iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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John Warner @biblioracle.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I don’t mean this as a criticism of this piece, but this was obvious from the start. If you don’t know anything, AI is a substitute, not a tool. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/25/o...

nytimes.com

Opinion | A.I. Has Made Me a Better Doctor. It’s Made Med Students Worse.

I’m confident in my mastery over what doctors do — and less confident about my continued mastery of an ever-evolving universe of facts.

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Vagrant Gautam @dippedrusk.com · 25/09/2026

If there was ever a bird that convinced me of the "birds aren't real" conspiracy it would be this one

Ridiculously picturesque Toco toucan on a tree with blue skies and cotton clouds. It's a stupidly built bird, seemingly more bill than face and more head than body. It doesn't just look like it shouldn't fly, it looks like it shouldn't even be able to perch on this tree. It's like a collection of toucan parts were balanced to create the illusion of a toucan for the precise second of my photo and then seconds later all the parts would come crashing down. This is, however, a real bird that I saw today in Brazil and it legitimately took my breath away. I don't even mean this metaphorically - I literally had to sit my butt down and catch my breath after seeing it because apparently I forgot to breathe.

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Vagrant Gautam @dippedrusk.com · 22/09/2026

The smallest Australian bird is the *weebill* 😭 Look at its tiny bill!

Small yellow-green bird with a tiny baby bill, practically the same size as its eye.

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Vagrant Gautam @dippedrusk.com · 22/09/2026

My godfather turns 90 this year so naturally I decided we needed 90 candles and a carefully-orchestrated plan to light them all simultaneously.

Six hands with long-wand lighters around a square cake with 90 candles, frantically trying to light them all and not burn ourselves. The candles were arranged in a grid of six 3x5 sections, and each person was assigned a section of 15 candles they were responsible for lighting. This mostly worked.

Cake with 90 lit candles - success!! It looks simultaneously like an impressive number of candles and also not that many for NINETY candles.

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ACL 2027 @aclmeeting.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

ACL Sustainable Reviewing Policy: We are introducing changes in the @ReviewAcl reviewing and submissions. The changes will cap authors and introduce changes in the reviewing to keep our community sustainable. #NLProc #NLP

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Dan Hon @danhon.com · 31/08/2026

I think a reasonable position on the OpenAI huggingface thing is: * executing untrusted code is a bad idea * sandboxes frequently aren't, even with the best intentions * novel combinations of untrusted code are being generated at scale and being executed * consequences probably bad

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Ryan Moulton @moultano.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

If you thought my last post didn't have enough birds, or enough math, or enough math about birds, I have the post for you. moultano.wordpress.com/2026/08/14/f...

moultano.wordpress.com

Fairly Ranking the Most Brilliant Birds

Finding beautiful birds with data, and the ethics of converting preferences into math

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Jordan Boyd-Graber @boydgraber.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

I'm moving to Nanyang Technological University in Singapore to start a new lab! We'll still be dedicated to adversarial QA, human-computer collaboration, probabilistic modeling, and the other fun hijinx my students and I have been up to, but now (hopefully) bigger and better.

Jordan and his wife in front of Singapore Strait

Jordan and his daughters (faces blured) in front of Nanyang gate in Yunan garden.

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Vagrant Gautam @dippedrusk.com · 20/08/2026

Another fun fact: Airport x-ray scanners can damage unused film (worse with film that is unpacked and loaded into your camera, with the new fancy scanners where you don't have to take liquids and big electronics out, and with multiple exposures over longer journeys).

Side-by-side comparison of near-identical photos taken on damaged film and fresh film, of a kitchen with plates and plants and big windows showing fir trees outside. The damaged film looks pinkish, faded, fogged up, and somewhat overexposed. The fresh film has a more crisp and bright, higher-contrast photo, with a good mix of warm colours in the kitchen and cool greens in the leaves outside.

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Vagrant Gautam @dippedrusk.com · 20/08/2026

Fun fact I recently re-learned: Python's string capitalize function works by upper-casing the first letter and *lower-casing the rest of the string*. This means "hi this is Vagrant".capitalize() gives you "Hi this is vagrant" and not "Hi this is Vagrant"

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Naomi Saphra @nsaphra.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

I've been unsettled lately when reading messages and papers. It feels like I'm dissociating. Everything seems a bit alien, even if it's completely human. I've had a realization: When our simulations finally exited the Uncanny Valley, they brought the Uncanny with them.

nsaphra.net

Life on the Uncanny Precipice | Naomi Saphra

We were wrong about the Uncanny Valley.

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Vagrant Gautam @dippedrusk.com · 10/08/2026

Look, if Italo Calvino had visited Vancouver then Invisible Cities wouldn't be about Venice

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Vagrant Gautam @dippedrusk.com · 15/07/2026

I have recently discovered that football is amazing

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Zeerak Talat زیرک طلعت (they/them) @zeerak.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

Thrilled to have been awarded the Association for Computational Linguistics 2016 test of time award for my first ever paper, written with/under the guidance of @dirkhovy.bsky.social A couple of cute things about the paper/its genesis/its outcomes

Photo of a test of time award for the paper "Hateful Symbols or Hateful People? Predictive Features for Hate Speech Detection on Twitter"

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Vagrant Gautam @dippedrusk.com · 05/07/2026

This is the one book I wish literally everyone working in NLP/AI would read. All of Weizenbaum's work is so incredibly relevant even after 50 years that I end up highlighting every third sentence every time I read it. This thread contains some great examples.

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Pranav A @pranav-nlp.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

I am shocked and flattered that this paper won the Best Paper Award (Honourable Mention) at #FAccT2026!

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Pranav A @pranav-nlp.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

I will be presenting our work titled "Making a Name for Myself: On Academic Naming Policies and their Impact" this week at #FAccT2026. This paper talks about why names matter, why name change policies are important, how people benefit from it and what's still left to do.

Making a Name for Myself: On Academic Naming Policies and their
Impact
A PRANAV, Trustworthy AI Lab, University of Hamburg, Germany
VAGRANT GAUTAM, Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies, Germany
MARTIN MUNDT∗
, University of Bremen, Germany
JORDAN TAYLOR∗
, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
ARJUN SUBRAMONIAN∗
, Queer in AI, USA
FRANZISKA SOFIA HAFNER∗
, University of Oxford, United Kingdom
DANIEL CHECHELNITSKY∗
, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
WILLIAM AGNEW∗
, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
ANNE LAUSCHER∗
, Trustworthy AI Lab, University of Hamburg, Germany

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blair @blairaf.com · 02/06/2026

I'm looking for a new PhD student to come join me at UAlberta & Amii to study trans perspectives on AI policy & the future of AI as part of my new lab. The position is fully funded and offers access to a range of supports - more details in the poster below!

Flyer with qualifications and details for the PhD position.

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EACL 2027 @eaclmeeting.bsky.social · 04/05/2026

Attention #NLProc researchers, the EACL 2027 website is officially LIVE: 2027.eacl.org! 🎉 🇬🇷 Join us in Athens, Greece (Mar 9-13, 2027) at #EACL2027 📅 ARR submission deadline: Aug 6, 2026. Open to all areas of CL/NLP + related fields. Stay tuned for the detailed CfP soon!

Picture of the Acropolis in Athens, Greece

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Ky @ky.fyi · 24/04/2026

I wrote about why I quit my job, and how weird and tiring tech feels these days.

ky.fyi

Do I belong in tech anymore?

On quitting, the spread of AI, and the loss of an ideal.

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Vagrant Gautam @dippedrusk.com · 26/04/2026

- Cafe / bookshop / board game bar with generously-sized tables, great coffee and cocktails, and excellent ventilation (sub-700 ppm CO2) - Trans-centred beach - Taxi service where I drive you from A to B without either of us uttering a word besides hi and bye

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Vagrant Gautam @dippedrusk.com · 20/04/2026

Virginia Eubanks: I find the philosophy that sees human beings as unknowable black boxes and machines as transparent deeply troubling... The presumption that human decision-making is opaque and inaccessible is an admission that we have abandoned a social commitment to try and understand each other.

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Vagrant Gautam @dippedrusk.com · 15/04/2026

imagine having a company called AllBirds, pivoting and changing its name to NewBird, and both before and after it's NOT ABOUT BIRDS!!!

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Vagrant Gautam @dippedrusk.com · 27/03/2026

Late post but I'm at #EACL2026 in Morocco where I'm petting cats, seeing sights, and presenting some work - here are the highlights.

A smug-looking cat loafs with its paws folded in at the top of stairs that lead down into an alley painted completely blue in Chefchaouen, Morocco.

A huge and imposing marble mosque in Casablanca, with blue skies and sparse white clouds in the sky above. This is the Hassan II Mosque, one of the biggest in the world. The handful of people standing around in front of it look like ants.

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Andreas Waldis @tresiwald.bsky.social · 27/01/2026

LMs that "know more" about toxicity are less toxic! Our #TACL 📄 connects behavior and internals: 💠 LMs amplify toxicity beyond humans 💠 Information about toxicity peaks in lower layers 💠 Bypassing these layers increases toxicity More details👇 #NLProc #interpretability (1/🧵)

simplified overview of our aligned probing setup, where we join the behavioral and internal evaluation of LMs' toxicity

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Jakob Schuster @schusterj.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

Excited to share the first preprint of my PhD! While many papers focus on what kind of information LLMs trust, @dippedrusk.com, Katja Markert, and I instead investigate whose evidence models prefer by looking at source credibility. #NLP #Research #CL #LLMs 1/7 🧵

“Whose Facts Win? LLM Source Preference under Knowledge Conflicts”
Authors: Jakob Schuster, Vagrant Gautam, Katja Markert

Source credibility hierarchy of Government > Newspaper > Person, Social Media induced by evaluating 13 LLMs on source and knowledge conflicts. However, repeating information can flip preferences.

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Vagrant Gautam @dippedrusk.com · 07/11/2025

@pranav-nlp.bsky.social and I are surveying researchers about naming and name changes in academia (especially computer science). If your academic name is / has been / might someday be different from other names you've used, please tell us about it here: forms.cloud.microsoft/e/E0XXBmZdEP

Naming in academia: Fill out our survey! We're surveying scholars about naming and name change experiences in academia. This includes spelling variations, reordering, changing any part of your name, for any reason: gender transition, marriage, divorce, immigration, cultural reasons, or recognition. This surveys takes around 5-10 minutes!

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Vagrant Gautam @dippedrusk.com · 01/11/2025

I was Delores from Beetlejuice Beetlejuice for Halloween!

Vagrant (me) staring into the distance wearing smokey makeup, a long-haired black wig, and a black scar on xyr face that is fake-stapled together with shiny silvery stickers. I'm also wearing a black dress that looks very goth.

Monica Bellucci is a divine vision for goths everywhere with her stapled face, tear-stained smokey makeup, dark flowing hair and black dress from Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. She looks unhappy, betrayed, and stunning.

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Queer in AI @queerinai.com · 01/10/2025

Attending COLM next week in Montreal? 🇨🇦 Join us on Thursday for a 2-part social! ✨ 5:30-6:30 at the conference venue and 7:00-10:00 offsite! 🌈 Sign up here: forms.gle/oiMK3TLP8ZZc...

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Vagrant Gautam @dippedrusk.com · 14/08/2025

I will be - at the Aarhus conference 🇩🇰 on Monday for our workshop on representation + representativeness with synthetic data - living in Heidelberg 🇩🇪 in 2 weeks - in Edinburgh 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 in late September giving a talk at the ILCC (on reasoning about reference, probably) - in Montreal 🇨🇦 in October for COLM

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Vagrant Gautam @dippedrusk.com · 11/06/2025

Have you or a loved one been misgendered by an LLM? How can we evaluate LLMs for misgendering? Do different evaluation methods give consistent results? Check out our preprint led by the newly minted Dr. @arjunsubgraph.bsky.social, and with Preethi Seshadri, Dietrich Klakow, Kai-Wei Chang, Yizhou Sun

arxiv.org

Agree to Disagree? A Meta-Evaluation of LLM Misgendering

Numerous methods have been proposed to measure LLM misgendering, including probability-based evaluations (e.g., automatically with templatic sentences) and generation-based evaluations (e.g., with aut...

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Vagrant Gautam @dippedrusk.com · 04/06/2025

Submitted! 🥳 Stay tuned for a defense date in 3-ish months

Three bright pink softbound review copies of my PhD dissertation: Fair and Faithful Processing of Referring Expressions in English, submitted towards a Doctor of Engineering degree at the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science at Saarland University. The thesis is surrounded by a small zoo of crocheted birds, my bird water bottle, and other knickknacks at my work desk.

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INTERPLAY Workshop@COLM '25 @interplay-workshop.bsky.social · 16/05/2025

🚨🚨 Studying the INTERPLAY of LMs' internals and behavior? Join our @colmweb.org workshop on comprehensivly evaluating LMs. Deadline: June 23rd CfP: shorturl.at/sBomu Page: shorturl.at/FT3fX We're excited to see your insights and methods!! See you in Montréal 🇨🇦 #nlproc #interpretability

Call for Papers, Interplay Workshop at COLM: June 23rd - submissions due. July 24th - acceptance notification. October 10th - workshop day.

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Vagrant Gautam @dippedrusk.com · 14/05/2025

Do you have Opinions™ on what it means to "represent" things and people with data? Then submit 1-2 pages by May 28th and join us in Århus 🇩🇰 this summer to discuss representation and representativeness with synthetic data!

synthetic-data-workshop.github.io

Call for Participation | Synthetic Data

Workshop on synthetic data at the Aarhus Conference 2025

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Vagrant Gautam @dippedrusk.com · 14/05/2025

synthetic-data-workshop.github.io

Call for Participation | Synthetic Data

Workshop on synthetic data at the Aarhus Conference 2025

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Vagrant Gautam @dippedrusk.com · 08/05/2025

I'm teaching for the first time this semester and I am thrilled with how my concepts class is going! We discussed interpretability today after reading 2 critique papers (Lipton's Mythos of Model Interpretability and Krishnan's Against Interpretability) and 2 content papers: Patchscopes and RAVEL. 🧵

Title slide: Defining and Measuring Abstract Concepts in NLP, Vagrant Gautam (they/them). The slide features a meme of a felt mouse in a hat carrying berries and some sort of sceptre is on the right, with the text "I am plagued by concepts."

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Vagrant Gautam @dippedrusk.com · 03/05/2025

Come to my keynote tomorrow at the first official @queerinai.com workshop at #NAACL2025 to hear about how trans languaging is complex and cool, and how this makes it extra difficult to process computationally. I will have SO many juicy examples!

Title slide: Processing Trans Languaging - Vagrant Gautam (they/xe), Saarland University, with a very brightly patterned background featuring colourful people and math symbols.

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Vagrant Gautam @dippedrusk.com · 27/04/2025

Best part of dissertation-writing is reading all sorts of things, including Ellen F. Prince making fun of sociolinguists in 1981.

An interaction: [A and B are passing each other on the street] A: Hi. B: Hi. Ellen F. Prince's interpretation of this interaction as the communication of "ritual finformation." [A and B are passing each other on the street] A: I am aware of your presence, I am not hostile, and I shall part ready to come into friendly contact again at some future time. B: Damn sociolinguists...

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Queer in AI @queerinai.com · 25/04/2025

Announcing our first workshop keynote! "Processing Trans Languaging" by Vagrant Gautam @dippedrusk.com at 13:30 - 14:30 MDT on May 4, 2025 Read on for a description of the talk! 🧵

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Vagrant Gautam @dippedrusk.com · 17/04/2025

If you were ever curious about the timeline of name changes as a Canadian immigrant in Germany, here's my data spanning 2 years for just the most important stuff. This does not include everywhere else I had to change my name, i.e., phone companies in Germany and Canada, public transit apps,

Gantt chart of Vagrant's name change schedule spanning over 2 years, from April 2022 to June 2024. The legal name change, passport and visa are all plotted, along with the timeline for banks and universities in Canada and Germany, and 2 papers in PLOS One (which took almost 2 full years) and the ACL Anthology, which was done in less than a month with a pull request I made myself. In general, the German things took much longer than the Canadian things. The legal name change itself took nearly a year, a saga that I've chronicled in an old blog post, as did changing my name with my German bank, because they wouldn't accept just a legal name change - they also wanted my passport and visa to be updated (which are linear dependencies). Similarly, Saarland University would not just allow me to have Vagrant Gautam as my display name on Teams for other students and my instructors to see, and instead they waited for my entire legal name change process to be complete before I could have the dignity of being recognized by my own name.

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Eoin Brodie @elbrodie.bsky.social · 11/04/2025

US students. Looking to apply to graduate school? Had an offer rescinded recently? The University of British Columbia in Canada will re-open the application portal in some departments for US students from April 14-18. Details: www.grad.ubc.ca/us-applicant... #ubc #AcademicSky #PhDSky #ScienceSky

grad.ubc.ca

US Applicant Week

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Vagrant Gautam @dippedrusk.com · 11/04/2025

@pranav-nlp.bsky.social is speaking at the @i2sc.net about how seemingly neutral policies can cause harm when developed without input from marginalized communities, with examples from the AI Act and name change policies in academia

Pranav A in a colourful jacket in front of an I2SC banner and a monitor displaying his first slide: Policy Impact: From AI Regulation to Academic Inclusion.

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Vagrant Gautam @dippedrusk.com · 04/04/2025

Just found a 2010 paper about automatically translating poetry, and one of the reviewers apparently wrote their entire review in verse! The authors link to the full review in a footnote - here's a snippet.

From an anonymous reviewer:

This paper has an admirable objective;
one that would have most of us spewing invective.
Can current SMT systems be hacked
to translate verse with its form intact?

It sounds difficult but don't be alarmed;
simply cast each form of verse you wish unharmed
into a feature that maintains state of the relevant kind.
Do the voodoo they do and you can use both Moses and Hiero, you'll find.

Ahh, you say, what if I am not as picky,
and want my decoder to produce any kind of poetry?
Fear not, the authors thought of that too-
a min-combination of these verse features is in the cards for you.

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Vagrant Gautam @dippedrusk.com · 22/03/2025

life update: i have discovered Gaming™

Screenshot from the game Unpacked, where I have fully unpacked the contents of a cute, animated study which is in a brick building with lots of natural light coming in through the windows. There is a work desk and chair with computer stuff, lots of art on the wall, and some shelving for books and such. The desk looks a bit crowded, but that's how I like my desks.

Screenshot from the game Undertale, a retro-style video game. My character stands before a sign behind which there are two spider webs of different sizes. The sign reads: Spider Bake Sale. All proceeds go to real spiders.

Animated Luxembourg from the game Euro Truck Simulator 2, showing a road leading up to the Fortress of Luxembourg. A text box says: At last you have the chance to experience your dream job - driving a truck! This has unironically been one of my dream jobs for years, so I'm really enjoying this game.

View from the inside of my truck in Euro Truck Simulator 2, as I make a lane change on a highway in Germany to do my pea delivery in Nuremberg. My side mirror shows that there is nothing around me, because it's quite early: 5:37 am. The dashboard shows that my high beams are on even though it's daylight and I clearly don't need them anymore, so I guess I forgot to turn them off.

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Angelina Wang @angelinawang.bsky.social · 17/03/2025

I've recently put together a "Fairness FAQ": tinyurl.com/fairness-faq. If you work in non-fairness ML and you've heard about fairness, perhaps you've wondered things like what the best definitions of fairness are, and whether we can train algorithms that optimize for it.

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V3333333 @v3333333333.bsky.social · 25/02/2025

Max and Owen are here Two 4x4 dog pet portraits

Max, a fluffy small dog, looks towards the right. They are green, purple, black, and white with blue linework. The background is light blue with green, purple, blue, white, and black dots. This is an example of a 4x4 pet portrait. You can get one of your pets for 30 or 25 if you get 2 or more. Offer good until the end of February. Next month they will be 35.

Owen, a fluffy small dog, looks towards the left. They are green, purple, black, and white with blue linework. The background is light blue with green, purple, blue, white, and black dots. This is an example of a 4x4 pet portrait. You can get one of your pets for 30 or 25 if you get 2 or more. Offer good until the end of February. Next month they will be 35.

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