iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jeremy Kahn @trochee.dair-community.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/09/2026

Y'all, I know I'm old because I confidently filled this in as CORTANA

A NYT crossword clue

Reads

6. Microsoft's A.I. assistant

seven letters.

Only the first two are filled in

CO 🟨⬜⬜⬜⬜

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Jeremy Kahn @trochee.dair-community.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/09/2026

[Don't judge this (objectively cool) cover by its book] "objectivist" pun not intended but y'know what, stet

The Fountainhead
Ayn Rand

A semi abstract deco art design that uses white black yellow red and blue uniform color areas only

To tell a story of people and construction work and buildings

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Jeremy Kahn @trochee.dair-community.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/07/2026

Numismatist alert! I just found this very old penny in my pocket because it *stuck to my headphone case's magnetic clasp* Wait, you say. Isn't ol' Abe supposed to be copper (or copper and zinc)? Apparently not in 1943!

A very old penny, nearly black, held between two fingers

Close inspection shows the year 1943.

It is older than my dad.

And apparently, ferromagnetic!

The back side of that penny which does not have the Lincoln Memorial, but instead has the wheat stalks and the words

ONE
CENT
United States
Of America

And the words "e pluribus unum" in small print across the top rim

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Jeremy Kahn @trochee.dair-community.social.ap.brid.gy · 17/07/2026

This feels like a postmodern throwing of the gauntlet If it's not considered a word, but I can make a meme of it, is it really unmemeable?

A screenshot of Spelling Bee in which UNMEMEABLE is attempted and rejected "Not in word list"

It would be a Pangram — it uses all seven letters offered, with U as the yellow center letter of the hexagon

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Jeremy Kahn @trochee.dair-community.social.ap.brid.gy · 17/05/2026

At Third Place Books while my kid practices with his "Midwest Emo" band up the hill. Two SF books and two non-fiction books, for a total of four antifascist, decolonizing books about how to live in a society that is trying to kill you and the people you care about

Four books

Alissa Schwartz — Organizational Performance Art

Martha Wells — Platform Decay

Ann Leckie — Radiant Star

Remski — Antifascist Dad

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Jeremy Kahn @trochee.dair-community.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/05/2026

I swear I was trying to type "Mansplaining", but autocorrect has other ideas

Text entry window. In the open text it says

The Power of Managing|

Autocorrect suggestions below read

Management Manslaughter Man...

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Jeremy Kahn @trochee.dair-community.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/03/2026

Got the book by @rwg , but I have some competition for getting to it

A cute red dog has fallen asleep on top of MOVE SLOWLY AND BUILD BRIDGES, a book by Roger W Gehl.
https://bookwyrm.social/book/823358/s/millions-billions-zillions

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Jeremy Kahn @trochee.dair-community.social.ap.brid.gy · 01/03/2026

a professional I work with uses this very weird header image that is EITHER * very clever * rogue lorem ipsum that speaks to very poor awareness of web design and while I'm afraid to know the answer I kinda want to steal the "very clever" for my own non-existent consulting company

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Jeremy Kahn @trochee.dair-community.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/02/2026

One of the reasons I am cranky about LLMs is that they take some of the joy out of casual, flamboyant bullshitting-as-a-spectator-sport For example, the telling of "tall tales", the game commercially known as "Balderdash" (in my extended family we […] [Original post on dair-community.social]

NYT Spelling Bee grid, showing that MOCKBA is not accepted

(It is not an English word, but it resembles the Cyrillic for Moskva (Moscow) , so rejecting this is absolutely correct)

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Jeremy Kahn @trochee.dair-community.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/02/2026

[NYT Spelling Bee grumbles, Gen X pop vocab erasure] Oh come on now, this has been a valid word in English since *Lisa The Iconoclast* (1996) How dare you, NYT. Attention @emckean , I thought of you!

The word EMBIGGEN
in the NYT Spelling Bee game
Showing "not in word list"

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Jeremy Kahn @trochee.dair-community.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/02/2026

new ways to say "false": I blame @hipsterelectron and @ids1024 mathstodon.xyz/@ids1024/11605419283…

$Falsity D&D alignment chart LG: False NG: 0.0 CG: 0+0j LN: \emptyset True Neutral: [] CN: {} LE: std::string foo = ""; NE: nullptr CE: -0.0 == +0.0$

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Jeremy Kahn @trochee.dair-community.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/01/2026

[NYT Connections puzzle spoilers, plus AI grumbling] Did somebody overrun their token bill, or do you think the NYT operates an on-prem LLM that went offline? It's 10p Eastern, they should have some results here in this (the only?) semi-benign application of the free-association machine

Screen cap of NYT puzzle results for connections

Today's Top Mistakes

Data for each mistake includes similar guesses. I haven't come up with A.I.-generated descriptions of what players may have been thinking yet.

MISTAKE

PCT. OF PLAYERS WITH THIS MISTAKE

RIB

MOCK

RAG

NEEDLE

20%

I didn't create a description for this guess.

RAG

SHAM

BUCKET

SOAP

I didn't create a description for these guesses.

18%

MOTOR

TIRE

NEEDLE

TONEARM

I didn't create a description for these guesses.

14%

RIB

MOTOR

NEEDLE

TONEARM

12%

I didn't create a description for these guesses.

RIB MOCK

SHAM

PRETEND

7%

I didn't create a description for these guesses.

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Jeremy Kahn @trochee.dair-community.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/12/2025

The Google Keyboard is a quiet collaborator. "antifascism" is not a spelling error.

An "add to dictionary" pop-up dialog box, in white on a black background.

The word "antifascism" is filled in; it wasn't in the Google keyboard dictionary

[Cancel] [OK] buttons

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Jeremy Kahn @trochee.dair-community.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/11/2025

Oof the AI world is eating its own here Somehow Google's AI got the wrong end of the stick about Meta's AI and Murati's AI and who is getting hired by whom everybody's grifting all the time forever

SCREENSHOT

Al Overview

The user's information is incorrect; the reverse is true. A co-founder of Mira Murati's startup, Andrew Tulloch, was recently hired by Meta, not the other way around. Meta has, in fact, been actively attempting to poach talent from Murati's company, Thinking Machines Lab, but most of those offers were initially rejected.

(FOLLOWED BY)

BI

Business Insider

https://www.businessinsider.com

Meta's Soumith Chintala Joins Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab

4 days ago - Soumith Chintala, the creator of PyTorch, has joined Mira Murati's Al startup Thinking Machines Lab.

Chintala's move comes amid major ...

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Jeremy Kahn @trochee.dair-community.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/11/2025

Just so you can guess where the "AI" thing is headed, look at this listing from a local community college "AI made simple for everyday life" ... And look at what comes next: "Flaggers certification" The exciting thing (for bosses) is the idea that […] [Original post on dair-community.social]

>

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

///

Al Made Simple for Everyday Life

Think Al is just for techies? Think again! This fun and accessible course breaks down the basics of ChatGPT and shows how anyone can use it to simplify tasks, get inspired, or learn new things. No jargon, no pressure-just practical, creative ways to bring Al into your world. This online (self-paced) class is on our Canvas learning platform and it includes a 1-hour, one on one tutoring session to address your specific questions/needs.

Instructor: (scribbled out to protect the poor bastard)

1/5-3/20, Online (self-paced) & 1-hr tutoring, $99

Flaggers Certification

Earn your WA State DOT flagging card (valid 3 years in WA, OR, ID, MT) and an American Traffic Safety Services Association (ATSSA) card (valid 4 years in 48 states) in one day! Must be 18+ with

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Jeremy Kahn @trochee.dair-community.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/11/2025

[the billionaires are making more billions from building bullshit engines, so I am going to claim in the face of all possible evidence that] the Peter Principle was named after Peter III born Karl Peter Ulrich von Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorp Duke of […] [Original post on dair-community.social]

Portrait of Peter III of Russia.

He is an eighteenth century man (wig and lace collar and all) with a dopey look on his face and is holding a scepter.

Portrait by Lucas Conrad Pfandzelt, c. 1761

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Jeremy Kahn @trochee.dair-community.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/10/2025

My friend — who *works* for King County — asked Google, back in September, which Council members are up for re-election this November. Google told her that the election in November 2025 had ALREADY TAKEN PLACE.

Screenshot

google.com

Al Overview

W+7

Five King County Council seats were up for election in 2025: Districts 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9. All King County Council members serve four-year terms. The general election was held on November 4, 2025.

2025 King County Council races

District 1: Incumbent Rod Dembowski ran unopposed and was re-elected.

District 3: Incumbent Sarah Perry faced challenger Rob Wotton, a Snoqualmie City Council member, and was re-elected.

District 5: With incumbent Dave Upthegrove having resigned to become State Lands Commissioner, this was an open seat. In the August primary, the race was led by SeaTac City Council member Peter Kwon and lawyer Steffanie Fain.

District 7: Incumbent Pete von Reichbauer was re-elected.

District 9: Incumbent Reagan Dunn was re-elected.

King County Executive

In addition to the council races, there was also an election for King County Executive, in 2025. With...

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Jeremy Kahn @trochee.dair-community.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/09/2025

Always reassuring 😬 when you see a misspelling in the kid's athletics login page come on soccer dads, don't roll your own crypto

Your password has been sucessfully updated. [sic on the number of "c"s in "sucessfully"

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Jeremy Kahn @trochee.dair-community.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/09/2025

New band name just dropped and bonus eponymous album cover …in my rental car paperwork

A folded piece of paper with the words
"Intentionally Blank" in two places.

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Jeremy Kahn @trochee.dair-community.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/09/2025

Two things of note (1) The men's room at SeaTac offers free menstrual products, good for them (2) #facesInThings

A stainless steel dispenser on a tile wall.

It appears to have two eyes (buttons, marked FREE) looking audience right, and the dispenser real looks like a mouth.

If you zoom in you can see that the thing in the dispenser tray is a box of menstrual pads

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Jeremy Kahn @trochee.dair-community.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/09/2025

My kid made this for me at camp He says "this is what a real #wug looks like, dad." #linguistics

A beaded keychain in the form of a lizard or gecko

But all the beads are small square letter-cubes.

It looks like a crossword puzzle origami-ed itself into a lizard

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Jeremy Kahn @trochee.dair-community.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/09/2025

Jobs at alignmentalignment.ai/jobs CAAAC is an open, dynamic, inclusive environment, where all perspectives are welcomed as long as you believe AGI will annihilate all humans in the next six months. We offer competitive salaries and generous […] [Original post on dair-community.social]

Center for the Alignment of AI Alignment Centers

Jobs

About our team

CAAAC is an open, dynamic, inclusive environment, where all perspectives are welcomed as long as you believe AGI will annihilate all humans in the next six months. We offer competitive salaries and generous benefits, including no performance management because we have no way to assess whether the work you do is at all useful.

We are currently actively hiring for the following roles:

(Page ends, because they're not actually hiring)

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Jeremy Kahn @trochee.dair-community.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/09/2025

This list of Unicode character name errata feels like back-matter for some SF novel www.unicode.org/notes/tn27 Via @quat

Screen capture

U+0F0A TIBETAN MARK BKA- SHOG YIG MGO

This character is used to indicate that a document is addressed to a superior (the "petition honorific"), but the Tibetan name actually indicates a superior addressing an inferior ("starting flourish for giving a command").
U+0F0B TIBETAN MARK INTERSYLLABIC TSHEG

The tsheg mark is not restricted to intersyllabic usage, and would have been better named Tibetan mark tsheg.
U+0F0C TIBETAN MARK DELIMITER TSHEG BSTAR

This character is not a delimiter, but is a non-breaking version of the tsheg mark (U+0F0B) that is used exclusively between the letter NGA (U+0F44) and the shad mark (U+0F0D)

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Jeremy Kahn @trochee.dair-community.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/08/2025

At least I know he comes to me for wisdom, when he hits the important questions of adolescence

An SMS conversation

Dad, who is the Looney Tunes character you were telling me about

Wat
Gotta give me more details than that

you know the rooster?
He says, I say, I say

Foghorn Leghorn!

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Jeremy Kahn @trochee.dair-community.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/08/2025

Oh HELL no this isn't me A friend saw this in a bookstore and sent it to me I'm gonna have to talk to Naomi Klein about dealing with pernicious doppelgangers

A book cover on a bookshelf in a shop

Supertitle
"A survival guide to our superpowered future"

Main title
Mastering AI

author
Jeremy Kahn

IT AIN'T ME, Y'ALL

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Jeremy Kahn @trochee.dair-community.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/08/2025

I sent this message to a recently departed-involuntarily work colleague It reads like the @mountain_goats lyrics, and I'm kinda proud of that

A Signal message

----
And all that is to say

I am getting out of here one day

And you're on my short list when I set something up on the outside
---
There's a single heart attached as a reaction

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Jeremy Kahn @trochee.dair-community.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/07/2025

Never really realized before, but Kubrick was pretty clearly a Klingon in shallow cover Via @AkaSci fosstodon.org/@AkaSci/1149194637586…

Director Stanley Kubrick on the set of the Warner Bros movie 'The Shining' in 1980.
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty

(Kubrick's prominent forehead is super obvious here, and he resembles a ST:TNG Klingon with slightly less forehead ridging.)

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Jeremy Kahn @trochee.dair-community.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/07/2025

Spouse always wins Words With Friends gets it.

[Words with Friends final score banner]

300 Jeremy
164 Dorothy

"Dorothy won the game"

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Jeremy Kahn @trochee.dair-community.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/07/2025

Out at The Gorge with my sweetie tonight

A warning sign saying "Moshing & Stage Diving is Not Advised"

In the background, THE GORGE amphitheater sign rises behind

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Jeremy Kahn @trochee.dair-community.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/07/2025

Haha, Gmail has gotten dumber I ordered a pizza (for takeout !) and Gmail offered to "track your packages"

Screen capture. [[[Things in brackets]]] are circled instead
------- ocred screenshot begins --------
Your Order Has Been Received

Inbox

Order from [[[Zeeks West Seattle]]]

Expected today

Order placed Estimate from Zeeks West Seattle

#

Order number

[[[Track your packages in mail]]] Google can show you updates from shipping carriers.

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Jeremy Kahn @trochee.dair-community.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/07/2025

Hanging out on #Alki Beach with my kid, who's ... sorta getting stood up on his first thing-that-looks-like-a-date (Long story, but a lot of it revolves around twelve year olds not communicating well with each other or their respective driving adults) #Seattle

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Jeremy Kahn @trochee.dair-community.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/07/2025

Preparing a Western hemisphere indigenous vegetable for a holiday that is problematic today. Distress flag seems right.

A circular steel colander in a steel sink, with a bunch of potatoes in it. The colors of the potatoes are assorted dark purple, light red, and a yellowish white

The same potatoes, arranged to look vaguely like the American flag upside down; the Distress flag.

The blue square is made of the dark purple potatoes, and the red and white stripes are made from red and white potatoes

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Jeremy Kahn @trochee.dair-community.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/06/2025

I found this magical but f*cked-up thing at Georgetown Music This is not what a "double bass" usually means

The body of a four string electric bass which seems to be attached to *another* four string electric bass pointing in the other direction

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Jeremy Kahn @trochee.dair-community.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/06/2025

I get a kick out of talking to experienced software engineers just after they have encountered ML research scientists for the first time

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Jeremy Kahn @trochee.dair-community.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/06/2025

For my next modern culture and media studies work, I'd like to use "THE SIMPLE NEW SOCIO-ECONOMICGEOPOLITICALBIO-HISTORICAL APPROACH" (TSR 1987) (The eighties were a very weird time, y'all.) (I found this in WCA #26, ZODIAC ATTACK)

$A yellowed page from a 1987 comic book Page reads (via Google OCR) gaz-ə-'ti(ə)r\n: THE SIMPLE NEW SOCIO-ECONOMICGEOPOLITICALBIO-HISTORICAL APPROACH TO D&D GAMEPLAY. Even if you've been to the Grand Duchy of Karameikos before, you probably didn't know their vampires could walk under the sun and that sheep are not the only things that are sheared ..Thanks to the Gazetteer, an exciting new con-cept in gaming aids, now there's nothing you won't know about the DUNGEONS & DRAGONS world. The Gazetteer is a fascinat-ing encyclopedia of knowledge. It lays out a complete histori-cal, economical, geographi-cal and sociological overview of each country in the D&D gaming sys-tem. Places you may have visited in the past but never knew much about. Dungeon Mas ters and players alike will now have access to a rich tapes-try of background material in this series, which will eventually cover every country in the D&D world. And each 64-page sourcebook includes a full-size four-color map of the surrounding territories. As well as several ready-to-play adventures for any character level. The Gazetteer is bound to revolutionize the way you play your DUNGEONS & DRAGONS game. It's history in the making. Available at most toy, hobby and bookstores. DUNGEONS & DRAGONS, D&D and the 15kogu are trademarks of TSR. Inc 1587 TSR, Inc. All Rights Reserved. GAZ I DUNGEONS & DRAGONS GAZETTEER OFFCUE GAME ACCESSORY The Grand Duchy of Karameikos$

The cover of West Coast Avengers #26
Subtitle ZODIAC ATTACK!

A man dressed in orange chainmail and a half cowl mask stands on a table? with legs spread apart in the Marvel power stance. In one hand he brandishes a vaguely Prince-symbol-shaped thing which is emitting rings of Kirby dots.

In the background, facing us, are silhouettes of various other supervillains (presumably zodiac) and in the foreground facing this guy and away from us are the assembled West Coast Avengers

Of note: iron Man is in his red and silver suit, which was a thing briefly in the late eighties.

Hawkeye and Mockingbird are here, in canon still married. Also present: Hank Pym, Wonder Man, Moon Knight, and Tigra

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Jeremy Kahn @trochee.dair-community.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/06/2025

I know I shouldn't still be using this curséd website but what is happening here with your lesson planning, Duo Employ humans to write QA validations to keep these questions from being this silly And stop using LLMs. Please.

A Duolingo puzzle page

The question reads
Choisis l'option qui veut dire « parfait »

[Pick the option that means "parfait"]

The words below are available for selection:
Un chien parfait. Je l'ai vu en ligne, papa.

[A perfect dog. I saw it on line, dad?…]

Both instances of the word "parfait" are circled in blue

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Jeremy Kahn @trochee.dair-community.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/05/2025

Halp there is an ewok sleeping on me how am I supposed to go to bed

A red/orange cavalier King Charles spaniel sleeps on his back on an adult's chest.

His ears are flopped out on both sides, and his snout is pointed straight up in the air with his eyes tight shut.

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Jeremy Kahn @trochee.dair-community.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/05/2025

At Elliott Bay Books to hear @emilymbender and @alex talk about their new book The AI Con. Let's go, friends!

A book on a stand in front of bookshelves and a microphone

The cover of the book reads
THE
AI
CON

Subtitle

How to fight big tech's hype and create the future we want

0186 18

Jeremy Kahn @trochee.dair-community.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/04/2025

This is giving me such schadenfreude/life HOW LONG HAS THIS GUY BEEN A POSTER

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias.bsky.social-7h
If people find my extremely tepid centrist takes to be "rage bait," I think that says more about them than about me.

George Pearkes @pearkes-10
Your posts are lazy, trolling rage bait and you offer nothing of value
so thank you for sparing us all. If I never heard your name again the rest of my life because you finally fell into deserved irrelevance it would be the greatest of blessings.

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias bsky.social-7h
Some of the big ideas I've been associated with in my career:
1. Supply and demand applies to housing
2. People like politicians who take popular positions
3. Police help prevent crime
4. The Orange Man is bad
5. China's large population matters a lot for power politics

Matthew Yglesias << [THIS IS THE FUNNIEST PART --@trochee]
@mattyglesias.bsky.social
I sincerely cannot think of a less provocative, less trolly thinker than Yglesias whose whole thing is mostly just to insist that obviously true things are in fact true.
April 13, 2025 1:34 PM

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Jeremy Kahn @trochee.dair-community.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/04/2025

At Elliott Bay Bookstore to hear @emilymbender interview Vauhini Vara about her new book. I'm kind of obsessed with this cover design, which puts suspiciously LLM-scented text in faint printing beside a bold title and cover image

A book cover, with the words

"Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age" by Vauhini Vara¹

¹ author of The Immortal King Rao, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize

The rest of the text on the cover smells like it was AI autocompleted

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Jeremy Kahn @trochee.dair-community.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/04/2025

I'm in the work chat, typing out a sociotech systems analysis "why the product team, the AI modeling team & the runtime engineering team always seem to miss each other" it involves a materialist analysis of conflicting incentive structures etc onto […] [Original post on dair-community.social]

Give the Anarchist a Cigarette
Chumbawamba

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Jeremy Kahn @trochee.dair-community.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/03/2025

[AI slop in asking for definitions] Doing a crossword puzzle (in English) and looked up COLL to check & got this trash "A noun that means destruction, injury, or violation" this is not in English at all: en.wiktionary.org/wiki/coll But! In […] [Original post on dair-community.social]

Al Overview

M-W

W +1

There are multiple matches for "coll", including a noun, a verb, and an island.

Noun

•

Coll: A noun that means destruction, injury, or violation

Related words

collateral, collect, collection, collective, collector, collegiate, colloquial, colloidal, and collyrium.

Show more

M-W

Merriam-Webster

https://www.merriam-webster.com

COLL- Definition & Meaning

The meaning of COLL- is glue. How to use coll- in a sentence.

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Jeremy Kahn @trochee.dair-community.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/03/2025

This is the answer I wanted but the AI decided that "eft" had to be capitalized because Electronic Funds Transfer Information retrieval is perceptibly worse than it was 15 years ago

What color is an EFT?

Eft (juvenile): Bright orange-red coloration with

small black dots scattered on the back and a row of larger, black-bordered orange spots on each side of the back. The larger spots resemble an eye, which is the meaning of their scientific name

"Notophthalmus".

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