Frank Elavsky ⌁
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frank.computer
Frank Elavsky ⌁
@frank.computer
4.6K followers 2.3K following 1.8K posts
On the faculty job market!

Presently PhD candidate on "toolmaking" @hcii.cmu.edu. Former: Adobe, Highsoft, Apple, Visa, etc.

I care a lot about accessible data interaction 📊 (:

Disabled, getting into trouble, & making a ttrpg.

He/him
www.frank.computer
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frank.computer
I was a barista for 9 years and still practice at home.

I think a 12-month tour of duty should be mandatory for anyone before they gain citizenship and the ability to vote.

The 3am to morning shift rush changes you as a person.

Also: here's some of my latte art at home on my affordable Bambino+.
A cortado with a 4-layer tulip pour. A cortado in a flat, wide, wooden cup with a rosetta (fern) pour. A cortado with a heart pour design on top. A cortado with a spiral pour design.
November 11, 2025 at 4:38 PM
frank.computer
This is a "repost" from my mostly-offline lab mate, when I was asked "what is 'theory' in HCI?"
A hand written note dated 9.30.25 with a quote, "We're trying to understand the mysteries of the shit we make" - frank from twitter
October 1, 2025 at 11:21 PM
frank.computer
i got blocked by them lol
Dr Manhattan meme person disintegrating: "Adapt. Or you will be replaced. I work in the private sector and we never consider "not having to learn something new" to be relevant and add value. There is no job security based on what the job was when I took it and there shouldn't be for you either." Dr. Manhattan, deleting them: "peepee poopoo"
October 1, 2025 at 10:31 PM
frank.computer
New Jackson+Williams piece is out and holy shit there are some outstanding points in this.

Liz and Rua have repeatedly helped my thoughts evolve over the years. This does it again.

This one isn't just about how "design for one, extend to all" is limited, but actively censors disabled people.
Particularly tantalizing to the designerly imagination are the ways disabled people hack existing objects and systems for our own purposes. The Microsoft Inclusive Design Toolkit uses empathy to prowl for these moments of disability ingenuity, because “the insight is in the adaptation.” The token is a first line of defense, as their presence is used to legitimize the way things are done. Whatever can’t be shielded by the token then gets divided into two categories; structural issues and surface issues. Structural issues are often so extensive that they call into question the entire premise of the thing being critiqued.
September 29, 2025 at 7:10 PM
frank.computer
Lmao these bar sizes are absurd. Why don't they share a scale??
Mobile view of bars in a bar chart. Mamdani has more than triple the donors as Sliwa but his bar is hardly larger. Full description: Individual donors since the primary Size of donation legend $250 or less $250 to $2,100 $2,100 Zohran Mamdani DEM 17,981 Curtis Sliwa REP 5,684 Eric Adams IND 2,149
September 5, 2025 at 3:29 PM
frank.computer
The chart from that article is so funny. Look at how amazing this dataviz is (click and scroll).
An obscenely tall data visualization that shows how astronomically large EA's CEO pay is over time (as high as 44m) compared to EA's median worker pay (currently 117k).
August 22, 2025 at 8:26 PM
frank.computer
I'm preparing my future research agenda and I want my aesthetic to be a mix of these two images:
(on the left is an actual mug I own that I bought at the start of my PhD lol)
An ugly, 90s aesthetic cartoon of a frazzled looking person on a coffee mug. They are saying, "Will someone please (underlined) shoot the computer?" A 90s aesthetic photo of a femme in a business outfit holding a rifle to a beige 90s desktop computer.
August 19, 2025 at 2:51 PM
frank.computer
Lmfao the r/vibecoding subreddit has finally discovered that vibes, not code, are the true output of vibe coding.

Source: www.reddit.com/r/vibecoding...
r/vibecoding 9 hr. ago AssafMalkiIL What’s the point of vibe coding if I still have to pay a dev to fix it? what’s the point of vibe coding if at the end of the day i still gotta pay a dev to look at the code anyway. sure it feels kinda cool while i’m typing, like i’m in some flow state or whatever, but when stuff breaks it’s just dead weight. i cant vibe my way through debugging, i cant ship anything that actually matters, and then i’m back to square one pulling out my wallet for someone who actually knows what they’re doing. makes me think vibe coding is just roleplay for guys who want to feel like hackers without doing the hard part. am i missing something here or is it really just useless once you step outside the fantasy Upvote 113 Downvote 98
August 19, 2025 at 11:46 AM
frank.computer
And for our project with video streaming, we had a simple but powerful architecture design: what if we passed the game data itself to the stream viewer? Instead of receiving pixels + audio as video, viewers also get the richness of the game's UI, world data, and more!

*This* is an underlay!
An architecture diagram that results in an image from a video game stream with a box over it labeled "screen reader accessible, customizeable interface." The diagram begins with audio, video, and stream ui data combined with game engine data going into streaming software. That is passed up to the stream as an inaccessible interface (a video feed). However, the game engine also passes up data to MARS, then to a twitch extension, and then to the accessible interface.
August 15, 2025 at 4:30 PM
frank.computer
This matters!

In data visualization, I did this with data navigator. The whole idea is that when you make a visualization, you have the data used for a chart/graph/etc as well as the code/specification/design information. And if you can pass all of that rich information to the frontend, then violá!
A cartogram showing data on a map of the US, labeled "this is made of pixels." A box shape floats over the map labeled, "this is a rich interface for assistive tech." Elavsky et al, "Data Navigator" (2023)
August 15, 2025 at 4:30 PM
frank.computer
Easily the most interesting and tempting spam text I've ever received. They're evolving.
Thursday 6:45PM Expect smoky ribs sizzing hot dogs and cold drinks tomorrow if you ve got time come join us Screenshot of an anonymous text
August 14, 2025 at 5:53 PM
frank.computer
lmao hell yeah

in high school people literally said I was a cartoon character because I wore the same 1-2 outfits every day and always had the same haircut!! the only time i ever changed outfits, I would wear thrifted, colorful, oversized suits (see fig a).
A skinny teenage creature, surprisingly with blonde hair (I was naturally blonde as a kid and it darkened with age). My hair is mid-length and straight, just to my shoulders, I have a huge smile and I am wearing small, oval yellow-tinted glasses. I am wearing a two piece purple suit that is too large for me, with a pink button-up shirt underneath.
August 1, 2025 at 2:35 PM
frank.computer
So great to read this reflection on my talk on "softerware" at Outlier by Gabrielle Merite. I deeply respect Gabby's work, which is some of the most enchanting and captivating in our field. Humbled to have left an impression.

Gabby's full reflection here: www.linkedin.com/pulse/notes-...
Frank argued for what he calls "softerware": visualizations that work more like clay than concrete. Instead of shipping finished, fixed objects, we give people tools they can reshape to meet their personal needs. But here's the most provocative part for me: most people have already told us what works for them. They've set their systems for dark mode, bigger fonts, motion reduction. And we routinely ignore all of that.
July 19, 2025 at 8:31 PM
frank.computer
Amazing piece.

One note: the repeated link (in the screenshot) is broke. It is missing "ch" at the end of the href, so it currently takes you to a dead end.
If you haven’t clicked that last link and thumbed through, you should (link). It gives extrapolations for general estimates for chat queries, LLM-generated images, LLM-generated videos, and also how much energy was used to train said LLMs – it’s really in depth and fascinating, to say the least.
July 8, 2025 at 11:11 PM
frank.computer
People who don't care to feel and connect view everything as an engineering problem; time can be optimized by removing any investment in your soul.

It's all engineering management, but as a product:
www.frank.computer/blog/2024/06...
I wouldn’t ask a robot to dance for me if I wanted to learn how to dance. That’s because I want to know how dancing feels, even while I am stumbling about and learning. Part of that stumbling (when you learn to dance) involves developing a better sense of feeling your own body. Asking a machine to dance takes away the opportunity to know your own body in the same way asking a machine to think takes away a sense of my own self-understanding. I certainly wouldn’t want an AI to go on a first date for me, I’d want to do that myself.
July 1, 2025 at 1:33 PM
frank.computer
"nobody is fully grasping that this is potentially the last social identity you have to create," @jay.bsky.team

This is, in essence, why I chose Bluesky. Its core pitch, which worked on me, was that my identity persists.

This is, to me, the most hopeful novel infrastructure for the future.
What’s your pitch for why people should join Bluesky? It’s a great time to shape the culture and the future of Bluesky. The people who have created starter packs, created feeds, and gotten involved in the community have seen a lot of growth—even if they previously weren’t big posters elsewhere. For creators, nobody is fully grasping that this is potentially the last social identity you have to create. Signing up now isn’t just committing to yet another micro-blogging app, it’s committing to a new era of social, to having a sort of digital passport that moves with you.
June 23, 2025 at 6:57 PM
frank.computer
Some tech bros love AI just because it gives you so many kisses on the forehead.

As someone suspicious of a technology that gives compliments, AI creeps me out every time I've interacted with it.

In my latest blog, I poke at this idea:

www.frank.computer/blog/2025/06...
Critics without solutions are useless Plus, just saying that SP™ has “blended babies” and we should “stop blending babies” doesn’t offer any actual, real, working solutions. Are you doing anything about it? How are you, personally, going to make up for my 200% increased dongle-production efficiency at Dongles LLC? These social media influencers talk about “climate change,” “murder without consequences,” “water insecurity” and the growing divide between people who have access to Super Productionizer™ and those who don’t. Plus, they say that because the SP™ gives me a kiss on the forehead every now and then when I do a really good job listening to it, that it is seducing me into an unhealthy relationship with it. UMMM I get kisses on the forehead because I am a smart, good boy who does a very good job, thank you very much. I earned my valor in the mines of dongle-production.
June 16, 2025 at 6:41 PM
frank.computer
Can anyone who attended #Outlier2025 by @datavizsociety.bsky.social guess which single talk/panel I definitely filled out a survey on? 😂
complete survey button
June 15, 2025 at 3:07 PM
frank.computer
Lmaoooo this method?? I guess I'm probably in the new gender category of "assigned male at GPT."

I also really love "once again, all the usual best practices of LLM prompting were applied." No citation! Hell yeah. Proper research going on over at Nature Human Behavior.
Gender Gender is not directly available through OpenAlex or Twitter. To infer gender, we extracted the official names of academics as provided by OpenAlex. We passed the names individually through an LLM (OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 Turbo model) in similar fashion as for tweets. We used the following prompt: “Based on the given name, please indicate the most likely gender association. Name: ‘<name>’. Respond as ‘Male’, ‘Female’, or ‘Unclear.” Once again, all the usual best practices of LLM prompting were applied.
June 7, 2025 at 7:31 PM
frank.computer
This is how I'm prepared to deal with the IEEE VIS paper review results that will be released this Friday.

Always plan ahead!
Google calendar screenshot Fri 6 9am to 5pm, event titled "Uhhhhhh depression??"
June 2, 2025 at 7:57 PM
frank.computer
This is good
And this is worrying, because language does--and should do-- so much more than that, and blurring the boundaries between language and code flattens the former more than it enlivens the latter.
May 30, 2025 at 7:33 PM
frank.computer
I was about to link to the humorous article "Libertarian Police Department" and talk about how capitalism, ideally, is a series of smaller and smaller tollbooths between you and anything (the cops puts a quarter in his gun to shoot it). But alas, the New Yorker is much harder to read than in 2014.
LPD Libertarian Police Department By Tom O'Donnell March 31, 2014 An image of a cop leaning in an open door is blurred. Already a subscriber? Sign in. (Link) Your window is closing. Unlock this story. Subscribe. (Link on a separate modal)
May 29, 2025 at 1:46 PM
frank.computer
A hammer requires whole worlds to participate in its creation and use. When we are considering the ethics of a hammer, how we choose to swing it is hardly the most important thing worth talking about.
Even a hammer, made of wood and iron, requires trees to be cut down and earth to be mined up. A simple hammer requires laws to be written about fair treatment of workers in multiple industries, sustainability of various biological and geological environments, and regulation about the sale and use of the hammer. “It matters how you use it,” in regards to artificial intelligence ignores the reality that it also matters how AI is made, how AI is disseminated, the waste AI produces, the damage AI causes to economies and environments, and the overall impact that AI has on human life and culture.
May 25, 2025 at 7:41 PM
frank.computer
AI discourse is all vibes.

Unfortunately, I love the vibes of writing (code included) but not what is called "vibe coding" now.

I saw this coming long before Karpathy tweeted 3mo ago: tech bros love managerial vibes and unearned power. But I love the vibes that come with the struggle of making.
I often feel that my “vibes” argument isn’t popular with computer and cognitive/behavioral scientists. Computer scientists are in it for speed and scale. And LLMs help speed and scale, so vibes are a hard argument with them. And I am far too ignorant to explain myself meaningfully to a cognitive or behavioral scientist, so I don’t even try. So I understand that a lot of other people simply won’t agree or relate at all to this post, which is fine. Other people don’t gain a sense of themselves through their work, I guess? I have no idea how other people form thoughts and know what they value. But tech bros in particular I understand intimately. And they love the managerial vibes of LLMs. So to tech bros, they understand a “vibes-based” approach but fundamentally disagree with my conclusion. Tech bros want the vibes that power offers them when they have an agent perform work for them. LLMs (borrowing the Hullman framing) help tech bros solve problems because of a sort of delegation of tasks. There’s some black box effect and trust required, but working with models largely converts any or all forms of difficult, analytical work into a sort of management work instead. Andrej Karpathy @karpathy There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It's possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper so I barely even touch the keyboard. I ask for the dumbest things like "decrease the padding on the sidebar by half" because I'm too lazy to find it. I "Accept All" always, I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I'd have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can't fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works. 6:17 PM · Feb 2, 2025 · 5M Views 1.3k comments 5k retweets 29k likes 15k bookmarks
May 25, 2025 at 3:19 PM
frank.computer
Good article on what dissonance feels like: we live in a time of atrocities and yet still have to clock in for work like it's a normal day.

Great, encouraging call to action and coupled with my favorite quote of all time, from Le Guin.

This article is a really important read right now.
“We are in a period now when it’s absolutely essential to protest,” says Hartmann, citing the Harvard professor Erica Chenoweth, who argues that just 3.5% of a population engaging in peaceful protest can hold back authoritarian movements. In 2014, Ursula Le Guin accepted the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, saying: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”
May 23, 2025 at 2:14 PM