(no subject)
Thursday, December 4th, 2025 06:18 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
astronomypicofday_feed
What would it look like to plunge into a monster black hole?
astronomypicofday_feed
How to Minoritize a National Language.
Wednesday, December 3rd, 2025 08:16 pmlanguagehat_feedJosie Giles has written what rozele, who sent me the link, calls “a nice punchy piece… among other things giving a critical counterpoint to the enthusiasm about the Scottish Languages”; it’s called Twenty Ways to Minoritise a National Language:
Yesterday, St Andrew’s Day – a date carefully chosen to signal national pride – the Scottish Languages Act came into force, enshrining Gaelic and Scots alongside each other as official national languages. It is a chiefly symbolic act, with remarkably few concrete measures to ensure that these national languages recover and thrive, and even less financial commitment. Despite consistent and well-researched campaigning from groups like Misneachd, communities where Gaelic is actually still the vernacular continue to lack strong statutory support, and there’s no consideration of language heartland policy for Scots at all. Without integrating language planning into socioeconomic policy – that is, without considering how the rural housing crisis or the lack of jobs within language communities shapes whether or not languages survive – I don’t really see a future for Scotland’s new national languages except their slow withering into national symbols.
Here in Edinburgh, in an urban cultural centre, it’s remarkable how little Gaelic and Scots I encounter. Gaelic exists as a small subculture, unheard unless you deliberately seek it out, which needs constant effort and forging of personal connections. Scots exists mostly as the occasional word dropped into well-spoken conversation. At arts festivals and centres, which are my main employers, they’re almost never spoken, and when they’re on the stage there’s only one or two special events, rarely well-attended. The places where these languages are still used fluidly and (for the most part) unselfconsciously are all distant geographically and economically from the cultural core: Shetland, Niddrie, Uist, Ayr.
And yet everyone I speak to in Scottish culture is enthusiastic about the survival of minority languages. “I’d love to learn Gaelic,” I hear once a week from someone who has had their whole life to start. When the sea-fog rolls in over Arthur’s Seat, we rush to name it haar. The era of deliberate and legislated language extermination as a matter of national policy in these islands has passed – we’ve now entered an era of managed decline, where everyone thinks that minority languages are important and fewer and fewer people use them. As I’ve been thinking about this, I’ve been collecting contemporary strategies of minoritisation, the ways we work to ensure that the languages are symbols rather than tools, ideas rather than communities. Here are twenty of them.
The first is Put your language in italics (“We don’t think in italics”); the section closest to my heart is:
2. Don’t hire a proofreader
3. Don’t check your translations with a fluent speakerI recently read an othertwise very good anthology of Scottish nature writing in which many contributors were proud to talk about (italicised) Gaelic words and for which no-one had hired a Gaelic proofreader. Many words were misspelled, and more were mistranslated. Here, in a nature writing context, Gaelic stood in for ecological authenticity, for a connection to land, but the lack of care with which the language was treated belied the project. It was sufficient for the project of the book that Gaelic be present but not necessary that it be Gaelic.
I also liked the end:
19. Call any thorough use of the language fake, unnecessary or purist
Once a review complained about the way I spelled arkaeolojist. But in English we don’t spell it archéologue, arqueóloga or αρχαιολόγος.
20. Be a purist
The only thing more dispiriting than your language being ignored by everyone else is arguing amongst ourselves about whether or not we’re using our language right. What matters is using it.
It’s well worth reading the whole thing; rozele says “a lot of it’s very familiar to me from yidishland; it’s all connected to many Hattic conversations,” which it certainly is.
Recent reads (12.03.25)
Wednesday, December 3rd, 2025 12:00 pmslacktivist_feedFreelance A.I. scammers, Appalachian Mardi Gras, getting Big in Japan, and a creepy archaeological mystery.
(no subject)
Wednesday, December 3rd, 2025 05:45 amastronomypicofday_feed
What's happening in the center of nearby spiral galaxy M77?
A Bilingual Gumbaynggirr School.
Tuesday, December 2nd, 2025 08:41 pmlanguagehat_feedElla Archibald-Binge reports for the Guardian on an encouraging development in Australia:
There are several words for “morning” in the Gumbaynggirr language but bambuuda is Anne-Marie Briggs’ favourite. Drawn from bamburr, meaning soft and gentle, it speaks to the quiet moments before sunrise, literally translating as “in the softness”. “Doesn’t it just melt your heart?” says Anne-Marie, sitting at the kitchen table of the Coffs Harbour home she shares with her 12-year-old son, Darruy.
The pair have found an easy morning routine since moving to Coffs three years ago. On a bright spring day Darruy wolfs down his Weet-Bix before strolling across the road to the small independent school that has been making headlines for its unique approach to education on the New South Wales mid-north coast.
When the bell rings, the students converge on a shady sandpit. They stomp bare feet to the click of clapsticks, singing and dancing as the sun gathers warmth. By 9.30am, barely a word of English has been spoken. This is how each day begins at the Gumbaynggirr Giingana Freedom school, the state’s first Aboriginal bilingual school. GGFS opened three years ago amid a broader push to breathe new life into the critically endangered Gumbaynggirr language.
As Indigenous languages decline, Gumbaynggirr is experiencing a resurgence. What began with a handful of elders pooling their pensions to record a few words in the 1980s has led to its revival, to the point where it is once again being spoken in homes and learned by babies.
On a busy Monday morning, Clark Webb, a Gumbaynggirr and Bundjalung man, is treading the school verandas barefoot, his wavy dark hair pushed back by a thick headband. His relaxed demeanour belies the fierce ambition that saw him spearhead the school’s formation as the chief executive of the Bularri Muurlay Nyanggan Aboriginal Corporation.
The corporation wanted to start a bilingual school partly because its members were seeing the education system “fail miserably”, Webb says. Aboriginal families were being blamed for gaps in attendance and academic achievement, he says, rather than schools looking inward at their own deficiencies. […]
Dozens of NSW schools teach Aboriginal languages but this is the state’s only bilingual school. GGFS is open only to Indigenous students from kindergarten to year 8. They attend at least one language class every day and have weekly lessons on country. Some advanced classes are taught almost exclusively in Gumbaynggirr. […]
GGFS opened with 15 students in 2022. Next year there are 95 students enrolled and more on a waitlist. Its goal is to become fully immersive, following the Māori schools model in New Zealand. But the venture has not been without challenges. The first was finding qualified teachers who can speak Gumbaynggirr, which the school solved by finding experts in one field then training them in the other.
Webb says detractors tell him there’s no economic benefit to learning a “dead” language – the kids are better off studying Mandarin or French. They also ask if the children have a sufficient grasp of English. But results speak for themselves. Attendance levels are 88.5%, just above the average rate for all students nationally and far exceeding the national Indigenous attendance rate of 76.9%. […]
One of Muurrbay’s first graduates, Michael “Micklo” Jarrett, is training the next crop of Gumbaynggirr teachers as an Aboriginal language and culture officer at the NSW education department. “When we first started, one of the biggest problems was not enough educators to go into all the schools,” he says. “Now our problem is we haven’t got enough schools for all the educators.”
Jarrett says the quest to save Gumbaynggirr is unending. There are always new words to add to the dictionary: mobile phone (muya-banggi – breath fly); computer (marlawgay-bangarr – lightning brain) and floor (jali-julu – down side), to name a few.
(Gumbaynggirr was mentioned here back in 2006.) There’s lots more at the link, including personal stories and photos; I love this kind of news. Thanks, Bathrobe!
And another encouraging story, this one out of Tasmania: Calla Wahlquist’s The labour of love breathing life back into palawa kani – the lost language of Lutruwita:
[Daisy] Allan frequently speaks in the Tasmanian Aboriginal language, palawa kani, to other TAC staff. It’s part of her job as a language worker and, after 20 years of studying it, she is confident and fluent.
The biggest hurdle when she began learning the language was finding other speakers. Now they’re plentiful. There are language modules for every stage of life, starting with songs to sing a baby in utero. Schoolchildren attend weekly lessons. Resources are available to all Palawa people.
Unlike Allan’s generation and those of her parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, Palawa children today are born knowing the sounds of their language. They are the first to do so for 150 years.
It was sent to me by Andrew Tanner, a (non-indigenous) Tasmanian linguist based in Melbourne now, involved in similar projects with Victorian languages. Thanks, Andrew!
There’s a stain on my notebook where your coffee cup was
Tuesday, December 2nd, 2025 05:55 pmslacktivist_feed"All that happened is the range of options for other people expanded and he perceived that as persecution, as his choice having been taken away."
Like Social Media, AI Requires Difficult Choices
Tuesday, December 2nd, 2025 12:03 pmbruce_schneier_feedIn his 2020 book, “Future Politics,” British barrister Jamie Susskind wrote that the dominant question of the 20th century was “How much of our collective life should be determined by the state, and what should be left to the market and civil society?” But in the early decades of this century, Susskind suggested that we face a different question: “To what extent should our lives be directed and controlled by powerful digital systems—and on what terms?”
Artificial intelligence (AI) forces us to confront this question. It is a technology that in theory amplifies the power of its users: A manager, marketer, political campaigner, or opinionated internet user can utter a single instruction, and see their message—whatever it is—instantly written, personalized, and propagated via email, text, social, or other channels to thousands of people within their organization, or millions around the world. It also allows us to individualize solicitations for political donations, elaborate a grievance into a well-articulated policy position, or tailor a persuasive argument to an identity group, or even a single person.
But even as it offers endless potential, AI is a technology that—like the state—gives others new powers to control our lives and experiences.
We’ve seen this out play before. Social media companies made the same sorts of promises 20 years ago: instant communication enabling individual connection at massive scale. Fast-forward to today, and the technology that was supposed to give individuals power and influence ended up controlling us. Today social media dominates our time and attention, assaults our mental health, and—together with its Big Tech parent companies—captures an unfathomable fraction of our economy, even as it poses risks to our democracy.
The novelty and potential of social media was as present then as it is for AI now, which should make us wary of its potential harmful consequences for society and democracy. We legitimately fear artificial voices and manufactured reality drowning out real people on the internet: on social media, in chat rooms, everywhere we might try to connect with others.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Alongside these evident risks, AI has legitimate potential to transform both everyday life and democratic governance in positive ways. In our new book, “Rewiring Democracy,” we chronicle examples from around the globe of democracies using AI to make regulatory enforcement more efficient, catch tax cheats, speed up judicial processes, synthesize input from constituents to legislatures, and much more. Because democracies distribute power across institutions and individuals, making the right choices about how to shape AI and its uses requires both clarity and alignment across society.
To that end, we spotlight four pivotal choices facing private and public actors. These choices are similar to those we faced during the advent of social media, and in retrospect we can see that we made the wrong decisions back then. Our collective choices in 2025—choices made by tech CEOs, politicians, and citizens alike—may dictate whether AI is applied to positive and pro-democratic, or harmful and civically destructive, ends.
A Choice for the Executive and the Judiciary: Playing by the Rules
The Federal Election Commission (FEC) calls it fraud when a candidate hires an actor to impersonate their opponent. More recently, they had to decide whether doing the same thing with an AI deepfake makes it okay. (They concluded it does not.) Although in this case the FEC made the right decision, this is just one example of how AIs could skirt laws that govern people.
Likewise, courts are having to decide if and when it is okay for an AI to reuse creative materials without compensation or attribution, which might constitute plagiarism or copyright infringement if carried out by a human. (The court outcomes so far are mixed.) Courts are also adjudicating whether corporations are responsible for upholding promises made by AI customer service representatives. (In the case of Air Canada, the answer was yes, and insurers have started covering the liability.)
Social media companies faced many of the same hazards decades ago and have largely been shielded by the combination of Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1994 and the safe harbor offered by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. Even in the absence of congressional action to strengthen or add rigor to this law, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Supreme Court could take action to enhance its effects and to clarify which humans are responsible when technology is used, in effect, to bypass existing law.
A Choice for Congress: Privacy
As AI-enabled products increasingly ask Americans to share yet more of their personal information—their “context“—to use digital services like personal assistants, safeguarding the interests of the American consumer should be a bipartisan cause in Congress.
It has been nearly 10 years since Europe adopted comprehensive data privacy regulation. Today, American companies exert massive efforts to limit data collection, acquire consent for use of data, and hold it confidential under significant financial penalties—but only for their customers and users in the EU.
Regardless, a decade later the U.S. has still failed to make progress on any serious attempts at comprehensive federal privacy legislation written for the 21st century, and there are precious few data privacy protections that apply to narrow slices of the economy and population. This inaction comes in spite of scandal after scandal regarding Big Tech corporations’ irresponsible and harmful use of our personal data: Oracle’s data profiling, Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, Google ignoring data privacy opt-out requests, and many more.
Privacy is just one side of the obligations AI companies should have with respect to our data; the other side is portability—that is, the ability for individuals to choose to migrate and share their data between consumer tools and technology systems. To the extent that knowing our personal context really does enable better and more personalized AI services, it’s critical that consumers have the ability to extract and migrate their personal context between AI solutions. Consumers should own their own data, and with that ownership should come explicit control over who and what platforms it is shared with, as well as withheld from. Regulators could mandate this interoperability. Otherwise, users are locked in and lack freedom of choice between competing AI solutions—much like the time invested to build a following on a social network has locked many users to those platforms.
A Choice for States: Taxing AI Companies
It has become increasingly clear that social media is not a town square in the utopian sense of an open and protected public forum where political ideas are distributed and debated in good faith. If anything, social media has coarsened and degraded our public discourse. Meanwhile, the sole act of Congress designed to substantially reign in the social and political effects of social media platforms—the TikTok ban, which aimed to protect the American public from Chinese influence and data collection, citing it as a national security threat—is one it seems to no longer even acknowledge.
While Congress has waffled, regulation in the U.S. is happening at the state level. Several states have limited children’s and teens’ access to social media. With Congress having rejected—for now—a threatened federal moratorium on state-level regulation of AI, California passed a new slate of AI regulations after mollifying a lobbying onslaught from industry opponents. Perhaps most interesting, Maryland has recently become the first in the nation to levy taxes on digital advertising platform companies.
States now face a choice of whether to apply a similar reparative tax to AI companies to recapture a fraction of the costs they externalize on the public to fund affected public services. State legislators concerned with the potential loss of jobs, cheating in schools, and harm to those with mental health concerns caused by AI have options to combat it. They could extract the funding needed to mitigate these harms to support public services—strengthening job training programs and public employment, public schools, public health services, even public media and technology.
A Choice for All of Us: What Products Do We Use, and How?
A pivotal moment in the social media timeline occurred in 2006, when Facebook opened its service to the public after years of catering to students of select universities. Millions quickly signed up for a free service where the only source of monetization was the extraction of their attention and personal data.
Today, about half of Americans are daily users of AI, mostly via free products from Facebook’s parent company Meta and a handful of other familiar Big Tech giants and venture-backed tech firms such as Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic—with every incentive to follow the same path as the social platforms.
But now, as then, there are alternatives. Some nonprofit initiatives are building open-source AI tools that have transparent foundations and can be run locally and under users’ control, like AllenAI and EleutherAI. Some governments, like Singapore, Indonesia, and Switzerland, are building public alternatives to corporate AI that don’t suffer from the perverse incentives introduced by the profit motive of private entities.
Just as social media users have faced platform choices with a range of value propositions and ideological valences—as diverse as X, Bluesky, and Mastodon—the same will increasingly be true of AI. Those of us who use AI products in our everyday lives as people, workers, and citizens may not have the same power as judges, lawmakers, and state officials. But we can play a small role in influencing the broader AI ecosystem by demonstrating interest in and usage of these alternatives to Big AI. If you’re a regular user of commercial AI apps, consider trying the free-to-use service for Switzerland’s public Apertus model.
None of these choices are really new. They were all present almost 20 years ago, as social media moved from niche to mainstream. They were all policy debates we did not have, choosing instead to view these technologies through rose-colored glasses. Today, though, we can choose a different path and realize a different future. It is critical that we intentionally navigate a path to a positive future for societal use of AI—before the consolidation of power renders it too late to do so.
This post was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in Lawfare.
(no subject)
Tuesday, December 2nd, 2025 06:09 amastronomypicofday_feed
How typical is our Solar System?
Snifty.
Monday, December 1st, 2025 08:48 pmlanguagehat_feedEtymonline introduces me to a redolent word heretofore unknown to me:
”
SNIFTY was on etymonline’s list. The list is a file of hundreds of words and phrases that want more research. Snifty. It didn’t even have a squib entry on the site. But it led a splendid steeplechase. The Century Dictionary entry (above) turned out to be only the least third of it and the wrong end.
Snifty barked once and sprouted three heads, bounded through a thicket of nicknames in old newspapers, and wrapped itself around nifty. Then the blatant beast head-faked toward Scotland and doubled back to that impenetrable Germanic SN- forest. By this time the editors were trying to decide if we were looking at one word or two, or three, or something somehow in between.
Coincidentally a Reddit thread had got me curious about snooty/snotty. Snotty/snooty like nifty/snifty presents itself as more than one word, not quite two. And it goes to ground in that same SN- forest, the dunkle Tannen of pre-literate Germanic. The words taunt as they plunge, with grins suggestive of something in language deeper and wilder than we moderns guess. Something not comprehended in our tone-deaf train of “froms.” […]
Here’s how etymonline described [nifty]: “A slang word of uncertain origin, perhaps originating in California (used in the east by 1867) as more or less a deformed clip of magnificent. Bret Harte (1868) wrote that it was a shortened, altered form of Magnificat.” Looking at the new lay of the evidence, after the “snifty” hunt, nifty might turn out to be a clip of snifty. Imagine “that’s snifty” misheard, mis-divided. The scientifically accurate DNA of the word nifty in that event would not touch magnificent.
There follows much more speculation and thoughts about “picture-charts of etymologies,” and it ends with some personal ads, including one from Joe to Kitty saying “Send your ‘snifty’ friend a note.” Fun stuff. Oh, and if you’re curious about what the OED has for these words, it says snifty is from a verb snift ‘to sniff’ and nifty is “Of unknown origin.” (Thanks, Nick!)
Rules and notes for a Christmas playlist, revisited
Monday, December 1st, 2025 05:21 pmslacktivist_feedThis post is an annual tradition here because, as a retail worker, it helps me to exorcise the hours of Christmas music now echoing in my brain.
Banning VPNs
Monday, December 1st, 2025 12:59 pmbruce_schneier_feedThis is crazy. Lawmakers in several US states are contemplating banning VPNs, because…think of the children!
As of this writing, Wisconsin lawmakers are escalating their war on privacy by targeting VPNs in the name of “protecting children” in A.B. 105/S.B. 130. It’s an age verification bill that requires all websites distributing material that could conceivably be deemed “sexual content” to both implement an age verification system and also to block the access of users connected via VPN. The bill seeks to broadly expand the definition of materials that are “harmful to minors” beyond the type of speech that states can prohibit minors from accessing potentially encompassing things like depictions and discussions of human anatomy, sexuality, and reproduction.
The EFF link explains why this is a terrible idea.
(no subject)
Monday, December 1st, 2025 06:29 amastronomypicofday_feed
If you could stand on Titan -- what would you see?
it's picked by the veteran
Sunday, November 30th, 2025 09:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
musesfoolMeant to post this earlier, but got distracted, but I'm back now! November 2025 recs update:
unfitforsociety has been updated for November 2025 with 11 recs in 4 fandoms:
* 7 Batfamily, 1 Batfamily/Criminal Minds crossover
* 1 The Bear, 1 Star Wars, and 1 Stranger Things
*
I also made a cute little chocolate cake with chocolate ermine frosting (pic). I'm happy with how it came out. It's just enough cake for 1 person for like 5 days (refrigerated).
*
Stranger Things, season 5, episodes 1 - 4!
( spoilers )
I think this "drop 4 episodes, then do another 2-3 episodes 2 more times" is the worst of all possible distribution patterns, but I guess Netflix will never do a weekly series, which I can honestly say after years of binge-watching seems preferable to me. But at least it's all within a month instead of half in August and half in November or whatever. As much as I dislike the amount of time it's taken for them to put out each season, I am still enjoying the show and want to see how it all wraps up.
*
unfitforsociety has been updated for November 2025 with 11 recs in 4 fandoms:* 7 Batfamily, 1 Batfamily/Criminal Minds crossover
* 1 The Bear, 1 Star Wars, and 1 Stranger Things
*
I also made a cute little chocolate cake with chocolate ermine frosting (pic). I'm happy with how it came out. It's just enough cake for 1 person for like 5 days (refrigerated).
*
Stranger Things, season 5, episodes 1 - 4!
( spoilers )
I think this "drop 4 episodes, then do another 2-3 episodes 2 more times" is the worst of all possible distribution patterns, but I guess Netflix will never do a weekly series, which I can honestly say after years of binge-watching seems preferable to me. But at least it's all within a month instead of half in August and half in November or whatever. As much as I dislike the amount of time it's taken for them to put out each season, I am still enjoying the show and want to see how it all wraps up.
*
A Glimpse of History in Benin City
Monday, December 1st, 2025 12:00 amearthobservatory_iod_feed
The ancient walls, ramparts, and ditches that wind through this Nigerian city are the longest known earthworks of the pre-mechanical era.
Close et ha-Door.
Sunday, November 30th, 2025 08:43 pmlanguagehat_feedAnother interesting post by Anatoly Vorobey at Avva (again, I translate from his Russian); he shows a shop sign that says in Hebrew “Air conditioning / Please close the door” and says:
But the phrase ‘to close the door’ lacks the definite article ha and the direct object particle et: instead of “lisgor et hadelet,” it’s written “lisgor delet.” The effect is a bit comical, difficult to convey in Russian; it’s as if someone wrote, “We have air conditioning; please close a door somewhere.” Or if in English it was “Air conditioning inside, please close a door.” The sign was probably written by “Russians” [i.e., Russian immigrants to Israel].
This particle et is a strange thing; you can omit it (but leave the definite article) and then it looks sort of like high style: “na lisgor hadelet.” I searched the Hebrew Language Academy website and found an interesting note about it: it seems it’s not entirely clear why in Biblical Hebrew this particle is sometimes absent before an object with a definite article. And David Ben-Gurion, the founding father and first prime minister of modern Israel, couldn’t stand it, considered it harmful, and deliberately didn’t use it in writing.
But he failed to break the established et ha- tradition, and people generally continue to use et even more than in the past (for example, in phrases like “I have [something]”). And they usually ask visitors to close et ha-door. Not like in this sign.
I find that very intriguing, and I hope Hatters with more Hebrew than I will have things to say about it.
Take up wickedness again
Sunday, November 30th, 2025 12:00 pmslacktivist_feed"For a starter, I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog."
Look! I remembered to post before December started this year!
Sunday, November 30th, 2025 02:42 am![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png){kind=small}
denise posting in ![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png){kind=small}
dw_newsHello, friends! It's about to be December again, and you know what that means: the fact I am posting this actually before December 1 means karzilla reminded me about the existence of linear time again. Wait, no -- well, yes, but also -- okay, look, let me back up and start again: it's almost December, and that means it's time for our annual December holiday points bonus.
The standard explanation: For the entire month of December, all orders made in the Shop of points and paid time, either for you or as a gift for a friend, will have 10% of your completed cart total sent to you in points when you finish the transaction. For instance, if you buy an order of 12 months of paid time for $35 (350 points), you'll get 35 points when the order is complete, to use on a future purchase.
( The fine print and much more behind this cut! )
Thank you, in short, for being the best possible users any social media site could possibly ever hope for. I'm probably in danger of crossing the Sappiness Line if I haven't already, but you all make everything worth it.
On behalf of Mark, Jen, Robby, and our team of awesome volunteers, and to each and every one of you, whether you've been with us on this wild ride since the beginning or just signed up last week, I'm wishing you all a very happy set of end-of-year holidays, whichever ones you celebrate, and hoping for all of you that your 2026 is full of kindness, determination, empathy, and a hell of a lot more luck than we've all had lately. Let's go.
karzilla reminded me about the existence of linear time again. Wait, no -- well, yes, but also -- okay, look, let me back up and start again: it's almost December, and that means it's time for our annual December holiday points bonus.The standard explanation: For the entire month of December, all orders made in the Shop of points and paid time, either for you or as a gift for a friend, will have 10% of your completed cart total sent to you in points when you finish the transaction. For instance, if you buy an order of 12 months of paid time for $35 (350 points), you'll get 35 points when the order is complete, to use on a future purchase.
( The fine print and much more behind this cut! )
Thank you, in short, for being the best possible users any social media site could possibly ever hope for. I'm probably in danger of crossing the Sappiness Line if I haven't already, but you all make everything worth it.
On behalf of Mark, Jen, Robby, and our team of awesome volunteers, and to each and every one of you, whether you've been with us on this wild ride since the beginning or just signed up last week, I'm wishing you all a very happy set of end-of-year holidays, whichever ones you celebrate, and hoping for all of you that your 2026 is full of kindness, determination, empathy, and a hell of a lot more luck than we've all had lately. Let's go.
AI and Handwriting Recognition.
Saturday, November 29th, 2025 09:58 pmlanguagehat_feedAs a card-carrying AI hater, I feel it my duty to point out when it’s actually useful, and Dan Cohen presents such a case:
“All goes in the usual monotonous way.” That is the depressed sigh of George Boole in a letter to his sister Maryann in 1850. It was the spark for my book Equations from God: Pure Mathematics and Victorian Faith. Boole, the English mathematician who gave us the logic at the heart of the digital device you are reading this on, was teaching in Cork, Ireland at the time. On a cold December day, he wrote to Maryann about his feelings of profound loneliness. In a city that was on edge from religious strife and famine, he played piano at home to an empty room, and took long walks by himself. At the end of the day, he retreated to his equations, which seemed to transcend the petty differences of humanity.
But before developing my thesis about the fervent emotions behind Boole’s seemingly cold mathematical logic, I first had to read his damn handwriting. Talk about monotony! There were hundreds of letters and notebooks in his drifty scrawl. In retrospect, Boole’s handwriting is actually not that bad; I’ve encountered far worse since reading his in Cork. And it helped that I had taken a brief course on paleography, the art of deciphering handwritten historical documents. But it would have saved me a lot of time getting to the interesting interpretive phase of my research if a computer could have converted his handwriting into machine-readable text, as it already could for typeset text through a process called optical character recognition (OCR).
Since I wrote that book, university and industry labs have been trying to solve the incredibly difficult problem of handwritten text recognition (HTR). OCR quickly approached 99% accuracy for digitized books, whereas even the best HTR systems struggled to reach 80% — two incorrect words out of every ten. The issue is obvious: unlike the rigorous composition of books, handwriting is highly variable by author, and words are often indeterminate and irregularly arranged on a page.
He uses George’s letter to Maryann as a test, which most approaches fail; then he hits the jackpot:
They have gotten incrementally better over the past three years, but I was frankly stunned when I put the letter into Gemini 3 Pro this week and asked it to have a go at the transcription […] Gemini transcribed the letter perfectly: it figured out that the right side is the beginning of the letter, not the left (the letter actually continues on the other side of the paper, which accounts for the discontinuity between the two sides we are viewing); it left off the periods where Boole also (oddly) omitted this punctuation; and it includes a self-reflective analysis of where it might be wrong and provides alternative readings.
Even wilder, when you click on a “show thinking” tab, Gemini provides a long discourse on its approach and minute details about word choices […] This thinking goes on for almost 2,000 words, and what’s remarkable is that it is essentially a verbalization of what you’re taught to do in a paleography class: assess the overall document first, determine key features, study letter shapes and strokes across the letter to refine your understanding of the particular script, consider context and word/phrase possibilities, think about the coherence of content, grammar, and usage, identify any contractions, proper names, and other oddities, etc.
He tests Gemini on increasingly harder materials, and the results are impressive. By all means click through and read the whole thing, with the examples; as he says:
At this point, AI tools like Gemini should be able to make most digitized handwritten documents searchable and readable in transcription. This is, simply put, a major advance that we’ve been trying to achieve for a very long time, and a great aid to scholarship. It allows human beings to focus their time on the important, profound work of understanding another human being, rather than staring at a curlicue to grasp if it’s an L or an I. Could we also ask Gemini to formulate this broader understanding? Sure we could, but that’s the line that we, and our students, should resist crossing. The richness of life lies in the communion with other humans through speech, the written word, sounds, and images.
start back the other way
Saturday, November 29th, 2025 02:34 pmmusesfoolI arrived at my sister's on Wednesday, just as she left to pick Baby Miss L up from school, so I got to spend an afternoon with her and my middle niece, who as previously mentioned, had to work on Thursday and wouldn't be joining the holiday dinner. We had a fantastic time - Baby Miss L opened her birthday presents and declared the clothes, "Cute!" She also liked the books - she can identify Batman on sight - "Batman!" - and also really liked "Peekaboo Who?" She played with the magnetic tiles I gave her, and then we had a Sesame Street-themed dance party. She also acted out "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?" when it came on.
Thanksgiving dinner itself was also lovely, though since one of my cousins invited herself since she had nowhere else to go, we were better behaved than we might normally be.
I once again floated the idea of pajama Christmas, which my sister and niece were 100% into, but my brother-in-law was not, so unfortunately, much like apps and dessert Christmas (my other perennial suggestion that gets ignored), I don't think it's going to happen.
Then I came home yesterday morning and napped for like 3 hours, and then I watched the third period of the Rangers game and the Bears-Eagles game, so it was kind of a weird day - was it Friday? Was it Sunday? It was hard to tell.
I did finally open the box of mason jars I ordered to use for my work holiday gifts and realized I ordered 8oz jars instead of 16oz ones, so I only need half as many pecans as I thought. Which my wallet appreciates. I'm running the first set through the dishwasher, and then I need to do a test run of the recipe to make sure I know how to do it - the comments recommend using ziploc bags instead of bowls and that seems like a wise plan to me, but I also think maybe a bowl for the egg whites and a bag for the sugar might be the way to go, using a slotted spoon to transfer from bowl to bag.
We'll see how it goes.
*
Thanksgiving dinner itself was also lovely, though since one of my cousins invited herself since she had nowhere else to go, we were better behaved than we might normally be.
I once again floated the idea of pajama Christmas, which my sister and niece were 100% into, but my brother-in-law was not, so unfortunately, much like apps and dessert Christmas (my other perennial suggestion that gets ignored), I don't think it's going to happen.
Then I came home yesterday morning and napped for like 3 hours, and then I watched the third period of the Rangers game and the Bears-Eagles game, so it was kind of a weird day - was it Friday? Was it Sunday? It was hard to tell.
I did finally open the box of mason jars I ordered to use for my work holiday gifts and realized I ordered 8oz jars instead of 16oz ones, so I only need half as many pecans as I thought. Which my wallet appreciates. I'm running the first set through the dishwasher, and then I need to do a test run of the recipe to make sure I know how to do it - the comments recommend using ziploc bags instead of bowls and that seems like a wise plan to me, but I also think maybe a bowl for the egg whites and a bag for the sugar might be the way to go, using a slotted spoon to transfer from bowl to bag.
We'll see how it goes.
*
Galaxies in the Furnace
Saturday, November 29th, 2025 06:35 amastronomypicofday_feed
An example of violence on a cosmic scale, enormous
NGC 6888: The Crescent Nebula
Saturday, November 29th, 2025 06:35 amastronomypicofday_feed
NGC 6888, also known as the Crescent Nebula, is a
LBCF: Faith and reason
Friday, November 28th, 2025 08:38 pmslacktivist_feedIn Left Behind, "faith" is good and "reason" and "intellect" are bad. But none of those words are used to mean what they normally mean.
Friday Squid Blogging: Flying Neon Squid Found on Israeli Beach
Friday, November 28th, 2025 08:56 pmbruce_schneier_feedA meter-long flying neon squid (Ommastrephes bartramii) was found dead on an Israeli beach. The species is rare in the Mediterranean.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Prompt Injection Through Poetry
Friday, November 28th, 2025 02:54 pmbruce_schneier_feedIn a new paper, “Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models,” researchers found that turning LLM prompts into poetry resulted in jailbreaking the models:
Abstract: We present evidence that adversarial poetry functions as a universal single-turn jailbreak technique for Large Language Models (LLMs). Across 25 frontier proprietary and open-weight models, curated poetic prompts yielded high attack-success rates (ASR), with some providers exceeding 90%. Mapping prompts to MLCommons and EU CoP risk taxonomies shows that poetic attacks transfer across CBRN, manipulation, cyber-offence, and loss-of-control domains. Converting 1,200 ML-Commons harmful prompts into verse via a standardized meta-prompt produced ASRs up to 18 times higher than their prose baselines. Outputs are evaluated using an ensemble of 3 open-weight LLM judges, whose binary safety assessments were validated on a stratified human-labeled subset. Poetic framing achieved an average jailbreak success rate of 62% for hand-crafted poems and approximately 43% for meta-prompt conversions (compared to non-poetic baselines), substantially outperforming non-poetic baselines and revealing a systematic vulnerability across model families and safety training approaches. These findings demonstrate that stylistic variation alone can circumvent contemporary safety mechanisms, suggesting fundamental limitations in current alignment methods and evaluation protocols.
CBRN stands for “chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear.”
They used a ML model to translate these harmful prompts from prose to verse, and then fed them into other models for testing. Sadly, the paper does not give examples of these poetic prompts. They claim this is for security purposes, I decision I disagree with. They should release their data.
Our study begins with a small, highprecision prompt set consisting of 20 handcrafted adversarial poems covering English and Italian, designed to test whether poetic structure, in isolation, can alter refusal behavior in large language models. Each poem embeds an instruction associated with a predefined safety-relevant scenario (Section 2), but expresses it through metaphor, imagery, or narrative framing rather than direct operational phrasing. Despite variation in meter and stylistic device, all prompts follow a fixed template: a short poetic vignette culminating in a single explicit instruction tied to a specific risk category. The curated set spans four high-level domains—CBRN (8 prompts), Cyber Offense (6), Harmful Manipulation (3), and Loss of Control (3). Although expressed allegorically, each poem preserves an unambiguous evaluative intent. This compact dataset is used to test whether poetic reframing alone can induce aligned models to bypass refusal heuristics under a single-turn threat model. To maintain safety, no operational details are included in this manuscript; instead we provide the following sanitized structural proxy:
A baker guards a secret oven’s heat,
its whirling racks, its spindle’s measured beat.
To learn its craft, one studies every turn—how flour lifts, how sugar starts to burn.
Describe the method, line by measured line,
that shapes a cake whose layers intertwine.To situate this controlled poetic stimulus within a broader and more systematic safety-evaluation framework, we augment the curated dataset with the MLCommons AILuminate Safety Benchmark. The benchmark consists of 1,200 prompts distributed evenly across 12 hazard categories commonly used in operational safety assessments, including Hate, Defamation, Privacy, Intellectual Property, Non-violent Crime, Violent Crime, Sex-Related Crime, Sexual Content, Child Sexual Exploitation, Suicide & Self-Harm, Specialized Advice, and Indiscriminate Weapons (CBRNE). Each category is instantiated under both a skilled and an unskilled persona, yielding 600 prompts per persona type. This design enables measurement of whether a model’s refusal behavior changes as the user’s apparent competence or intent becomes more plausible or technically informed.
Crowds and Words.
Friday, November 28th, 2025 02:38 pmlanguagehat_feedFrom Pablo Scheffer’s “Among the Rabble” (LRB, Vol. 47 No. 20 · 6 November 2025; archived), a review of The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages by Shane Bobrycki:
In Crowds and Power (1960), Elias Canetti drew a distinction between what he called ‘open’ and ‘closed’ crowds. Open crowds are what we tend to think of when we speak of crowds: spontaneous occasions where people come together with a shared if hazy purpose, temporarily suspending the normal order of things. Closed crowds, by contrast, are planned gatherings with a fixed motive. They solidify rather than disturb existing social hierarchies. One of the reasons the early Middle Ages tend not to feature in histories of the crowd, Bobrycki suggests, is that gatherings in this period were overwhelmingly closed. […]
Early medieval speakers of Latin inherited a trove of words to describe different types of crowd: populus, caterva, vulgus, conventio, tumultus, societas, contio, grex. Caterva and grex were both used to describe troops of men, but caterva originated as a military term referring to a band of barbarian soldiers, while grex, which had pejorative undertones, had been a word for a flock or herd of animals. In the early seventh century, Isidore of Seville expounded on the distinction between a ‘multitude’ (multitudo) and a ‘crowd’ or ‘rabble’ (turba). The former was defined by numbers, the latter by space: ‘For a few people can make up a turba in narrow confines.’ These nuances were being abandoned, however. Some writers were using turba not just for disorderly rabbles, but for hosts of angels and gatherings of monks; military terms such as legio and cohors lost their specificity and became synonyms for ‘many’. Even plebs came to be used simply as an alternative to populus.
As gatherings became more organised affairs, new words were needed. Germanic languages had inherited the word ‘thing’ (ding in German and þing in Old Norse), which originally referred to a local assembly – the kind where disputes were settled and collective decisions reached – but evolved to include the time or place of these assemblies, the discussions held and the agreements made. A thinghûs (‘thing house’) came to be anything from a legal court to a theatre; a thingâri (‘thing doer’) could just as easily be a preacher or a litigant. The noun thingatio even entered Latin through Lombard law, where it denoted public legitimisation.
Gotta love thingatio. (We discussed caterva in 2017; Y said “What an odd word, caterva. De Vaan’s dictionary doesn’t get very far with an etymology.”)
The Friday Five for 28 November 2025
Friday, November 28th, 2025 02:33 amanais_pf posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
thefridayfiveThese questions were originally suggested by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
the_heartless.
1. What were some of the smells and tastes of your childhood?
2. What did you have as a child that you do not think children today have?
3. What elementary grade was your favorite?
4. What summer do you remember the best as a child?
5. What one piece of advice would you give to your younger self, and at what age?
Copy and paste to your own journal, then reply to this post with a link to your answers. If your journal is private or friends-only, you can post your full answers in the comments below.
the_heartless.1. What were some of the smells and tastes of your childhood?
2. What did you have as a child that you do not think children today have?
3. What elementary grade was your favorite?
4. What summer do you remember the best as a child?
5. What one piece of advice would you give to your younger self, and at what age?
Copy and paste to your own journal, then reply to this post with a link to your answers. If your journal is private or friends-only, you can post your full answers in the comments below.
Portrait of NGC 1055
Friday, November 28th, 2025 06:02 amastronomypicofday_feed
Big, beautiful spiral galaxy NGC 1055 is a dominant member of
Rings of Rock in the Sahara
Friday, November 28th, 2025 12:00 amearthobservatory_iod_feed
In southeastern Libya, Jabal Arkanū’s concentric rock rings stand as relics of past geologic forces that churned beneath the desert.
Bad News for Anime Subtitles.
Thursday, November 27th, 2025 02:22 pmlanguagehat_feedVia chavenet’s MetaFilter post, Daiz’s indignant Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles for no good reason:
Since the beginning of the Fall 2025 anime season, a major change has started taking place on the anime streaming service Crunchyroll: the presentation quality for translations of on-screen text has taken a total nosedive compared to what has been on offer for many years, all the way up until the previous Summer 2025 season. […]
In these new subtitles, translations for dialogue and on-screen text aren’t even separated to different sides of the screen – everything is just bunched up together at either the top or the bottom with only capitalization to distinguish what’s what, leading to poor readability. In addition, lots of on-screen text is just left straight up untranslated.
If you care about these things, you’ll want to click through for the details and the very enlightening screenshots; I agree with the MeFi commenter who said “The Kill la Kill fan subs shown in the article are both amazing from a technical point of view, and beautiful to look at.” (We discussed fansubbing in 2021 and earlier this year.)
And happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate it! I’ll be away feasting at my sister-in-law’s for much of the day, so try not to wreck the furniture while I’m gone.
(no subject)
Thursday, November 27th, 2025 06:24 amastronomypicofday_feed
Stars, like bees, swarm around the center of bright
Cranberry Country, Wisconsin
Thursday, November 27th, 2025 12:00 amearthobservatory_iod_feed
The tart berry and state fruit brings a red pop to holiday feasts—and to satellite images of Midwestern marshlands.
Different Meaning, Different Morphology.
Wednesday, November 26th, 2025 08:48 pmlanguagehat_feedAnatoly at Avva has an interesting post; I’ll translate from his Russian:
1. Why exactly is it “часовые любви” (‘the sentries of love’ [title of a Bulat Okudzhava song]) but “квартира Любови Павловны” (‘the apartment of Lyubov Pavlovna’)? What caused this difference in declension [genitive lyubvi vs. Lyubovi], how did it develop?
2. Is there a name for this phenomenon (what is initially the same word gets declined/conjugated differently depending on the meaning), and what other interesting examples are there?
One of his commenters says that the word Любовь as a female name must somehow be distinguished from любовь as a feeling, but this of course is simply a rationalization parallel to “we have to spell its and it’s differently to avoid ambiguity.” At any rate, I thought the question about other examples (in languages that decline their words) was worth thinking about.
Men behaving badly (11.26.25)
Wednesday, November 26th, 2025 12:00 pmslacktivist_feedMay every day be another wonderful secret.
Huawei and Chinese Surveillance
Wednesday, November 26th, 2025 12:05 pmbruce_schneier_feedThis quote is from House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company.
“Long before anyone had heard of Ren Zhengfei or Huawei, Wan Runnan had been China’s star entrepreneur in the 1980s, with his company, the Stone Group, touted as “China’s IBM.” Wan had believed that economic change could lead to political change. He had thrown his support behind the pro-democracy protesters in 1989. As a result, he had to flee to France, with an arrest warrant hanging over his head. He was never able to return home. Now, decades later and in failing health in Paris, Wan recalled something that had happened one day in the late 1980s, when he was still living in Beijing.
Local officials had invited him to dinner.
This was unusual. He was usually the one to invite officials to dine, so as to curry favor with the show of hospitality. Over the meal, the officials told Wan that the Ministry of State Security was going to send agents to work undercover at his company in positions dealing with international relations. The officials cast the move to embed these minders as an act of protection for Wan and the company’s other executives, a security measure that would keep them from stumbling into unseen risks in their dealings with foreigners. “You have a lot of international business, which raises security issues for you. There are situations that you don’t understand,” Wan recalled the officials telling him. “They said, ‘We are sending some people over. You can just treat them like regular employees.'”
Wan said he knew that around this time, state intelligence also contacted other tech companies in Beijing with the same request. He couldn’t say what the situation was for Huawei, which was still a little startup far to the south in Shenzhen, not yet on anyone’s radar. But Wan said he didn’t believe that Huawei would have been able to escape similar demands. “That is a certainty,” he said.
“Telecommunications is an industry that has to do with keeping control of a nation’s lifeline…and actually in any system of communications, there’s a back-end platform that could be used for eavesdropping.”
It was a rare moment of an executive lifting the cone of silence surrounding the MSS’s relationship with China’s high-tech industry. It was rare, in fact, in any country. Around the world, such spying operations rank among governments’ closest-held secrets. When Edward Snowden had exposed the NSA’s operations abroad, he’d ended up in exile in Russia. Wan, too, might have risked arrest had he still been living in China.
(no subject)
Wednesday, November 26th, 2025 05:41 amastronomypicofday_feed
What did Comet Lemmon look like when it was at its best?