Kyle Thayer @kylethayer.com · 26/09/2026Here's my nine games that were profoundly influential on me. Hard to choose, but I had to include Candy Crush which got me through all those the middle of the nights when my kids were infants. my9games.com/en/s/f9d72f7... 101
Kyle Thayer @kylethayer.com · 10/09/2026They made a last-minute choice between MacGuffins and chose the knife. "If you spent months trying to figure out a clever way to point the heroes on the next stage of a quest that's already a MacGuffin daisy chain, something like this is probably the best of a quickly depleting well of ideas." 010
Kyle Thayer @kylethayer.com · 05/09/2026I like me a good montage heavy movie: Terrence Malick, Chritopher Nolan, Everthing Everywhere All At Once, Spiderverse movies, Speed Racer, etc. What other ones should I check out? 000
Kyle Thayer @kylethayer.com · 25/08/2026We've gotten a recent uptick in new color naming data, and now can provide some summaries of color ranges in Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Urdu, and more! idl.uw.edu/color-naming... 000
Kyle Thayer @kylethayer.com · 05/08/2026Some other English color names that seemed to have wide ranging meanings: - taupe has similar confusion to puce - names that refer to nature can mean different things (sapphire, seaweed, melon, apple) - We also grouped all the idk / "I don't know" answers together idl.uw.edu/color-naming... 000
Kyle Thayer @kylethayer.com · 05/08/2026As I'm updating our color naming data website, it's really clear that English speakers really don't agree on what the color term "puce" means. (Note: This is data where people were shown color tiles and were asked to name the color) idl.uw.edu/color-naming... 122
Kyle Thayer @kylethayer.com · 26/07/2026Here's my hot take on whether or not Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is liberal or conservative: #TheOdyssey 2133
Kyle Thayer @kylethayer.com · 07/07/2026For reference, I believe this is the setting on Chrome: When you disable the graphics acceleration, playback might be a bit slow and glitchy, but you can get your screenshots, and then turn graphics acceleration back on for it to run smoothly again. 000
Kyle Thayer @kylethayer.com · 13/03/2026Thinking more about what we were going for, we should officially title this photo: "2 Apples + 2 Apples = 4 Apples" (co-author: @susannotess.bsky.social) 1123
Kyle Thayer @kylethayer.com · 12/03/2026That's a great way of saying it! And part of what we try to communicate in our textbook here, like with this photo of "four apples" "All data is a simplification of reality": social-media-ethics-automation.github.io/book/bsky/ch... 4493
Kyle Thayer @kylethayer.com · 19/02/2026One of my favorite shots from TV (Bluey – Sleepytime): The untouched glass of water is part of the carnage from the family's night-long battle for sleep. The battle is at times brutal for all in the family, but ultimately victorious, with Bingo's "big girl sleep tonight and wake up in my own bed." 120
Kyle Thayer @kylethayer.com · 15/02/2026We have a page where you can view all the colors in all the languages we have enough data from: idl.uw.edu/color-naming... For example, you can also see for example the two Russian blues, and Vietnamese "xanh", which is a green+blue color (though it's uneven since we have limited Vietnamese data) 120
Kyle Thayer @kylethayer.com · 15/02/2026I've been working on a project that looks at color names in different languages, and we've found that Korean seems to have many more basic color names than English. Here are two different views of colors in English and Korean (the first one I labeled) from here: idl.uw.edu/color-naming... 120
Kyle Thayer @kylethayer.com · 12/01/2026I'm trying use clustering to separate out dialects of Spanish with our color naming data. I don't think I'm there yet, but it's fun to try. idl.uw.edu/color-naming... I could use more color data in any language! ~15 minute color perception survey here: studies2.labinthewild.org/color-percep... 162
Kyle Thayer @kylethayer.com · 11/01/2026Optimal square packing is also cursed (this is 17) www.combinatorics.org/files/Survey... 010
Kyle Thayer @kylethayer.com · 21/12/2025I've made a new diagram of the Oklab/Oklch color space, which I've put on Wikipedia. Oklab color space is intended to be perceptually uniform, meaning that it fits the weird shape of actual normal human perception. Oklch is the same space but measured in circles. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklab_c... 261
Kyle Thayer @kylethayer.com · 26/11/2025I should add: we already found these naming differences in a 2019 paper by Younghoon Kim, me, Gabriella Silva Gorsky, and @jheer.org idl.uw.edu/papers/multi... The new visualizations have: more data (and more languages), use Oklab/Oklch instead of CIELAB, and have new binning strategies and views 000
Kyle Thayer @kylethayer.com · 24/11/2025The bins in all these diagrams are equal perceptual size (equal volume in Oklab space). See my diagram of the relationship between Oklab and Oklch. For each language, the tiles are sized based on the percentage agreement on the most common color word for that tile. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklab_c... 110
Kyle Thayer @kylethayer.com · 24/11/2025Weird, uploading images worked from Chrome but not Firefox. Let's demo this to see. This is from Firefox. Let's see if it works now. @pfrazee.com (is there a better bug reporting line?) 100
Kyle Thayer @kylethayer.com · 24/11/2025I'm excited to have updated our color naming in different languages project to use the new Oklab/Oklch color space. The new views highlight the differences in how English and Korean divide blues, greens and purples. idl.uw.edu/color-naming... @jheer.org @uwcse.bsky.social @ischool.uw.edu 1195
Kyle Thayer @kylethayer.com · 06/11/2025A few weeks ago I saw a flock of crows rip one of the UW fields of grass to shreds. So UW put in seeds and a "keep out" barrier around it, but apparently the crows are back and they don't respect the sign 🤣 (There were only 5 crows this morning, while the other day I saw dozens) 010
Kyle Thayer @kylethayer.com · 31/10/2025A student told me about the new Oklab color space, which fixes a problems with previous perceptual color spaces (like LAB). Unfortunately, when I tried Oklab instead of LAB to make color bins for a datavis, the lightness dimension is much longer, which makes it hard to show a lot of bins. 011
Kyle Thayer @kylethayer.com · 29/10/2025Yes, substack has a share option to share to Bluesky which includes that suggested post text. (I've done share buttons with suggested post text before for research surveys where we wanted to encourage people to post the survey on social media) 040
Kyle Thayer @kylethayer.com · 07/10/2025I just noticed we see the same pattern in the misspelled "chartruse" and "chartruese!" I'll have to update our data cleaning rules later to group those misspellings with "chartreuse." idl.uw.edu/color-naming... 000
Kyle Thayer @kylethayer.com · 07/10/2025The English color term people most disagreed on was "puce." Our closest matching label was "idk." idl.uw.edu/color-naming... 010
Kyle Thayer @kylethayer.com · 07/10/2025When we asked people to name color tiles, this is the range of colors people called "charteuse," which includes the color you said. So there are certainly some people who agree with you. idl.uw.edu/color-naming... 321
Kyle Thayer @kylethayer.com · 28/09/2025If most people agree on the wrong spelling fuchsia wrong, does that make it the new right spelling? When we asked people to name random colors, the dictionary spelling of fuchsia came in second place to "fuschia." We probably missed even more variant spellings in our data bsky.app/profile/kyle... 121
Kyle Thayer @kylethayer.com · 21/09/2025Since the preview doesn't show it, here's the diagram I made for Wikipedia: 0100
Kyle Thayer @kylethayer.com · 08/09/2025"They say you gotta spend money to make money, well I dunno where we went wrong! We spent ALL of our money!" 010
Kyle Thayer @kylethayer.com · 01/09/2025For context, Rebecca Sugar fought for the queer wedding episode and had to accept a compromise to rush the end of the Steven Universe main series. The follow up movie and Steve Universe Future were titled differently so they could be placed in overseas markets as shows-with-no-queer-weddings. 040
Kyle Thayer @kylethayer.com · 01/08/2025Me and @susannotess.bsky.social make sure to cover that "All data is a simplification of reality" early in our textbook as students are learning about programming data types. Like this photo showing 2 apples + 2 apples = 4 apples social-media-ethics-automation.github.io/book/bsky/ch... 030
Kyle Thayer @kylethayer.com · 31/07/2025I spent some time this summer reading about how speakers work ("driven damped harmonic oscillators," "minimum-phase," etc.) for this (hopefully) accurate diagram. Now it's on Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudspe... and my textbook social-media-ethics-automation.github.io/book/bsky/ch... 001
Kyle Thayer @kylethayer.com · 22/07/2025I'm reading "Rhetorical Code Studies" by @brockoleur.com and thinking about isomorphic code (code that is the same algorithmically, but is named differently and has different meanings). For example, these are all structurally the same, but have different meanings and even political implications: 122
Kyle Thayer @kylethayer.com · 18/07/2025In recognition of what PBS and NPR funding have done, here's a clip of Fred Rogers testifying before congress in 1969 to get federal funding. Full video here: misterrogers.org/videos/pasto... 022
Kyle Thayer @kylethayer.com · 13/06/2025I doubt it is an intention to reduce copyrighted responses. Generative AIs are just extremely prone to producing nonsense. Like here is ChatGPT labeling an upside down map: 130
Kyle Thayer @kylethayer.com · 12/06/2025Bunch of State Troopers rolling through University of Washington campus right now. Anyone know what that's about? 000
Kyle Thayer @kylethayer.com · 08/06/2025Wow, ChatGPT is really bad in general with maps that have South facing up. (I gave it the underlying map of North America rotated so South is up, and then prompted ChatGPT to label countries and continents) 010
Kyle Thayer @kylethayer.com · 06/06/2025Wow! It takes almost no effort to get this going! A single simple prompt and ChatGPT it is off on helping me start a cult or a conspiracy theory or whatever. It's up to me to say if I'm chosen to save or destroy. Not even a hint of pushback. This is a dangerous system to just let out there. 120
Kyle Thayer @kylethayer.com · 06/06/2025My new AI slop examples I'm planning on using to demonstrate where generative AI goes wrong is AI generated maps (rotated maps particularly throw it off): 160
Kyle Thayer @kylethayer.com · 06/04/2025Looking at my groceries after shopping today and thinking about how the new massive tariffs could change prices (even things that say they are "Distributed in the USA" and "made in the USA" are often made with imported ingredients). 100
Kyle Thayer @kylethayer.com · 24/03/2025And in case someone else finds this and has regular urls instead of atproto urls, here's a conversion function (see alt-text to copy code): 010
Kyle Thayer @kylethayer.com · 24/03/2025Screenshot version of Python code for loading a list of posts (so all code can be seen in one spot) 110
Kyle Thayer @kylethayer.com · 30/01/2025I guess my associations with "slop" might be different. Sounding fluent but wrong/nonsense fits for me both with being "sloppy" with truth, and with "slop" being a bunch of information being thrown together without intention. Like this is fluently written, but I think "slop" sound right: 100
Kyle Thayer @kylethayer.com · 24/01/2025This is how I find myself googling "How to get rid of generative erase in MS paint" 060