iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

the 2003 Vaux survey had 122 questions, the 2013 Katz survey had 25, mydialect.us has 122+those 26 like the peach v apricot one

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note in this that I quoted I said it was the same exact data, but later down in the thread I find that it's per state, the raw data must have been used by the NYT version but it's not easy to find online, so presumably whatever AI agent they used decided it wasn't worth it

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anyway the github page is an unfinished version of the website with LLM-generated "fill this in later" type blanks in the README github.com/jenilkansara...

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Looking at the .js of the website itself it seems that the answers are stored on a per-state basis rather than a per-city basis like the NYT one, which explains the New Jersey thing, and also implies the maps are just a gaussian kernel on the centroids of the states and...yeah that's how they did it

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mydialect.us doesn't do as good a job weighing the statistics. A single question can completely change the look of the map even if it's a minor thing. Like I answered 20 questions and here's if I say "Peas" on Q21 vs "Green Peas" on Q21:

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Geobica @geobica.com · 29/08/2026

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I've found that there's a phantom island in the middle of the Greenland Sea in the GADM database at 80.136°N, 0.018°W. No such island seems to exist irl, so maybe it was a glacier that got scanned? It was messing with some code I was running as it's right in the middle between Greenland and Svalbard

Screenshot of https://gadm.org/download_country.html with the phantom island shown

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hormuzstraitmonitor.com/ is an example I've come across in the wild. This is a horribly designed website for a lot of reasons, but it's come to be the top search result for "hormuz strait status" when I look that up. It attributes its creation to "an individual developer". Nothing else to learn.

From hormuzstraitmonitor.com/about:
Who Is Behind This?

The Hormuz Strait Monitor is an independent project built and maintained by an individual developer. It is not affiliated with, funded by, or endorsed by any government, political organization, military entity, think tank, or corporation.

The project was created to fill a gap in publicly available crisis information. During the Strait of Hormuz crisis, reliable data was scattered across dozens of specialized sources — shipping databases, energy market feeds, diplomatic wires, and news outlets. This dashboard aggregates those sources into a single, accessible view for anyone who needs it.

The site has no editorial agenda. It presents data as reported by its upstream sources without political commentary or interpretation. Where AI-powered analysis is used (such as for strait status assessments and diplomatic summaries), the underlying methodology relies on real-time web data from established news and maritime sources.

Ideas like the "Trust Dial" for example are clearly pretty half baked. This sort of demonstration would in the pre-AI era have taken quite a while to set up, so the whole thing feels as if it's thought out at first, but in reality it's unlikely they spent more than an hour on this.

The "Trust Dial", an interactive widget showing a "planned" feature on the twitter.now site. In several places it's implied that this has not actually been implemented or tested.

This idea gets repeated twice on the about page, but without ever explaining what that means. I still have no idea what they mean by that! If this website was made by a person with a deeper understanding of the project, this would be an important thing to elaborate on, perhaps with its own page.

From the website:
10% of CT population reached via AI

From the website:
First Large-Scale Use of AI to Link Assembly Discussion with the Public

Using cutting-edge AI technology, the assembly aims to connect its deliberations with over 10% of Connecticut's population — extending the reach and legitimacy of citizen voices far beyond the assembly room.

As far as I can tell, this about page was made by pointing an AI agent at this two page pdf ct-citizens-assembly.org/media/CT-Cit... and asking it to make a webpage advertising the plan. Note for instance this line about reaching 10% of CT's population with AI:

From the PDF:
Key Features of the Assembly
1. First large state level, state-endorsed Citizens’ Assembly in the US
2. First large scale attempt using AI tech to link assembly discussion with the larger public,
aiming to reach over 10% of the state’s population
3. Backed by State Comptroller Sean Scanlon, who has the constitutional right to push items
to the legislative agenda on financial issues

Also typical is these light indicators, with a colored circle on the left of some text within an oblong shape:

Tell #3 is the CSS styles used. In particular this border-left style is very typical of Claude, usually with rounded rectangles, evenly spaced, often with box-shadows and other elements typical of dashboards.

Screenshot from twitter.now showing the border-left design on two rounded rectangles.

It's also common with AI generated text to have a ton of emojis and small caps eyebrow sections and headers.

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Inter is, I think, disproportionately common here, though it's also been rising in popularity regardless. Fraunces and Space Grotesk are I think the more interesting ones, as I don't remember seeing them until this year, and now I notice them everywhere. Fraunces in particular because of that 'f':

Tell #2 is text, by which I mean both the content of the text (which has a very recognizable voice at this point) and the way it's formatted, including fonts. Below is a list of the fonts I've found to be most common in a sample of 2120 likely Vibe Designed websites:

1. Inter (603 sites)
2. Arial (429 sites)
3. JetBrains Mono (258 sites)
4. ui-monospace (217 sites)
5. -apple-system (206 sites)
6. ui-sans-serif (153 sites)
7. Geist (141 sites)
8. Space Grotesk (133 sites)
9. Times New Roman (113 sites)
10. system-ui (107 sites)

11. Fraunces (106 sites)
12. monospace (105 sites)
13. IBM Plex Mono (97 sites)
14. DM Sans (96 sites)
15. Geist Mono (93 sites)
16. Plus Jakarta Sans (70 sites)
17. Hanken Grotesk (68 sites)
18. Outfit (56 sites)
19. Space Mono (51 sites)
20. Georgia (50 sites)

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This has had a noticeable effect on the average thumbnail color of posts to reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful btw

A plot showing the average thumbnail colors of posts to r/dataisbeautiful over time, showing that dark thumbnails have become substantially more common since around March 2026.

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This isn't because they're using popular style libraries, and the colors used rarely match any others I see used to the exact hex value, it's just a common tendency for them to use blues and purples.

A sample of blues from posts to r/dataisbeautiful from a few months ago, compared with blues from popular style defaults, showing none of them match.

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Tell #1 is color, for which each model has a default it tends towards. Claude 4.x almost always goes for a dark blue, while the more recent Claude 5 uses even darker greyer shades closer to black. GPT and Gemini tend to use white with blue or purple highlights.

rocketmapper.com, most likely made with Claude 4.6

isgithubcooked.com, likely made with Claude 5

Anyway, a project I've been on and off typing up over the past couple months is a big list of all the basic web design elements that in my opinion give away a website as having not been designed by a human. I've enumerated these as "The 5 Tells of Vibe Design":

A list of the five tells with screenshots illustrating each.

The tells are:
1. Colors (shown with a site with a dark blue color palette)
2. The Text (a site with many emoji and AI generated copy)
3. CSS Styles (the twitter.now page, with characteristic rounded rectangles and left-border elements)
4. Design Priorities (a site that uses a dashboard format to display inane details prominently)
5. The Creator's Relationship to the Product (a site whose domain registration has lapsed)

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the main indication is of course the fact that it's a grift asking for ≥$20 with AI generated copy and AI generated icons, but there is a lot about the CSS styling and structure of the site that also gives it away to me

A screenshot from twitter.now, showing the options it offers for a $20 tier and a $40 tier. Both have AI generated imagery and text attached.

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Turnout was certainly higher in places with other elections (36.31% of 2024 for x>0.9 vs 28.71% of 2024 for x==0) but the main trend is just that more Dems turned out across the board.

Another matplotlib graph showing how vote share in 2024 correlates with turnout in 2025.

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On the right is a big blob that fits what Mary Radcliffe was describing, but her hypothesis is wrong; These aren't democrat areas. All the precincts with x>0.9 together voted 56.42% for Trump in 2024, whereas they went 55.90% for *democrats* in this year's PSC elections, a D+12.32 point swing.

A close-up of the right side of the graph.

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I looked at two metrics: 1. What was the ratio of turnout in for the PSC races vs the highest turnout for any other race in that precinct in 2025? (x-axis) 2. What is the ratio between the highest turnout for any race in the precinct in 2025 and the 2024 presidential turnout? (y-axis)

A plot made with matplotlib comparing the amount of turnout in 2025 that was for races other than the PSC against how turnout in 2025 compared with 2024, colored by Republican vs Democrat vote share in the PSC elections. Some points along the extremities are labeled with the county and precinct names.

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So I downloaded some precinct level data from results.sos.ga.gov/cdn/results/... to compare with the 2024 presidential results from github.com/21MetcalfJ/2... A lot of precincts have either changed names or merged/split, so I don't have the exact correspondence I'd need yet, but most are the same:

A map of Georgia election precincts from 2024, colored based on if the precinct name was also in the 2025 data.

I was inspired to make this by the fact that I couldn't find one quite like it, though admittedly I didn't search that long. This was the best I found, though it fudges the numbers a bit to account for the fact that the systems use averages over different numbers of minutes of sustained winds.

Chart from https://earthsci.org/processes/weather/cyclone/cyclone.html, though I think it was originally on wikipedia somewhere.

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A chart and map I made based on information found in en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropica... The map shows where the scales are typically used, and are based on outlines of the WMO's Regional Specialized Meteorological Centres (RSMCs).

A chart that shows five different Tropical Cyclone Intensity Scales with colors used on Wikipedia, and a map showing which regions the scales are used in.

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However, the 2016 article (Aguiar et al.) isn't the origin either, and it references another document from 2003. scielo.sld.cu/scielo.php?p...

En Cuba, se reporta una incidencia de 2 a 4 por cada 10 000, aunque según afirma Ravelo, V. "existe la posibilidad de que las cifras sean mucho más bajas que los actuales reportes de hasta uno por 100 de todo el espectro que en algunos países se estiman, pues es cierto que el aumento del reporte para algunos está dado por el mayor conocimiento que del trastorno se tiene, así como la diversidad en las definiciones, los sesgos estadísticos etc., lo que hace parecer que realmente hay más casos".2

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Searching for this alleged study brought me to Hernández-González et al. (2022), which contains these figures in the introduction, but sources that from a 2016 article. www.mdpi.com/2227-7102/12...

1. Introduction
Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) encompass a group of neurodevelopmental disorders that appear in the early stages of life, and they are characterized to variable extents by difficulties in verbal and non-verbal communication, reciprocal social interactions, and restricted or repetitive behaviors [1]. In recent decades, the prevalence of ASD has grown exponentially [2]; for example, an incidence of 2 to 4 per 10,000 is reported in Cuba [3] and at international level there is a global autism prevalence that ranges within and across regions, with a median prevalence of (screenshot cuts off there)

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Geobica @geobica.com · 21/07/2025

The article claims that there exists a "2022 study" that shows "an autism incidence of about 2 to 4 per 10,000 children" in Cuba, which would be significantly less than the US in 2022. However, these numbers aren't from 2022.

According to a 2022 study, Cuba had an autism incidence of about 2 to 4 per 10,000 children in some settings. While research on autism diagnoses in Cuba is much more limited than in the US, the data from the 2022 study shows a far lower rate of recognised cases than in the US – despite the presence of acetaminophen.

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ok so I just realized that I forgot about this line, which makes me confident that the festival is Halloween

Jackenstein: "* I WAS BANNISHED TO THE DARK ZONE, ONLY TO APPEAR ON FESTIVAL NAIGHT..."

Geobica @geobica.com · 12/07/2025

All voting systems have some form of strategic voting, a bit like how all map projections have some distortion. (See Gibbard's Theorem for the mathematical proof of this.) Here's an animation that shows a case in which strategic voting is possible with Instant-Runoff Voting (IRV):

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Geobica @geobica.com · 16/06/2025

Map I made in 2020 to compare how the International Date Line is usually depicted on maps (in gold, though it varies a ton) to how it exists based on Nautical Time Zones, with zones cut out around island countries based on their Territorial Waters:

A slice of an equirectangular map of the Central Pacific running from the north to south poles showing an "Imaginary IDL" in gold and a "Nautical IDL" in red.

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Geobica @geobica.com · 07/06/2025

A bunch of rivers especially in Quebec had their source listed as being in the eastern hemisphere by mistake. Checking Doucet River, for example, this still has not been fixed. Perhaps I should regather this data to fix it.

The English Wikipedia infobox for Doucet River. The source is listed as having longitude 72°28'02"E.

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Geobica @geobica.com · 07/06/2025

Map I made on 2022-12-01 of the listed source and mouth of every river on English Wikipedia that had those as coordinates:

An equirectangular map of countries with orange lines connecting the source and mouth listed for each river on wikipedia. Many are inaccurate, which can be seen by the horizontal lines running across the North Atlantic.

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Another note: While the common depiction of baby ducks is as yellow, this more closely resembles the goslings of the embden (right) than the ducklings of a mallard (left):

A female mallard with four ducklings, each of which is mostly black with some yellow.

An embden goose with many goslings, each of which is yellow.

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Aside from the baby ducks, duck clipart is mostly male mallards, while the common archetype in goose clipart is the domesticated embden breed. Presumably this became the cultural association because of these species' presence throughout Europe.

Two mallards: a female on the left, a male on the right.

An embden goose. White with orange beak and feet.

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Culturally, there is a bit of a difference. If you search for clipart of ducks and geese, you find that ducks are more colorful than geese, while geese have longer necks.

Google images result for "duck clipart". Most are yellow baby ducks, the adults are mostly mallards.

Google images result for "goose clipart". Most are either white geese with orange beaks or grey canadian geese.

Geobica @geobica.com · 04/06/2025

There is no real difference between ducks and geese, or even swans for that matter, the names are used essentially at random for different species:

John Boyd's taxonomy of Anseriformes as seen on Wikipedia, colored by which birds are commonly called "ducks", "geese", "swans", or "screamers".

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Here's a map from 2023 showing school districts in the US overlaid with county borders. Some states have one district per county, some have multiple per county, and in some the borders are pretty much entirely unrelated. For the most part, it's complicated.

Map of School Districts in the US from the NCES EDGE dataset, colored based on how school district boundaries relate to county borders.