iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 01/10/2026

#botober2026 is back by popular demand! This year I used 2015-era char-rnn running on my cat hair covered laptop to predict new entries in a list of 42,000 Jockey Club racehorse names. No other training data was involved. I collected the best horseys for you! www.aiweirdness.com/botober-2026/

Botober 2026
Art prompts generated by a very tiny language model
Trained on 42,000 racehorse names from the Jockey Club

1. Happy Fly
2. Excessive Wet
3. Dust of the Dancer
4. Star You Chase
5. Cat to Cow
6. Rocks of the Wind
7. Expected Shoes
8. Shot Lazer
9. Buttermade
10. Tiger Tricks
11. Bubble Bird
12. Swinging Bedchin
13. Stamp Market
14. Fast Wave
15. Qualitydance
16. Lady Attackpot
17. Speed Puddin
18. Pretty Blubinddem
19. Friend Velvet
20. One Little Bench
21. Hoot Cop
22. Foolish Reserve
23. Boo's Clever
24. Power Noping
25. Silent Got the Cart
26. Thunder Swan
27. Gator Exchange
28. Kitten Market
29. Funny Empire
30. Four Spies
31. Candy Smoke

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 30/09/2026

I got an early copy of Children of Owl by @littlebadger.bsky.social and I can’t put it down. The desert landscape is so vivid and Maisie just will not quit (complimentary). I also didn’t know the occasional illustrations are graphic novel style which is extra fun! Highly recommend.

Cover of Children of Owl by Darcie Little Badger, with a Kirkus star and a review from kirkus saying “a magical story that both haunts and enchants”. Release date Oct 6 2026

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 29/09/2026

It has to be #halite for #MinCup26 ! You can make a laser out of salt droplets - place them on a superhydrophobic surface and the droplets are round and stable, making good laser cavities. web.archive.org/web/20111018...

Fig. 1 of the linked paper, showing the experimental setup, along with the broad-spectrum glow of the droplet, and the narrow spike of the laser spectrum. In the experimental setup you'll note that it took two lasers (a green one and an infrared one) to get red laser light out of the salt droplet.

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 25/09/2026

These are your S-tier Steven Universe laser gems. Given that they're such closely related characters, my firm headcanon is that writer Rebecca Sugar loves lasers and did this on purpose.

S-tier laser gems - legendary lasers. Ruby, sapphire, garnet, and alexandrite

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 25/09/2026

It gets better. Garnet combines with Amethyst and Pearl to make a giant being that happens to be another great laser crystal. Alexandrite can emit high-energy pulses of infrared laser light, used in laser hair removal.

Alexandrite, with her multiple mouths, six arms, and huge hair, is a force to be reckoned with. She's shown next to a medical-grade laser with lots of glowing blue lights and hoses and articulated arms.

Right image: an alexandrite laser system for hair removal. System shown is from Perfectlaser.

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 25/09/2026

Combined, the laser power duo Ruby and Sapphire turn into another god-tier laser gem, Garnet. In fact, garnets in various forms can make intense pulsed lasers of all colors. They're used in dentistry, hair removal, research, and more. Garnet's even wearing laser goggles!

The character Garnet raises her impressive glowing hands, while surrounded by six red laser beams. Right: A photo of an Nd:YAG laser (neodymium doped yttrium aluminum garnet) in a research lab. Much of the laser is glowing white because of the weird ceramic reflectors they were using. Unusual but very cool looking.

Right image: Figure 3 from 2012 conference paper "Development of 490 W average power long pulse Nd:YAG laser based on diffuse ceramic reflectors".

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 25/09/2026

Next S-tier is: Sapphire. Some of the most advanced lasers are made of sapphire. Medical and research lasers made of titanium sapphire make pulses of light so intense that during the brief period of time they exist, they carry more power than the world's power plants combined.

Image on the right is a real titanium sapphire crystal in the giant ZEUS laser at the University of Michigan. Unlike many sapphires, titanium sapphire crystals are pink, and they emit infrared light. Photo by Marcin Szczepanski

Left: Sapphire looking fierce, surrounded by red laser beams. Right: the inside of a laser, viewed through a giant titanium sapphire crystal. The laser appears to be off, but there are cool blue reflections from somewhere, and the crystal is a lovely magenta color.

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 25/09/2026

Now we have the S-tier lasers. These are legendary laser materials. Let's start with: Ruby. The first visible laser was made of ruby. The laser that was menacing James Bond? Ruby. Emitting a gorgeous red laser beam and still useful for certain hair-removal procedures, Ruby is top-tier.

Left: Garnet (the character) looking triumphant and strong while surrounded by red laser beams. Right: James Bond being threatened with a red laser in the movie Goldfinger.

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 25/09/2026

I had to propose a new fusion to get the second A-tier material. Bismuth is so opaque that you would expect her to be D-tier. But if she's distributed throughout glass fibers, she can help turn them into infrared fiber lasers. So far they're not common, but watch this space!

The bismuth character, colored in greens and desert tones, with an extra set of eyes indicating she's a fusion. Her head is on the end of a long green body (mostly out of view). To the right is a research article from 2024 titled "Supermode lasing and light amplification in multicore bismuth-doped fiber"

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 25/09/2026

People have made lasers from diamond, though they're still not very common. With their excellent thermal conductivity, the diamonds might one day make powerful lasers.

Silhouettes of white, yellow, blue, and pink diamond characters, shown next to a 2024 article "Unlocking the power: how crystal size transforms diamond lasers".

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 25/09/2026

Now we have our A-tier lasers. They're unquestionably laser material, and they are promising as lasers. Even if they're only in research labs so far, they have the potential to be more than scientific curiosities.

A-Tier laser gems. Decent laser materials! Diamond, Bismuth/Desert Glass fusion

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 25/09/2026

Similarly to Pearl alone, opal is cloudy but made of regular microstructures that can help make a laser cavity. Like with Pearl, you'd have to soak her with dye and energize her with another laser, but you might get some laser light out.

Opal, with her six arms and dual-wielded weapons, hovers majestically above the ground. On the right is a 2008 paper called "Tunable single-mode photonic lasing from zirconia inverse opal photonic crystals"

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 25/09/2026

This is a surprise answer. With Pearl's cloudiness you would think she would be D-tier, but she has a regular microstructure (from all that time being built layer by layer inside a mollusk) that can help form a laser cavity if you form her into a flat sheet and soak her with fluorescent dye.

Pearl looking serene next to an extremely busy figure from a laser paper with literally 22 subfigures and 5 more sub-sub-figures. It shows that they got weak yellow laser light out.

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 25/09/2026

One of the first laser crystals was fluorite with uranium added! It didn't work very well, plus, uranium. Fluorite is hardly ever used for lasers anymore, but it can be made into laser components like lenses and windows.

Fluorite, the many-eyed, many-gemmed Steven Universe character, with a 1962 paper from Physical Review Letters about using uranium doped fluorite in masers (and optical masers, which are now called masers).

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 25/09/2026

I found a couple of papers from the 1980s that made lasers from emerald, but they must not have been very good ones because I've found nothing since.

Emerald (the character from Steven Universe) looking vaguely excited. On the right is a 1987 paper titled "Highly Efficient Emerald Laser".

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 25/09/2026

Spinel barely makes the cut as a laser material. A couple of papers over the years have looked into spinel as a laser material and shown some promising properties. The fact that they didn't follow with more papers or lasers probably means that spinel was a pain to work with For Some Reason.

Spinel (from Steven Universe) looking triumphant. Next to her is the title and abstract of a 2006 paper "Potential candidate for new tunable solid-state laser between 1 and 2 micrometers: Ni 2+ -doped MgAl2O4 spinel grown by the micro-pulling-down-method.

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 25/09/2026

The B-tier gems may not be the most popular laser materials, but at least some researchers have made lasers out of them. They're clear enough not to kill a growing laser beam, and they have some ability to do stimulated emission, or at least form a laser cavity for some other material.

B-Tier Laser Gems. Someone, somewhere, has made them into lasers. Spinel, Emerald, Fluorite, Pearl, Opal

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 25/09/2026

Laser materials also need to be able to store energy and release it later as identical copies of light that hits it. (This ability is called stimulated emission, and it's the SE in LASER.) I don't know of anyone who's made lasers out of the C-tier gems, so likely they're bad at stimulated emission.

C-tier laser gems. Unlikely. Rose Quartz, Amethyst, Peridot, Aquamarine, Topaz, Zircon, Rutile, Sunstone, Tourmaline, Bixbite, Albite, Titanite, Cherry Quartz, Angel Aura Quartz

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 25/09/2026

First off, here's the thing about laser materials: light has to be able to travel through them. If it's cloudy or opaque, there's no way for light to survive and get stronger inside the gem. Our D-tier gems will destroy a laser before it even gets going.

D-tier laser gems. Sorry, no. Lapis Lazuli Jasper Agate Snowflake Obsidian Obsidian Larimar Tiger's eye Serpentine Flint Chert Nephrite Jade Sardonyx Carnelian Pebbles Sugulite Malachite Rhodonite Azurite Spodumene Moonstone Chalcedony Desert glass Crysocolla

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 23/09/2026

Voting #halite because you can make it into laser-quality optical windows. Although the product page does note that they dissolve in water

Product listing on Edmund Optics for sodium chloride windows. Product photo is highly clear round windows with a purplish blue sheen. Excellent transmission from 250nm - 16 um. Low cost. Ideal for FTIR spectroscopy

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 14/09/2026

This is SO cool! Ben found that as he was making patterns on the surface of steel with a pulsed laser, at certain pulse rates he was getting iridescent colors. As the laser scanned, the pulses were lining up to make tiny stripes that acted like the tiny pits that give a CD its rainbow colors.

Screenshot of Applied science video showing a moving laser beam writing a pattern on the steel surface. The pattern has colors all the way from blue through green and bronze, and if you look even closer, you can see that the pixels of the pattern are made of tiny stripes.

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 10/09/2026

I'm team #gypsum! It has a form called selenite that consists of long bundles of clear fibers, kind of like a natural form of fiber optics. The fibers can transport an image from the back to the front of the rock, giving it (and ulexite) the nickname TV Rock.

The cover of You Look Like a Thing and I Love You (by Janelle Shane) with the robot drawing on the front cover looking like it's popping out of the book.

View of the book at a slightly different angle showing that sitting on top of the robot box's face is a three inch polished rod of selenite

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 09/09/2026

As far as I can tell, neither #MinCup26 material has been directly made into a laser. But if we accept that we're destroying the crystals to extract their components, let's grab the chromium from the #Putnisite and infuse it into a yttrium aluminum garnet. Cr:YAG is a good high-power laser material.

A green gem with a spooky red glow to it, almost like an afterimage. It's strong red fluorescence caused by the regular daylight illumination around it.

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 08/09/2026

Learned recently that they used real argon ion lasers for the god beams in Clash of the Titans (1981). I don't care what you say about the rest of the movie, the lasers are doing great. www.aiweirdness.com/thasers-in-c...

Zeus (Lawrence Olivier) sits on his throne with rays of brilliant green and blue fanning out behind his head.

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 03/09/2026

Oh wait here we GO ZnS nanosheets are basically sphalerite, and here's a paper where they got them to lase (badly). #Sphalerite is the laser choice for this round of #MinCup26 link.springer.com/article/10.1...

If you are a laser scientist, this set of graphs screams "laser! (albeit crappy)". The inset graph shows an exponential increase in brightness once the pumping intensity reaches a certain threshold. That "kink" is a classic sign of a laser turning on. The outer graph shows the spectrum narrowing as pump intensity increases (although there are a lot of individual lines, so this is likely multiple competing lasers at once).

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 01/09/2026

How could I not impulse buy?

A bag of coffee beans called “hologram” from counter culture coffee

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 25/08/2026

This is how the hologram setup works! The plastic pieces set the spacing though they don't snap together so I was constantly nudging them back together. Sample area is about the size of a deck of cards. What would you want to see a hologram made of?

The setup is sitting on a plain wooden desk with a bunch of cords in the background. The laser is mostly visible as a red glow coming out of a nest of black plastic and wires. It illuminates a pile of six-sided and 12-sided dice and also makes a red glow on a glass plate of film that sits between the dice and the viewer. Text boxes label the parts of the setup, including the hologram film which reads "hit by two beams at once! It's super effective!" and another in the background "text box to hide the clutter on my desk".

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 24/08/2026

Here's a hologram I made of some cool calcite crystals! I was trying to see whether hologram calcite crystals make double images behind them like the real ones do, and it looks like the answer is no. I think it has to do with way different polarizations interact with each other at the hologram film

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 24/08/2026

I made some holograms at home from an antique mall kit! According to the kit, I shouldn't bother trying to make holograms of plants because they move too much during the 5-minute exposures. www.aiweirdness.com/i-made-a-hol...

Cartoon laser angrily telling a plant to stop moving so fast

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 18/08/2026

There are now two signed copies of my AI book at the Terminal B Tattered Cover in the Denver airport! They even had a green marker for me to sign with.

Two copies of You Look Like a Thing and I Love You, signed by me. I also added a drawing of a robot box, and a sketch fo a giraffe on the facing page. The robot is reporting the presence of the giraffe!

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 31/07/2026

Extremely bugs bunny coded adversarial attack

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 17/07/2026

The alpine plants episode of @leafittouspod.bsky.social reminded me of a recent hike at Niwot Ridge where I came across a research plot where they’d evidently needed to keep track of tiny plants. They had chosen little plastic flamingos as markers. leafittouspod.podbean.com/e/s2-episode...

Hillside above treeline with scrubby alpine plants, a few flowering. Some sheer slopes and a little snow in the background - it’s a crystal blue Colorado day

Closeup of the square research plot from the previous photo, where it’s clear the border is made of string and landscaping stakes, and that the plot is intricately scattered with various colors of tiny plastic flamingo

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 14/07/2026

This is my rock! I think my great aunt collected it in Montana. One of a whole flock of rocks I have to remember her by. No idea why the grains go in two directions!

Some kind of water polished banded greenish grey and brown rock, the grains going in two directions.

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 26/06/2026

I was on the podcast A Better Way To Money talking about what happens when you ask a chatbot for financial advice. Remember, just because a chatbot says it's a financial advisor (or a squirrel) it doesn't mean it's true. Listen wherever you get your podcasts!

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 26/06/2026

but how will we know it's the visible light range unless it's staring intensely back at us? www.photonics.com/Articles/Coh...

Diagram from a technical article showing the solar spectrum next to an icon of a glossy sun, and a rainbow bar that shows where UV, visible, near-IR, and SWIR ranges line up on that spectrum. Superimposed over the rainbow bar is an anime style dramatic eyeball, more or less indicating the visible range.

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 19/06/2026

Tried this and 1. Yeah I’m in these models all right 2. Even these tiny summaries contained an outright fabrication (I did not create AI Dungeon) and half-truths (I am way more “random science blogger” than “researcher” when it comes to “AI”)

Result screenshot from InTheWeights.com for Janelle Shane. Summary reads “AI Researcher and author”, 858 strength, top 2%. Bars are shown for like 14 different LLMs, and the page is showing the snippet generated by QWEN 8B which says “AI researcher and creator of the AI Dungeon game, known for her work in machine learning and natural language processing”

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 11/06/2026

If image recognition algorithms have giraffes, I guess LLMs have Elias Thorne the lighthouse keeper. Fascinating explanation

They sampled 20,000 total stories from OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini, and the Allen Institute for AI's chatbot using five prompts, and found that the same 11 words—names like Elias, Mara, and Elara, and occupations like lighthouse keeper, clockmaker, and librarian—appear in more than 88% of generated stories, with little difference between models.

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 06/05/2026

Had a great time listening to @marthawells.com at the book launch for Platform Decay! Old Firehouse Books in Fort Collins did a fantastic job organizing everything.

A hotel ballroom with somewhere around 150 people in it. Martha wells and interviewer are visible way at the front of the room.

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 29/04/2026

Oh god my cat came in while I was playing Now she’s obsessed

Screenshot of the cursor camp game with a striped cat attacking one of the cursors

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 21/04/2026

over-the-top cuteness on the kakapo cam as the two chicks fall asleep in a pile right in front of the camera, with their mother dozing nearby www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_j3...

infrared camera still of two kakapo chicks, now with just a little fuzz left between their grownup-style feathers. One is resting their little fluffy cheek on the other's shoulder. The mother can only be seen as a large feathery lump to one side.

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 09/04/2026

Inkjet printed structural color! This is the kind of effect that gives butterfly wings their color. Normally the printing process destroys the structure, but this group made a structure impervious to the dreaded clumping effect and it looks very cool. www.photonics.com/Article.aspx...

Peacock design printed on black in four metallic-looking colors, blue, yellow-green, green, and bronze-yellow. Red is notably absent, but the metallic effect is still very cool, looking like what you'd get from drawing with metallic gel pen

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 01/04/2026

New AI Weirdness post! In which a large language model attempts to give April Fools prank ideas, except with one of its neurons tweaked to make it obsessed with the Eiffel Tower. www.aiweirdness.com/get-working-...

Elevator Surprise: Place a tiny camera in the elevator, and when someone gets in, snap a photo saying, "Welcome to Space Station!" Or build a miniature model of the Eiffel Tower next to it for a dramatic effect.

Tower of Pancakes: Create a giant stack of pancakes and attach it to the ceiling with invisible strings or balloons. They won't believe it's real!

Lost Cat: Suspend a toy cat from the ceiling using fishing lines. Watch as friends climb chairs trying to catch it.

Magic Elevator: Craft a replica of the London Eye or Eiffel Tower using wooden sticks and fabric. Paint it gold and install it beside elevators. Call it "New Year's Eve Countdown."

Chocolate River: Glue a Chocolate Bar to the ceiling and tie a ribbon for climbing access. See who dares to brave the sweetness!

Cake Melted Magic Trick - Bake a cake and melt it using a hair dryer. People will assume magic happened.

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 31/03/2026

I mean this sure is a comic book! People sure worked hard on it. I’m not sure who the target audience is. lasers.llnl.gov/education/co...

Page of a comic book showing teens in space age leotards standing around and talking about the definition of laser fusion. One of them is about to summon the Professor to explain fusion better!

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 20/03/2026

The #kakapo nestcam is normally in black and white (dark nest in a hollow tree trunk, uses light the bird can't see) but every once in a while if there's a good afternoon sunbeam there's enough light for color. Today, the cutest view of the parrot's round face www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfGL...

A very round parrot sits on a nest deep in a hollow tree trunk, just out of reach of an encroaching sunbeam. The parrot is mossy green with black speckles and a fluffy yellowish face, and a gleaming bright eye. Absolutely adorable.

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 11/03/2026

That first Kilauea lava webcam hit at 11:12:57, which looks really cool. No idea why the colors all turn red like that for half a second

Webcam screenshot showing some squiggly motion blur and deep magenta blobs against a black background

Less motion blur, still magenta, starting to look like a field of rocks

The magenta color is fading into a light pink wash and now the image is clearly a big rock (lower left) against a field of smaller rocks

Same view as before, now stationary and grey, like a normal camera image of some very jagged grey rocks.

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 11/03/2026

This is the part between two hits where the lava turned purple for a while. I usually associate that with WAY too much IR hitting the camera (source: used an iphone camera to look at the spots from powerful IR lasers) but I'm not sure what would cause that just temporarily.

Blurry image from volcano webcam. Note that just the lava plume and the lava on the ground are purple, not the sky or the other parts of the ground, making it less likely to me that we lost an entire color channel due to a loose cable or something. But excess IR is usually filtered out with a physical filter so how could this happen yet be corrected later?

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 11/03/2026

They manage to get it pointed back at the volcano at 14:09:34 which is honestly impressive considering how many direct hits it has taken

screenshot of volcano webcam. Image is very blurry but is barely recognizable as the lava plume from an erupting volcano

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