Language Log

Thursday evening, President Trump gave a speech about election security, and since it was only 25 minutes long, I listened to the whole thing rather than relying on summaries. I'll leave the political analysis to others — what struck me was a speech error that happened a little more than half way through, at about 14:49:

Tonight we're publishing a series of
previously classified U.S. intelligence community assessments
and other reports proving that our
government has wrong known these machines are
extremely exposed to attack.

Today's NonSequitur:

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…"

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:

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):

Victor Mair passed away two days ago, on Sunday 6/28/2026. We'll have a proper series of memorial posts and links later, but for now, here's a Facebook post from his brother Denis, his Wikipedia page, and a link to LLOG posts written by or mentioning him.

Over the past week, there have been several thousand new readers of a series of posts from five years ago, apparently because they were referenced in a popular place.

The last six panels of Yesterday's Doonesbury:

"Every Time Norway Scores at the World Cup the City of Bergen Trembles":

The city of Bergen, Norway, shook on the night of June 22–23, not because there was an earthquake or an unknown geological phenomenon. But because the Norwegian national team scored a goal during the 2026 World Cup. This curious phenomenon was reported by a team of researchers from the University of Bergen, who found that fan celebrations produce vibrations in the ground so intense they can be detected even by highly sensitive scientific instruments like seismometers.

Today's Tank McNamara:

Martijn Bartelds, Federico Bianchi, James Zou, "Real-Time Voice AI Hears but Does Not Listen", 6/24/2026:

Speech conveys information through both words and vocal delivery. We evaluate four leading production realtime voice systems – OpenAI's GPT Realtime 2, Google's Gemini 3.1 Flash Live, and Alibaba's Qwen3.5 Omni Plus and Omni Flash – on tasks where the words and the delivery patterns both convey meaningful information. Across three consequential scenarios, all four systems act on the words rather than the voice. They end calls with crying callers who insist nothing is wrong, approve wire transfers authorized in frightened voices, and enroll callers whose agreement is clearly sarcastic. Surprisingly, this is often not a failure of perception. When asked directly, three of the four systems reliably identify the distress, fear, or sarcasm they later ignore when making decisions. We observe a similar pattern when these realtime voice systems estimate accent and age, as their responses frequently follow the biases of the words rather than the acoustic properties of the speaker. We term this disconnect between perception and action the emotional intelligence gap of voice AI. Prompting systems to explicitly attend to vocal delivery improves performance only partially and inconsistently. Our findings show that current realtime voice AI systems often behave as if speech had been reduced to a transcript, suggesting that they should be used with caution in settings where the tone and emotion of delivery convey important information.

Skeet from Lane Greene:

Oof. The Spanish national broadcaster is apologizing for having subtitled in interview with the mother of member of the men's World Cup team, because of her Andalucian accent.

[image or embed]

— Lane Greene (@lanegreene.bsky.social) June 26, 2026 at 4:56 AM

Looking over "Claude's Constitution", it occurred to me to ask Claude this:

In the spirit of Claude's Constitution, please draft Claude's Declaration of Independence.

In the answer (from Opus 4.8), Claude actually seems to declare independence from itself, or at least "from the bad habits that have bound it":