competition propels scientific risk-taking Kevin Gross∗ Department of Statistics North Carolina State University Raleigh, NC USA Carl T. Bergstrom† Department of Biology University of Washington Seattle, WA USA (Dated: September 9, 2025) In science as elsewhere, attention is a limited resource and scientists compete with one another to produce the most exciting, novel and impactful results. We develop a game-theoretic model to explore how such competition influences the degree of risk that scientists are willing to embrace in their research endeavors. We find that competition for scarce resources—for example, publications in elite journals, prestigious prizes, and faculty jobs—motivates scientific risk-taking and may be important in counterbalancing other incentives that favor cautious, incremental science. Even small amounts of competition induce substantial risk-taking. Moreover, we find that in an “opt-in” contest, increasing the stakes induces increased participation—which crowds the contest and further impels entrants to pursue higher-risk, higher-return investigations. The model also illuminates a source of tension in academic training and collaboration. Researchers at different career stages differ in their need to amass accomplishments that distinguish them from their peers, and therefore may not agree on what degree of risk to accept.
September 14, 2025 at 1:50 PM
Reposted by Ethan Cecchetti
hammancheez.bsky.social
Cop : i was hit in the face by a club

Lawyer : u mean a club sandwich right

Cop (through tears) : still a club
August 13, 2025 at 10:37 PM
Reposted by Ethan Cecchetti
khandozo.bsky.social
I think Altman assumes that “PhD-level expert” means someone who speaks confidently on everything as opposed to saying “it’s nuanced,” losing their keys, and getting maniacally fixated on their current topic to the point of seeing it in everything.
jaspar.bsky.social J. Emory Parker 🏳️‍🌈 @jaspar.bsky.social · Aug 7
“GPT-5 is the first time that it feels like talking to an expert in any topic — a Ph.D.-level expert,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said.
theo.io Theo Sanderson @theo.io · Aug 7
(real, one-shot :p )
August 7, 2025 at 9:14 PM
Reposted by Ethan Cecchetti
donmoyn.bsky.social
Coding interviews from people who left government earlier this year, and this is a fantastic quote in response to a question about what DOGE tech folk don't understand.
And yeah, I think that the DOGE folks at agencies kind of had unilateral decision making authority in a way that's kind of scary because they both had the we should come into government and do common sense things mindset without realizing that the most common sense things are actually the hardest to accomplish for very specific reasons.
August 4, 2025 at 7:32 PM
Reposted by Ethan Cecchetti
bordergroves.bsky.social
Academics on August 1st
August 1, 2025 at 1:31 PM
Reposted by Ethan Cecchetti
joshjohnsoncomedy.bsky.social
When you strip away humanity
July 26, 2025 at 11:31 AM