blakestacey @ blakestacey @awful.systems

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Or, since we already know that it's insipid fashtech with the cortical impact of moonshine, we could... not do that. Instead of wasting carbon on a joke about failing to synthesize a joke, maybe pet a cat? Drink a hot cocoa? Sing along to the "oh oh oh"s in "Sweet Caroline"?

Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen slop as the 2025 Word of the Year. We define slop as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” All that stuff dumped on our screens, captured in just four letters: the English language came through again.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/word-of-the-year?2025-share

"Your mother shubscribed to makshimum, unbounded shcale last night, Trebek."

An academic sneer delivered through the arXiv-o-tube:

Large Language Models are useless for linguistics, as they are probabilistic models that require a vast amount of data to analyse externalized strings of words. In contrast, human language is underpinned by a mind-internal computational system that recursively generates hierarchical thought structures. The language system grows with minimal external input and can readily distinguish between real language and impossible languages.

John Scalzi:

I search my name on a regular basis, not only because I am an ego monster (although I try not to pretend that I’m not) but because it’s a good way for me to find reviews, end-of-the-year “best of” lists my book might be on, foreign publication release dates, and other information about my work that I might not otherwise see, and which is useful for me to keep tabs on. In one of those searches I found that Grok (the “AI” of X) attributed to one of my books (The Consuming Fire) a dedication I did not write; not only have I definitively never dedicated a book to the characters of Frozen, I also do not have multiple children, just the one.

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/13/ai-a-dedicated-fact-failing-machine-or-yet-another-reason-not-to-trust-it-for-anything/

There's a version animated in the style of the '70s Star Trek cartoon that makes it legitimately great.

Purdue and Google recently expanded their strategic partnership, emphasizing the importance of public-private partnerships that are essential to accelerating innovation in AI.

https://www.purdue.edu/ai/

Translation: somebody's getting paid off

🎶 Money makes the world go 'round 🎶

This is what you get when you take Star Trek episodes where the writers had run out of ideas and watch them from the bottom of a K-hole.

And just think, he's been further pickling his brain for half a decade since then.

I miss n-gate but that was what, 8 years ago.

Only four (August 2021).

Do you remember where Piper said that? Somewhere on Xitter? It sounds familiar. (Edit: here it is. I remembered the "James Damore was egregiously wronged" part but had mostly forgotten the rest.)

Damore's memo blew up in 2017; ScienceBlogs was a shambling husk after most of the serious writers left in 2010, when management decided to offer Pepsi an advertorial disguised as a "nutrition" blog. (I left too, but I wasn't a serious writer by any stretch of the imagination.) That capped off a long trend of the Seed Media Group management not listening to the bloggers, even though SB was the best thing they had going for them. Complaints on the back-channel forum were downplayed or ignored, etc. SB puttered along under National Geographic's ownership through the Damore era, but the writing was on the wall in 2010 that the site couldn't last.

The community that had formerly focused on SB got another nasty knock a few years later, when sexual harassment allegations came out about Bora Zivkovic, one of the prime organizers of the ScienceOnline conferences. That was a real betrayal that wounded a lot of people, and the organization only held on for one more conference before going belly-up.

"Skepticism" that acts to cover for bad science that hurts people deserves a retraction, not a disapproving shrug.

More than anything else, it was the skeptic movement’s decision that “no actually, being sexist is more fun” which drove out everyone interested in doing more than relitigating Bigfoot.

The sewer-deep Islamophobia from "luminaries" like Richard Dawkins didn't help, either. One thing that is perhaps easy to miss now in looking back at "New Atheism" is how much it inhabited a shortly after 9/11 cultural space.

And regarding the point above that the analysis needs "Explicit acknowledgement of the role of capitalism and colonialist tendencies in corrupting subcultures", the term New Atheism itself was a branding gimmick imposed from outside (codified by and perhaps first used in Wired magazine, of all places, AFAIK). The people who were already "in" it looked around and asked, "OK, what exactly is new about it?". As far as actual arguments went, there was little if anything that Paul Dirac had not already said in 1927.

Shermer is a "sociopath" in the GMS taxonomy. But he rose to prominence in the '90s, co-founding the Skeptics Society in 1991 and publishing Why People Believe Weird Things in 1997. He was considered the old guard by those who came to skepticism/atheism via the '00s blogosphere, who were some combination of "geeks" and "mops". So, there's not really the linear order to it that the neat and tidy GMS story calls for.

I know both Watson and Myers. Neither of them were interested in "being tastemakers"; both of them stood on the right side of trying to make the skeptic/atheist spaces less of a sexist waste dump, and both of them caught hell for it. Myers was the one who blew the lid off Shermer's history of sexual harassment (and got blackballed from a lot of skeptics' events because of it). He was also part of the effort to make Atheism Plus a thing, and Watson was in favor too.* Carrier sued Myers and others after being removed from FreethoughtBlogs on what we'd now call #MeToo reasons. The rage tsunami directed at Watson for saying "guys, don't do that" was basically the trial run for GamerGate. More than anything else, it was the skeptic movement's decision that "no actually, being sexist is more fun" which drove out everyone interested in doing more than relitigating Bigfoot.

Harriet Hall got into trouble for just-asking-questions transphobia.

*The McCreight mentioned in that blog post later chose the name "Jey" and uses they/he pronouns.

The best I ever saw was a reply to a news story to the effect of, "If I were ever invited swimming in the Murderkill River, I would just not go."

(This might be the original. Then again, it might not.)

J. Mijin Cha writes:

My colleague reviewed a paper for the journal Climate and discovered it has been written by AI (citations that didn’t exist). Not only did the journal keep the paper, they asked her to re-review it. We are so cooked.

Climate is an MDPI journal. Finland's journal-ranking service downgraded Climate to zero status.

I would simply not name my airplane company "Boom".

Reported for being too soon

:-P

"How do you keep yourself from going insane?"

"I tell myself I'm a character from a book who comes to life and is also a robot!" (Hubert Farnsworth giggle)

Also discussed in last week's Stubsack.

This was the second fork I heard of, the first being "clbre" ("calibre" without the a and i):

https://github.com/grimthorpe/clbre