Travis LaCroix, Fintan Mallory, and Sasha Luccioni. "Strategic polysemy in AI discourse: A philosophical analysis of language, hype, and power." In The 2026 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 2026: Abstract: This paper examines the strategic use of language in contemporary artificial intelligence (AI) discourse, focusing on the widespread adoption of metaphorical or colloquial […]
I was curious about the Unicode characters involved in the "shrug" text art: ̄\_(ツ)_/ ̄ so I ran it through charnames.pl:
Too Faced is a cosmetics company acquired by Estée Lauder in 2016. The name is obviously a pun, substituting too "to an excessive degree" for the two in two-faced "deceitful" — though too here apparently connects to the literal idea of a second face, more than to the idea of deceit or hypocrisy. A couple […]
I was struck yesterday by the term Melt-Up in a story about the stock market: "Tech Melt-Up Drives $3.5T Nasdaq 100 Gain in Four Days", Bloomberg 8/5/2026: A dramatic turnaround in technology stocks has powered a $3.5 trillion increase in the Nasdaq 100’s market capitalization in just four days, driven by strong earnings that have […]
This morning's question: I'm an ESL textbook editor in Korea, and a grammar dispute has come down to one question: is "What do you say that we get together tonight?" grammatical, with "that" included (vs. the more common zero-complementizer "What do you say we…")? My understanding is "that" is simply optional here, not ungrammatical.
Email from JK: My daughter remarked that on several occasions recently she has heard presumably college-educated people use the word “I’s”, in a sentence like "I just picked up Margaret and I’s cat from the vet." I'm guessing the reason for this jarring (to me) usage is that the sentence could be more logically parsed […]
According to a recent BoingBoing segment, Ballots for a special election in England's Clacton-by-Sea are the longest ever produced in U.K. electoral history despite¹ only one major party contesting the race. The footnote: 1. This is the journalist's despite, wherein the word implies disregard when there is in fact a blatant causal relationship.
The singularity may have arrived, but AI systems still can't label diagrams:
As you probably know, Emily Wilson wrote a critical review of Christopher Nolan's Odyssey movie, and Joyce Carol Oates posted a negative evaluation of Wilson's review, among lots of other (mass and social) media coverage. My favorite so far is today's SMBC:
Last December, Rob Pike got big mad at AI Village. Simon Willison covered the associated events and discussions.
I've recently wrestled several times with similarly frustrating Gmail searches, for recent tickets and the like: Impossible to put into words how useless Gmail search is. No wait, these guys did it! [image or embed] — Alex Selby-Boothroyd (@alexselbyb.bsky.social) July 28, 2026 at 2:22 PM I get the impression that these problems have multiplied since […]
Randoh Sallihall at unscramblerer.com sent an email offering his company's 2026 study of "America's most searched words" — what he sent is presented verbatim below.