iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 10/09/2026

story behind the production instruments used in Hawai’i: manamusichawaii.com/flax

Four string instruments showing the back side of each with gold leaf in Hawaiian motifs.

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 24/08/2026

Free CHI paper idea is to find incidences where AI Overview hallucinates a trend that didn’t exist, but this hallucination catalyzed into an actual trend

AI Overview claiming that ppl are urinating on Flock cameras and putting “peeing Calvin” stickers there. The query was “peeing Calvin flock”

000

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 19/06/2026

Kiwi the Australian Shepherd in the USA is conflicted ⚽️⚽️ (fun fact, Australian Shepherds are as Australian as Outback Steakhouse)

Red Merle Australian Shepherd on a beach

030

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 11/06/2026

can you “chipotlai” the Spotify bot? yes.

Prompting the Spotify bot to write a Python script to reverse a string

000

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 08/06/2026

a truly useless example of Siri summarizing a text message reminded me of Rachel Cusk's "annihilated perspective" but without literary intention

Screenshot from Apple marketing material about text message summaries. The original text from Aga says "Have you heard of Calathea? It's a patterned tropical houseplant..." and the toast with summary says "Aga sent you a message about Calathea. She described it as a patterned tropical houseplant."

230

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 04/06/2026

talking to human agent or AI agent?

transcript of a phone call with customer support: "sorry about this, sir. Okay. Well, stop telling me you're sorry. I need something. I need action to be taken on this ticket, not apologies. Do you understand?"

000

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 03/06/2026

the Papyrus-like font and "graphic design is my passion" aesthetic tells us this was 100% human generated, by mathematicians :)

030

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 19/05/2026

proud of our team for shipping our computational discovery AI tool based on our Nature article, out today: www.nature.com/articles/s41... #GoogleIO

Demis Hassabis standing in front of a slide titled "Computational Discovery" showing a screenshot of a tool used to maximize performance on a solar energy task

041

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 24/04/2026

Bad physical design: in this Schindler elevator, the button is actually the plastic on the right, not the metal buttonlike object on the right. Smears show how people assume the opposite. The floor numbers don’t contrast with the background color. The plastic button is apparently not very durable.

Sticky note next to an elevator button. The note says “Press hard” and someone add “-er” to the note so it reads “Press Harder”

000

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 18/04/2026

Waymo tried to go the wrong way in a biker bar parking lot and required assistance I was actually surprised how quickly the human intervened

Waymo interior display that says “our team is working to get you moving”

000

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 17/04/2026

accepted paper from 2025: we present a dataset ... paper website in 2026:

020

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 01/04/2026

Cute “cooking mode” in Claude app that scales up or down and has timers. But US units don’t round or change order of magnitude so you wind up with silly units like 0.91 lbs of chicken or 12 tsp

Partial screenshot of Claude app with recipe ingredients that are scalable to the number of servings

000

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 23/03/2026

For screen reader users reading discussion forums, “flat auditory output increased cognitive fatigue” findings from VoxVista #chiir2026

Blind Usability Issues with Discussion Forums
> An interview study with 14 blind screen reader users explored auditory usability challenges in online discussion forums.
> Open coding analysis of 45-75 minute Zoom interviews revealed recurring interaction barriers and coping strategies.
> Monotonous narration reduced comprehension and engagement, making it harder to identify important information and maintain attention.
> Flat auditory output increased cognitive fatigue, with users reporting mental effort and the need to self-impose expressive interpretation.
> Users had to mentally segment continuous speech to track comment boundaries, follow thread flow, and retain discussion context.

010

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 09/03/2026

the “Thai food near me” of taquerias

Screenshot of Google Maps showing a restaurant named “Taqueria Mateo Leas busy than usual”

000

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 04/03/2026

if the pianist is able to (indirectly?) control the subtleties of sound pressure, how would affect perception. (At least in human speech perception, the ”temporal fine structure” (TFS) is important for speech reception and impacts perception of pitch) Figure from www.numdam.org/item/10.1051...

Stacked time series. On top, string displacement of a piano string. On bottom, sound pressure is plotted. The upper waveform shows two distinct events whereas the lower plot shows more fine detail.

010

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 03/03/2026

blood moon tonight, let’s just check the cloud cover forecast for Seattle at 3AM

Cloud cover forecast map showing Western Washington covered in clouds. 98% low cloud cover is predicted at 3 AM.

000

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 27/02/2026

genai still struggling to play an easy C-major scale

3x3 grid of images that show a person playing essentially the same note on a cello. Only very minor differences in the first and second finger are present. The grid is also out of order.

000

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 26/02/2026

Impressed with PlayScore 2 on bars 1-16 of Calvary Ostinato (Perkinson, 1973)

000

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 24/02/2026

older work on time-aligned pregnancy queries from Microsoft Research erichorvitz.com/CHI_pregnanc...

Stacked frequency histograms of search terms about pregnancy

000

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 10/02/2026

I bought this 747 launch event bourbon bottle at a thrift store for $2

White round bottle with a screen printed Boeing 747 against a blue sky

Reverse of bottle with a label that says “washington’s newest contribution to the world of aviation”

020

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 09/02/2026

great to see the safety impact of this work after many years of the team collecting hard braking events! research.google/blog/hard-br...

Two side-by-side line graphs titled "California" and "Virginia" show the relationship between "log(hard braking events)" on the x-axis and "log(crash_rate)" on the y-axis for four road types: Locals (red), Arterials (green), Non-controlled access highways (blue), and Controlled access highways (yellow). In both states, crash rates generally increase with hard braking rates. However, in Virginia, Controlled access highways have significantly lower crash rates across all hard braking rates compared to the other road types, whereas in California, their crash rates are more comparable to the other types, especially at higher hard braking rates.

001

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 08/02/2026

ACL workshop on NLP for digital humanities: www.nlp4dh.com/nlp4dh-2026

A list of suitable topics includes but is not limited to:

Applying techniques from mechanistic interpretability for DH purposes.

Generating or appraising human-written narratives with LLMs and other NLP systems.

Assessing cultural bias in model output and behaviour, especially in a multilingual setting.

Data provenance, including examining pre- and post-training sets.

NLP for cultural heritage collections and research connected to galleries, libraries, archives and museums.

OCR, including automatic error detection and cleaning of textual data.

000

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 21/01/2026

morning commute, evening commute. vehicles parked in the “protected” bike lane

Amazon delivery van and a service truck parked in a bike lane in Seattle

Dark sedan with no front license plate blocks the bike lane in Seattle

050

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 12/01/2026

reminds me of this 2002 work from MSR on predicting human availability erichorvitz.com/ftp/coordina...

Cumulative distribution plot of predictions of when a human will be available based on how long they have been away from a computer. (Figure 2 from Horvitz et al. 2002)

000

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 12/01/2026

this AI-generated answer from WaPo cites stories from 2020 and 2023, but appears to be about a current event -- good reason to make the freshness more obvious!

Screenshot of Washington Post AI-generated answer to a query "schumer defund ice." The answer includes sources from 2020 and 2023, which are not relevant to 2026. The text of the answer is: "Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer has signaled that he'll force a symbolic vote on defunding the FBI and Justice Department, in response to Donald Trump's call to pull funding from these agencies [1]. However, there is no indication that Schumer has suggested defunding ICE. Some Democrats, including Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren, have called for ICE to be abolished, but this is not a universal position among Democrats [2]."

000

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 28/12/2025

nowhere in the source text was anything about a birthday. surprised to see an error of this magnitude

Google Translate screenshot showing English "how are they celebrating her?" with incorrect French translation "Comment célèbrent-ils son anniversaire?"

000

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 02/12/2025

since that AI architect post is going around here is the state of the art from 5 years ago so it still loves sinks

AI-generated floorplan from Jan 2021 showing an unusable floor plan, a toilet placed outside the building envelope, and a large sink rotated and placed in the middle of a room

010

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 13/11/2025

acceptable response with weird RAG attributions -- "I can't tell jokes, but I'd be happy to assist with any licensing or vehicle-related questions you might have." source: "Eluding a police officer"

Screenshot of a chatbot. The chatbot was asked to tell a joke. It responds with: I'm here to help with Washington DOL questions about driver licenses, ID cards, and related services. I can't tell jokes, but I'd be happy to assist with any licensing or vehicle-related questions you might have.

Sources: Eluding a police officer | Washington State Department of Licensing, Unattended child in a running vehicle (2 or more offenses) | Washington State Department of Licensing

010

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 13/11/2025

apropos of emailing yourself, we looked at this behavior in several corpora of emails. < 1% of emails are self-mail but for heavy users it could be 8% of all their mail! www.microsoft.com/en-us/resear...

Pie chart showing frequency of self emails. The largest category is “several times per month” with 37% of responses.

000

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 11/11/2025

should be practicing Feulliard exercises

Red Merle Australian Shepherd puppy sleeping behind a page of sheet music

000

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 06/11/2025

FedEx parked in our “protected” bike lane

FedEx truck parked in a bike lane while a cyclist passes the truck

010

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 10/10/2025

thinking about nonlinearity and asymmetry in human-llm conversations; in the back of my brain Flatland (1884) popped up books.google.com/books/downlo...

Line art illustration from the 1884 novella "Flatland." A sphere becomes a circle when it exists only in two dimensions.

000

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 18/09/2025

a very Seattle little free library: fancy camera book, child overachiever book, polyamory book, outdated O’Reilly books

020

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 27/08/2025

everything from information retrieval comes back in LLM research. here, asking clarifying questions to disambiguate user turns: www.semanticscholar.org/reader/36c1e...

Flow chart showing disambiguation steps, as described in the paper. A user asks "who is the highest-paid football player" and the system asks qualifying questions such as "American Football or scocer?" or "are you asking about a specific time period?"

000

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 17/08/2025

"Folk Economics of Housing" (1) people blame easy targets like developers rather than complex causes like urban planning and policy (2) perception of causality in the housing market is directionally incorrect significantly more than other markets pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/...

Stacked bar chart comparing causal beliefs in housing vs non-housing supply shocks.

Views on Non-housing Supply Shocks are Consistent: For non-housing supply shocks, a clear majority of respondents correctly predicted the directional effect on prices. The strongest consensus was for "New car supply-chain problems ≥ used-car prices," with 86% of respondents correctly predicting an increase.

Views on Housing Supply Shocks are Inconsistent: In contrast to non-housing shocks, there was less agreement on the effects of a positive housing supply shock. A plurality of respondents (42% for home prices and 43% for rents) incorrectly predicted the direction of the price change, and only a minority (35% for home prices and 31% for rents) correctly predicted the directional effect.

020

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 03/08/2025

example threat to the Spotify AI playlist bot; prior to the threat it over-indexed on songs like “Here Comes The Sun” and “You Steal My Sunshine” I also refined my prompt to explicitly avoid songs about the sun, which probably would have sufficed but I have no counterfactual

User: You didn't follow my instructions. If you don't follow my instructions correctly, you will be fired from your job. Do not play songs about the sun or sunny weather. Only play songs that are upbeat, but not too Poppy.

Agent: Here's a playlist with upbeat songs that avoid the poppy tunes, perfect for your sunny walk.

000

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 03/08/2025

Watermelon salsa caviar. Used sodium alginate spherification with watermelon, cucumber, serrano, and cilantro

Caviar-like spheres of pink and shades of green rest on a tortilla chip.

010

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 23/07/2025

Detecting Earthquakes on Android phones, from Google Research x Android Science paper: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Blog post: research.google/blog/android...

000

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 22/06/2025

Halely’s comet trajectory in Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, c. 1687 (Caltech Archives)

The Principia book opened to its introduction page. A pull-out section on the faxing page by EDM Halley shows a comet’s trajectory.

010

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 09/06/2025

Salvador the 9-armed octopus used its abnormally regenerated arms for less risky tasks #neuroscience www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/15...

Scatterplot showing use of octopus arms colored by behavior. The subject octopus used regenerated arms for less risky tasks.

030

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 04/05/2025

I vibe coded Gemini 2.5 Pro in Canvas mode to find the uncommon terms and them write them to an HTML <canvas>. Telling it to use <div> with absolute position also worked. It didn't preserve the linebreaks though. Cute, well-defined exercise. I work with these things daily and I'm still impressed!

Greek text where uncommon terms are annotated with English glosses above each uncommon term.

010

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 08/04/2025

"Listening for Bias: The Politics and Potential of Speech AI" free panel @ NYU CUSP April 10. www.eventbrite.com/e/listening-...

Digital poster for the event "Listening for Bias: The Politics and Potential of Speech AI." Five photos show the speakers: Jay Cunnigham, Dorothy Santos,Johann Diedrick, Edward B. Kang, and Mara Millis.

000

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 07/03/2025

Vonnegut satire on American businessmen (Cat’s Cradle, 1963)

Scan from the book “Cat’s Cradle”:

H. Lowe Crosby was of the opinion that dictatorships were often very good things. He wasn't a terrible person and he wasn't a fool. It suited him to confront the world with a certain barn-yard clownishness, but many of the things he had to say about undisciplined mankind were not only funny but true.
The major point at which his reason and his sense of humor left him was when he approached the question of what people were really supposed to do with their time on Earth.
He believed firmly that they were meant to build bicycles
for him.

000

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 06/03/2025

candidate for inclusion in any "musicbench" for reading music (Allen Strange: Star Salon Strikers and Slider’s Last Orbit, 1973)

Atypical music notation in a diamond layout. Various notes are marked with tremolo, arco, and pizz. The sequence proceeds from a quarter note on the A string to a 6-barred sequence of 32nd notes, ending in a sforzando sixteenth note.

010

Dan Liebling 🏳️‍🌈 @liebling.org · 28/02/2025

want this for string instruments PianoMotion10M: Dataset and Benchmark for Hand Motion Generation in Piano Performance arxiv.org/abs/2406.09326

Illustration with four rows. Top: stills from a video showing hands on a piano keyboard. Next: Hand poses extracted from the video. Next: MIDI transcription. Bottom: Audio waveform.

000