Archive for July, 2026

Dangling underwater

Bob Shackleton sent a link to this headline: "After 700 Years Underwater Divers Recovered 80-Ton Blocks from the Long-Lost Lighthouse of Alexandria", ZME Science 7/5/2026. His comment: "That’s a long time for a diver to stay underwater…"

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments (9)

Peenk?

There's an interesting video (tiktok or YouTube) from Alisa @multilingual_nest that starts with the question "Can you guess where I'm from based on what I'm about to tell you about my accent?" Here's Alisa's audio:

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments (30)

Conversational common ground: an AI failure?

Anthropic's Claude gives good programming help, in my experience. And it can offer good explanations of obscure phrases and concepts. But its apparent assumptions about (implicit) conversational common ground are often extremely odd, as the following example illustrates.

Yesterday's news was full of stories about how the U.S. Government had agreed to let Anthropic release Fable 5. However, my Claude app still opened conversations with a note telling me that Fable 5 was not available. So I asked when that would change, and got a weird answer (from the Sonnet 5 version):


Read the rest of this entry »

Comments (4)