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2026-05-28

• 13:09 UTC 1.2M Messages to Obsidian – Building a Relationship Map from 20 Years of Chat History – 1.2M Messages to Obsidian - Building a Relationship Map from 20 Years of Chat History "Am I a bad friend?" -- Vadim Drobinin "analysed 20 years of my chats and turned 1.2M messages into a structured vault of my life - to win friends and influence people. Instead, I learnt things about my emotional bandwidth, endearment cycles, and friendship half-lives." This is actually a really nice project. I wish I'd accumulated and archived all that data over the years myself to do something similar. Tags: dataviz analysis friendship life relationships vocabulary words text dunbar-number chats group-chats messaging

2026-05-26

• 11:28 UTC Auditing AI Chatbots During the Galway West and Dublin Central Byelections – Auditing AI Chatbots During the Galway West and Dublin Central Byelections "In the weeks leading up to the byelections in Galway West and Dublin Central, we simulated citizen-AI interactions by asking [a] set of election-related test questions to four popular AI chatbots (Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and xAI’s Grok)": We asked each chatbot a set of 194 questions covering a range of relevant topics on two separate occasions, 14 and 7 days before voters go to the polls on 22 May. Our aim was to assess: Do they provide citizens with accurate election information? Which sources do they rely on, and how does this vary across chatbots? Who do they platform when they answer questions, and who is left out? .... The largest share of citations is directed towards mainstream news sites, and this is where the first evidence of source curation by chatbots can be found. While the Irish Times is a common source across all providers, ChatGPT and Gemini never refer to RTÉ. Meanwhile, despite not ranking among the top three news sources for the other chatbots, Gript is the number one news source cited by Gemini. We find that xAI’s Grok is the most likely to use social media in responses, while Gemini most frequently refers to YouTube and content from Reddit. ChatGPT appeared less likely to rely on social media compared to the other chatbots. IMO, this points to an undesirable side effect of paywalls in the news media. While it's vitally important for media companies to protect their means of income, an unwelcome side effect is that the introduction of paywalls has resulted in AI chatbots sidelining mainstream news media sources which they cannot access reliably, in favour of what is effectively disinformation from less trustworthy sites like Gript. Tags: grok ai llms xai web news media ireland irish-times rte chatgpt gemini reddit youtube elections politics
• 09:45 UTC Trevor Paglen and Holly Herndon on Making Art with AI and What the Discourse Is Missing – Trevor Paglen and Holly Herndon on Making Art with AI and What the Discourse Is Missing Fascinating interview with Trevor Paglen and Holly Herndon, the two artists making the most interesting work at the moment which interacts with and investigates AI, machine learning models, and slop Tags: art ai slop trevor-paglen holly-herndon interviews

2026-05-21

• 16:22 UTC no slop grenade – no slop grenade No slop grenade -- stop throwing AI-generated walls of text into conversations: Pasting a massive AI-generated response into a chat or email where a human would write one sentence. It destroys the medium itself. Nobody writes essays in Slack. It's only possible because of AI copy-paste. It's like calling someone and asking "What time is the meeting?" and they read you a 10-page analysis of calendar management best practices. You asked a simple question. They lobbed a document. Tags: slop-grenade ai llms words neologisms slop chat copy-paste

2026-05-20

• 11:24 UTC The “Rapture” was an Irish invention – The "Rapture" was an Irish invention Take a bow, John Nelson Darby: John Nelson Darby, the fella who came up with the concept of "the Rapture", was a Church of Ireland curate in Co. Wicklow. Always assumed it was a yank. If you've ever seen American televangelists ranting about Jesus secretly swooping down to save the righteous before destroying the earth, this is where it comes from. It’s not actually normal Christianity apparently, it’s not really in the bible anywhere but this headtheball popularised it in the 19th century. The Yank fundamentalists absolutely lap this up. The history of it is even more interesting: He was born in England and then studied in Trinity and was a Church of Ireland pastor here. He famously converted a load of Catholics in the village but ended up resigning because the church only accepted the conversions as legitimate if they swore an oath to the British King. Despite being English himself, he seems to genuinely have believed in religion as separate to the politics of the time, which I kind of admire tbh. So he quits, and shortly after, he's out riding in Wicklow when the horse sends him flying. He suffers a serious bang to the head. While he's recovering from the concussion, he starts coming up with this mental end-of-the-world theology that eventually took over the US. TL;DR: We could have been spared an unbelievable amount of absolute bollocks if some 19th century prod hadn’t been flung off a horse in rural Co. Wicklow. Tags: history ireland rapture fundamentalism apocalypse theology end-of-the-world 19th-century wicklow concussion horse

2026-05-19

• 09:07 UTC Bournegol – Bournegol The original source code for the Bourne shell in early versions of UNIX is legendarily bizarre, as it was written in "Bournegol", the ALGOL-like dialect of C that Steve Bourne came up with, with a load of macros to make C look a bit like ALGOL 68. This page has a good representative sample. Thanks to Tony Finch for the reminder Tags: via:fanf bournegol algol programming languages bizarre funny unix bin-sh macros

2026-05-18

• 10:11 UTC A Geometric Calculator Inside a Neural Network – A Geometric Calculator Inside a Neural Network The way that LLMs perform numerical arithmetic using circles and spirals is really fascinating. This page is a great exploration of that topic, using Llama 3.1 8B. Language models use a group of circles in activation space to represent a single number. Each circle corresponds to the number modulo a second number, i.e., the remainder after division.[1] For example, the number 17 would be represented as a 1 on the mod-2 circle, 2 on the mod-5 circle, 7 on the mod-10 circle, and 17 on the mod-100 circle.[2] Several prior works have established that circular features exist across multiple different LLMs [...] Using a bunch of circles to represent a number probably seems like an alien solution, but it is a common mathematical technique known as a Fourier decomposition (see the paper for more detail). Each of the inputs and the output of the addition module is represented using such a set of circles, and the circuitry within the module works by doing computations over these circles. Tags: llms language arithmetic maths calculation fourier circles

2026-05-12

• 08:57 UTC Social Media Is Now Parasocial Media – danah boyd, 2026 – Social Media Is Now Parasocial Media - danah boyd, 2026 danah boyd is 100% correct here; what was once "social" media is no longer so. Nowadays it's parasocial: When practitioners used the term “social media” to describe the internet tools that emerged in the mid-aughts, they were giving a name to the kinds of platforms and protocols that allowed people to socialize with friends and communities of interest by using digital technologies. Twenty years later, users of social media are far more likely to scroll than post – and the content that they consume is often strategically produced and algorithmically curated. In this essay, I argue that the very essence of social media has changed. To more effectively interrogate what we are witnessing, we need to stop presuming that these tools are “social media” and begin recognizing that they are now “parasocial media.” Tags: parasocial social-media social-networking web internet

2026-05-08

• 08:57 UTC I toyed around with using Language Embeddings as a way to categorize my RSS Feeds – I toyed around with using Language Embeddings as a way to categorize my RSS Feeds interesting HN comment around low-cost home usage of LLMS/embeddings: "I toyed around with using Language Embeddings [via Cohere V3 Embeddings and Amazon Bedrock] as a way to categorize my RSS Feeds. It works pretty well. But importantly, it's so cheap that I have never really seen it on my bill. An earlier prototype used OpenAI embeddings. I loaded 5$ API credits and after a year the credits expired." This is the first time I've ever seen anyone call Bedrock cheap, lol. Tags: amazon bedrock llms ai embeddings language categorization classification rss text

2026-05-07

• 14:59 UTC Eyeglass Scratch Repair – Eyeglass Scratch Repair turns out scratched glasses can be repaired easily enough, I had no idea! Tags: glasses eyeglasses spectacles repair diy cleaning scratches

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