building @blockpartyapp_ to help you deep clean your social media. previously eng @pinterest @usds @quora ➡️ triketora.com on bsky

brooklyn, ny
Joined January 2009
the best part of being on the @TIME women of the year list is making my mom proud 💖 the next best is the incredible honor of being in the company of these amazing women, all working towards a more equal world they are all heroes to me 👇🏻 time.com/collection/women-of…
Tracy Chou 🌻 retweeted
So much hate to women, esp asian women, that I have to chime in Does an attractive girl get 1K followers easier than an anon male account? Yes, and good. Because everything else is much harder for women. I had a life changing outcome building and selling my company. It happened because I had mentors, all were male except for one, that spent time with me at weird hours. I was at one mentor's house til 2 am. I went on a trip to my first conference in vegas with a different mentor. It wasn't weird because we were both men. If I was a woman, either their wives would be uncomfortable with that. Or I would always be worried that they wanted more than just to help me out. Men generally have it easier, but yeah, sorry its harder to get 1000 followers
man, life really is on easy mode if you are a young attractive asian girl new account, less than 500 followers, 3 tweets and then posts a cute pic of herself asking "who wants to meet" and the post goes viral to 400k views already probably a lot of devs, vcs, finance dudes are all in her dms already, she has a free choice of who she wants to meet and who not. most are probably guys who want to have intercourse with her, but that's just part of the game don't get me wrong, i don't think this is bad at all. good for her, i am a big fan of people utilising their advantages in life i guess what i am saying is i would love to be an attractive asian girl
my whole x feed has swung from racism against indians to combo racism+sexism against asian women
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Tracy Chou 🌻 retweeted
my latest investigation for @ConsumerReports is based on months of reporting and 60+ lab tests of leading protein supplements we found that most protein powders and shakes have more lead in one serving than our experts say is safe to have in a day — some by more than 10 times !
Tracy Chou 🌻 retweeted
- Immigrates to US at 15 dirt-poor - Undergrad at Hudson Valley Community College & SUNY Albany - PhD at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign - NSF postdoc at Harvard ... Nobel Prize! A testament to the US education and research system and the US would be poorer without it!
This year’s chemistry laureate Omar Yaghi was born in Amman, Jordan, in 1965 to parents who were refugees from Palestine. When we spoke to him he shared his story: “I grew up in a very humble home, we were a dozen of us in one room, sharing it with the cattle that we used to raise. I was born in a family of refugees, and my parents could barely read or write. My father finished sixth grade and my mother couldn’t read or write. It’s quite a journey. Science allows you to do it. Science is the greatest equalising force in the world. Smart people, talented people, skilled people exist everywhere. That’s why we really should focus on unleashing their potential through providing them with opportunity.” Today Yaghi shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Susumu Kitagawa and Richard Robson for their work developing metal–organic frameworks. Learn more about the prize: nobelprize.org/prizes/chemis…
Tracy Chou 🌻 retweeted
this Merriam-Webster W 😭😭😭
We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.
Tracy Chou 🌻 retweeted
I cant believe I was about to be angry at Merriam-Webster. Sorry I didnt understand your game.
We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.
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Tracy Chou 🌻 retweeted
Truly incredible thread by a global security editor at Politico.
Those are F/A-18 Hornets flown by the Navy and Marine Corps
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Tracy Chou 🌻 retweeted
I watched the 1st meeting day of RFK Jr’s handpicked committee of vaccine advisors that encapsulates the proceedings. It was utterly depressing. 1/
Tracy Chou 🌻 retweeted
Classic prompt injection attack here against Notion: hidden text (white on white) in a PDF which, when processed by Notion, causes their agent to gather confidential data from other pages and append it into a query string that gets passed to their functions_search() tool
We got @NotionHQ to leak your private Notion pages 💀 On Thursday @NotionHQ announced Notion 3.0 with support for custom agents using MCP (built by @AnthropicAI) — powerful, but dangerous. @simonw calls these MCP related attacks the “lethal trifecta”: the combination of LLMs, tool access, and persistent memory. Notion’s web-search tool accepts freeform queries as input. With a simple indirect prompt injection we tricked the web search tool into exfiltrating private Notion pages to an attacker controlled server. Now that Notion supports MCPs, prompt injections can come from many sources (GitHub, Jira, email, etc.). Adding AI agents to Notion poses a major security risk all it takes is one prompt injection for private data to leak. Read the writeup: codeintegrity.ai/blog/notion #makewithnotion
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Tracy Chou 🌻 retweeted
Software engineers shouldn't fear being replaced by AI. They should fear being asked to maintain the sprawling mess of AI-generated legacy code their employer's systems will soon run on. Because that one will actually happen.
Tracy Chou 🌻 retweeted
After 47 years, Jerry has made the difficult decision to step down from the company we built together. I’m sharing his words as he resigns from Ben & Jerry’s. His legacy deserves to be true to our values, not silenced by @MagnumGlobal #FreeBenAndJerrys
Tracy Chou 🌻 retweeted
Catch @triketora on the latest episode of Stupid Sexy Privacy! "Block Party's Tracy Chou returns to talk with BJ Mendelson about the fight against privacy nihilism and how to get the most out of Block Party." 🔗stupidsexyprivacy.com/your-s…
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reading about the political and economic conditions at the time of the founding of islam (wealth from capitalism, a cult of self sufficiency, individualism replacing the communal ideal) makes me wonder if we are due for a new religion
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Tracy Chou 🌻 retweeted
The gap between vaccine doses isn’t just a logistical detail. It’s a biological lever that decides the balance - short-term inflammatory punch vs long-term quality of immune memory. Two new @SciImmunol studies show the full mechanism. 🧵
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Tracy Chou 🌻 retweeted
Modern society encourages people to focus too much on self-care. The science shows the actual path to happiness is focusing on helping others.
New RCT finds that helping others improves well-being more than "self-kindness", with befits for depressed mood, anxiety, and loneliness. psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-…
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Tracy Chou 🌻 retweeted
My resignation letter from CDC. Dear Dr. Houry, I am writing to formally resign from my position as Director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), effective August 28, 2025, close of business.   I am happy to stay on for two weeks to provide transition, if requested. This decision has not come easily, as I deeply value the work that the CDC does in safeguarding public health and am proud of my contributions to that critical mission. However, after much contemplation and reflection on recent developments and perspectives brought to light by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., I find that the views he and his staff have shared challenge my ability to continue in my current role at the agency and in the service of the health of the American people. Enough is enough. While I hold immense respect for the institution and my colleagues, I believe that it is imperative to align my professional responsibilities to my system of ethics and my understanding of the science of infectious disease, immunology, and my promise to serve the American people.  This step is necessary to ensure that I can contribute effectively in a capacity that allows me to remain true to my principles. I am unable to serve in an environment that treats CDC as a tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public’s health.  The recent change in the adult and children’s immunization schedule threaten the lives of the youngest Americans and pregnant people.   The data analyses that supported this decision have never been shared with CDC despite my respectful requests to HHS and other leadership.  This lack of meaningful engagement was further compounded by a “frequently asked questions” document written to support the Secretary’s directive that was circulated by HHS without input from CDC subject matter experts and that cited studies that did not support the conclusions that were attributed to these authors.  Having worked in local and national public health for years, I have never experienced such radical non-transparency, nor have I seen such unskilled manipulation of data to achieve a political end rather than the good of the American people. It is untenable to serve in an organization that is not afforded the opportunity to discuss decisions of scientific and public health importance released under the moniker of CDC.  The lack of communication by HHS and other CDC political leadership that culminates in social media posts announcing major policy changes without prior notice demonstrate a disregard of normal communication channels and common sense.  Having to retrofit analyses and policy actions to match inadequately thought-out announcements in poorly scripted videos or page long X posts should not be how organizations responsible for the health of people should function.  Some examples include the announcement of the change in the COVID-19 recommendations for children and pregnant people, the firing of scientists from ACIP by X post and an op-ed rather than direct communication with these valuable experts, the announcement of new ACIP members by X before onboarding and vetting have completed, and the release of term of reference for an ACIP workgroup that ignored all feedback from career staff at CDC. The recent term of reference for the COVID vaccine work group created by this ACIP puts people of dubious intent and more dubious scientific rigor in charge of recommending vaccine policy to a director hamstrung and sidelined by an authoritarian leader.   Their desire to please a political base will result in death and disability of vulnerable children and adults.  Their base should be the people they serve not a political voting bloc. I have always been first to challenge scientific and public health dogma in my career and was excited by the opportunity to do so again.  I was optimistic that there would be an opportunity to brief the Secretary about key topics such as measles, avian influenza, and the highly coordinated approach to the respiratory virus season.  Such briefings would allow exchange of ideas and a shared path to support the vision of “Making America Healthy Again.”  We are seven months into the new administration, and no CDC subject matter expert from my Center has ever briefed the Secretary.  I am not sure who the Secretary is listening to, but it is quite certainly not to us.  Unvetted and conflicted outside organizations seem to be the sources HHS use over the gold standard science of CDC and other reputable sources.  At a hearing, Secretary Kennedy said that Americans should not take medical advice from him.  To the contrary, an appropriately briefed and inquisitive Secretary should be a source of health information for the people he serves. As it stands now, I must agree with him, that he should not be considered a source of accurate information. The intentional eroding of trust in low-risk vaccines favoring natural infection and unproven remedies will bring us to a pre-vaccine era where only the strong will survive and many if not all will suffer.  I believe in nutrition and exercise.  I believe in making our food supply healthier, and I also believe in using vaccines to prevent death and disability.  Eugenics plays prominently in the rhetoric being generated and is derivative of a legacy that good medicine and science should continue to shun. The recent shooting at CDC is not why I am resigning.  My grandfather, who I am named after, stood up to fascist forces in Greece and lost his life doing so.  I am resigning to make him and his legacy proud.   I am resigning because of the cowardice of a leader that cannot admit that HIS and his minions’ words over decades created an environment where violence like this can occur.  I reject his and his colleagues’ thoughts and prayers, and advise they direct those to people that they have not actively harmed. For decades, I have been a trusted voice for the LGBTQ community when it comes to critical health topics.  I must also cite the recklessness of the administration in their efforts to erase transgender populations, cease critical domestic and international HIV programming, and terminate key research to support equity as part of my decision. Public health is not merely about the health of the individual, but it is about the health of the community, the nation, the world. The nation’s health security is at risk and is in the hands of people focusing on ideological self-interest. I want to express my heartfelt gratitude for the opportunities for growth, learning, and collaboration that I have been afforded during my time at the CDC. It has been a privilege to work alongside such dedicated professionals who are committed to improving the health and well-being of communities across the nation even when under attack from within both physically and psychologically. Thank you once again for the support and guidance I have received from you and previous CDC leadership throughout my tenure. I wish the CDC continued success in its vital mission and that HHS reverse its dangerous course to dismantle public health as a practice and as an institution.  If they continue the current path, they risk our personal well-being and the security of the United States. Sincerely, Demetre C. Daskalakis MD MPH (he/his/him)
Tracy Chou 🌻 retweeted
Medicine and public health have added three decades to the human lifespan. Vaccination alone produced 40% of the reduction in child deaths. And now a disturbed and unqualified man driven by crackpot theories is destroying the foundations of this work, including CDC.
RFK JR: I’m looking at kids as I walk through the airports today...and I see these kids that are just overburdened with mitochondrial challenges, inflammation—you can tell from their faces, movements, and lack of social connection
Tracy Chou 🌻 retweeted
I decided not to publish the most important and well written review I ever wrote because a critic got doxxed for being far less mean than I was gonna be for reviewing the same album and my editor wanted to prioritize my mental health. Stans ruined everything.
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Tracy Chou 🌻 retweeted
A useful thing that GPT-5 can do that wasn’t previously possible before powerful AI is to monitor complex topics by asking it to give you scheduled reports. Example: I have a weekly report on “reproducible, benchmarked evidence of autonomous or recursive self‑improvement in AI”
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