Language inventor guy in Wisconsin. Just trying to survive the consensus death cult. https://lingweenie.org/conlang/ Accounts posting genAI slop are generally an instant block from me.
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New Kílta ideophone: astóm-astát, of being stupefied from screen time. Koluchát si allui numë rinko, ëlli runtúnin chaso — astóm-astát. cellphone ACC long.ADV aimlessly look.at.PFV, so.that befuddled do.PFV — IDEO "He screwed around on his phone so long he became befuddled." #conlang
Well now I’m trapped. #cats #siamesecats
The Great Old Ones - this is something already existed in my mind when illustrating the previous cephalopods piece; and so glad I’ve completed it so now I can display them side by side💙 Never stop missing prehistoric cephalopods! Thinking about making this one a silver foiled print as well!
I don't have anything specifically for that. Yet.
I considered writing a long carefully constructed argument laying out the harms and limitations of AI, but instead I wrote about being a hater. Only humans can be haters.
Think of it more like, “she answered me; she took her time.”
Ël në ha kë taha si mítët tëtilo. 3SG TOP 1SG DAT answer ACC say.CVB.PFV take﹒one's﹒time﹒PFV "She took her time answering me."
I recently added an auxiliary usage to the existing Kílta verb tëtilo "wander, roam." As an auxiliary, taking a converb, it means "take one's time," but only in the bad sense. You'd never use it to tell someone to slow down. #conlang
The platform has some controversy around it in who it will let post on it (actual Nazis, and alarming push notification disaster that happened this year). But I deeply understand the need for a platform that 1) you can share stuff on but 2) keeps out AI scrapers.
Just as a point of amusement, Vonda McIntyre's "Starfarers" books (first one published 1989) have small maintenance robots everyone calls "artificial stupids."
Making quick pickles out of the beatin' kohlrabi and carrots I got at the farmers' market yesterday. There's some garlic hiding in the bottom of the jar. #cooking #pickles
Interesting. escholarship.org/uc/item/2zw4... - The Category of Engagement in Chhitkul-Rākchham (West-Himalayish): The Post-Verbal Clitic =niŋ #linguistics
Is it, though? The last few years I've tried to take the idea of the "post-truth era" completely seriously, and ignore what partisans say about anything, really, and pay attention to what they do. Hypocrisy will no longer check or shame anyone in the throes of an agenda.
Bird! #Caturday #BlackCats
i'll say it again, my loud and vigorous support for any democrat who calls for televised hearings and criminal charges for everyone involved in DOGE. this guy should never be able to live in peace again.
Exposure to "AI Assistance" lowers doctors' ability to diagnose cancer just after a few weeks. "AI"s main effect on people is skill decay. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langas/article/PIIS2468-1253(25)00133-5/abstract
Yeah! The related fact that the Greco-Roman alphabets still have almost a 1000 years to go before they've been used longer than Egyptian hieroglyphs were used was the drive behind this chart
Kílta got two new ideophones today — - kop - of something formerly in motion coming to a complete stop - liu-miu - of saying stupid things Kílta somehow has a lot of ideophones that encode different sorts of speaking. #conlang
First, C-suite denizens who harbor fantasies of firing a whole lot of people. Second, AI/Singularity true-believers who want to build an enslaved god to do for them everything mom used to, and maybe make them immortal. (Adam Becker's "More Everything Forever" is a great account of the second group.)
I despise these AI bros for so many reasons — but among the top for me is that, bc of their egos + recklessness, and bc of a gullible grifter culture that expands their uptake + influence, we’re all now obligated to care abt their bullshit + minimize its harms. I’d rather be doing anything else.
Life after death? A wave of states move to legalize human composting as people seek out funeral practices that better reflect their own values, personalities, traditions and preferences. www.usatoday.com/story/news/n...
in mid/late 2023 i told someone that i'm not as invested in accounting of energy usage for training models because tech companies will employ accounting bullshit to obscure their energy and resource usage; that we should focus on the nearby communities that can't access water/energy reliably anymore
New Kílta word that's been on the TODO list a while: lavúsa /laˈβuːsa/ "hallucination" < lavúmo v.intr. "to dream." For Eng. "hallucinate sth." an idiom is used, Ha në lavúsa kwan inachin tátiën si rinko. 1SG TOP hallucination INST big dog ACC see-PFV "I hallucinated a large dog." #conlang
Shadow has a mild suspicion of the camera. #caturday
But even if something lies to you "only" 15% of the time, it's not helpful, it's not saving you time, it's not making you smarter, it's just lying to you. That's more work. If your research assistant lied to you 15% of the time you would no longer work with them.
Shadow in one of his favorite observation stations. #BlackCats
Oscar is interested in what's going on. #caturday #SiameseCats
Shared-memory IPC is probably the one I'm most likely to mess up.
beans
I can't speak to popularity, but that statement gives me stress.
Did they ever use the armpit lore in the TV series? I can’t recall it there.
They created a Database of Tonogenetic Events (DTE) and illustrate its use to investigate questions about tones and tonogenesis: “Tonogenesis: a diachronic typology” by Lilja Maria Sæbø, Eitan Grossman and Steven Moran (July ’25) www.jbe-platform.com/content/jour...
“Imagine a billionaire’s digital boot stamping on a human face — forever.” That’s the future Silicon Valley is building, writes astrophysicist Adam Becker in his blistering takedown of tech’s most delusional prophets. www.truthdig.com/articles/the...
Big #Egyptian news!! Book on Hieratic. Free to download for 2 weeks. www.cambridge.org/core/element...
Team Uncial.
Skeksis.
Oscar snoozin' and snorin'. #caturday #siamesecats
Shadow keeps an eye on things. #BlackCats
A tweak — mapping the second argument to `mod` to coherent noise.
Oh my god. I tried out LOGNOR (bitwise not) and yet again some variant of the Sierpinski triangle pops out (I'm using my own eccentric Common Lisp library here, rather than Clojure). Actually, several operations do. That triangle might be the key to the universe.
When is this going to end? What is there to even say anymore?
Or a Northerner designed this for a Southerner that didn’t care about it too much. To many Northerners all Southern dialects are the same: Foghorn Leghorn.
In his new book, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, Adam Becker probes the technocrat worldview. Interview ⤵️
I got this fractal system switched over to the refactored/rewritten version of my Common Lisp library. For some reason, this is noticeably faster than in the original library (which has not always been the case). #fractal #CommonLisp #AlgorithmicArt
A company supposedly worth billions of dollars has zero interest in the fact its platform is being used to host nonconsensual AI models of celebrities and regular people www.404media.co/hugging-face...
A Borges story about a guy who gets AI to summarize all the world’s information for him, and then summarize the summary, until the AI has the whole world summarized into a single word. He sits alone at his desk, staring at the word, repeating it endlessly, certain he is experiencing everything
I watched "Sinners" last night, and I'm seeing suggestions that it and "K-Pop Demon Hunters" make a sensible double feature (not something that would have initially occurred to me).
Ha në lína máhin nëkë tátiën kë ines li líkkis si salko. ha në lína máhin n-ëkë tátiën kë ines li líkkis si salk-o 1SG TOP sky hot be-REASON.CVB.PFV dog DAT ice ABL food ACC put-PFV
A quixotic request from the one other person who knows Kílta: tunákërelës "hovercraft" (from tunáko "hang" and relës "vehicle"). As in — Ha vë tunákërelës në rëskur li chárin no. 1SG ATTR hovercraft TOP eel-PL ABL full be-PFV "My hovercraft is full of eels." #conlang
I made an offensive sound. #caturday #SiameseCats
What? Page 99 of www.skase.sk/Volumes/JTL5... #linguistics #ideophone
a couple of hours before my keynote, I went through an intense negotiation with the organisers (for over a hour) where we went through my slides and had to remove anything that mentions 'Palestine' 'Israel' and replace 'genocide' with 'war crimes' 1/
what's a normal amount of dread?
Fun. A comment I made on r/conlangs years ago has found its way into a journal article, "Defining 'Naturalness': Constructed languages as typological exploration," ojs.unito.it/index.php/ri... @dedalvs.bsky.social and @gliese1337.bsky.social get more conventional citations. #conlang
So far he has spooked one rabbit.
Shadow bakes himself in the sun while keeping an eye on the birds and chipmunks. #caturday #blackcats
Staying on a theme, some topical Kílta vocabulary: síkupalta - "fireworks," lit., "star-bombs" poh - the ideophone for gunfire or fireworks Aunur vë mautur në síkupalta si ríncho më hwí. 1PL ATTR cat.PL TOP fireworks ACC fear.PFV NEG PTCL "Our cats aren't afraid of fireworks (yay!)." #conlang
Tech is also extremely bad at software. We habitually make fragile, insecure, complex, and hard to maintain code that backs poor UIs. The best case scenario is that LLMs accelerate already broken software dev processes in an industry that is built around monopolies and billionaire extremists
Etymology note: Síkis - "star" -> Sësíkis - "firefly," by reduplication
Kílta ethology of the day — Sësíkisá në tërë rëtu chaso hwí. sësikis-á në tërë rët-u chas-o hwí firefly-PL TOP now much-PL do-PFV PTCL "The fireflies have become numerous now," or, more colloquially, "There are a lot of fireflies now." Kílta uses an inchoative a lot, [ADJ + "do"] here. #conlang
Been rewriting the algorithmic art library I wrote in #CommonLisp during the height of COVID. I can't say I've managed to make it too much faster, but it *is* easier to use. The canvas mottling code is so much shorter now, and ready to go. Drawing on a flat canvas can be boring. #AlgorithmicArt
Interested in Balkan languages? The definitive reference work has arrived – on 1000 pages, in open access. www.cambridge.org/core/books/b...
This is the most conlanger-y conlang post I've seen in a while.
Poor doggos!
Oscar has been enjoying the hot weather more than me. #caturday #SiameseCats
Both Arabic and Persian have been bucket list languages for me for a long time — I did manage to take a semester of Arabic decades ago that got me on some fun mailing lists. One blocker, honestly, is that my Arabic handwriting is not very good, even with T.F. Mitchell's help, which makes me sad.
From Ahiqar, chap 2, line 17, My son! If the rich man eat a snake, they say, "it is by his wisdom," and if a poor man eat it, the people say, "from his hunger." sacred-texts.com/bib/fbe/fbe2...
crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their consultants
For Arabic pronunciation you ideally do need a human teacher. Old phrasebooks are even funnier than Duolingo. I have a late 19th c. Arabic for upper class twats phrasebook. "Camelboy! Go fetch my collapsible bath and fill it with clean water from the oasis!" is one phrase in it.
I hope it is of use to you!
Quoting from the middle of the thread bc this is such a WEIRD viewpoint to take - one that assumes that monolingualism is the default and the only legitimate way to learn another language is in a classroom. Across time and space, multilingual + illiterate is overwhelmingly more common.
For example...
The total depravity of major American press outlets is, as always, a marvel to behold.
Lína në luikë nánin no. sky TOP heavy-ADV hot-and-humid be.PFV "It is very hot and humid." The word "nánin" *could* be translated "sultry," but in my variety of English that has primarily non-weather connotations. Using the "luikë" intensifier emphasizes the high humidity.
Seasonal Kílta wishes — Astëm lorátin mëli rum! astëm lorátin mël-i rum solstice gentle become-IMP OPT "Happy Solstice." "Lorátin" 'gentle' is the conventional wish for events. "Astëm" means 'turn' primarily, but here is the turning of the sun on the horizon. #conlang #solstice
That feedback loop is how they think they're going to create Silicon Jesus, to take them to heaven, ah, space, and make them immortal.
Today's conlanging accomplished to the tune of some spooky ambient.
Does he have any ideas how training these models actually works? Is he addressing the bot like a sentient being because he's a member of the Silicon Valley alien death cult, and thinks it is almost sentient, or is he a more disciplined worker of PR/marketing than I previously had reason to suspect?
Well rockets are supposed to explode, only the explosion is supposed to go out one end instead of all directions at once
I guess we're getting a textbook: "Inventing Languages: a Practical Introduction," by Carolina González. An old conlanger will be forgiven, I hope, for some brief amusement at the word "practical" in the title. #conlang
“AI” is fast becoming the new “Jordan Peterson’s young men.” Criticism must start by accepting its champions’ image of it, the possibility of rejection becomes a problem society must solve rather than something they must learn to deal with, and trolling people who prefer to work without it is a win
The Svensson attractor often does these circular or torus-appearing shapes. #fractal #commonlisp
Of *course* it’s loaded down with AI slop.
New study on the effects of LLM use: Quote: "LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work. […] Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels."
Kílta ethology of the day — Ha në sitika kwét si nënkëppi rinko. ha në sitika kwét si nënk-ëppi rink-o 1SG TOP chipmunk sparrow ACC attack-REP.CVB.PFV see-PFV "I saw a chipmunk attack a sparrow." #conlang
New Kílta ideophone: íri-éri. It depicts two situations: 1. the erratic flight of butterflies. 2. agitated speech jumping from topic to topic. The second sense is due to already existing "kolkol vë lár" "butterfly word(s)" having the concrete sense of disordered, agitated speech. #conlang
Oscar likes it when I'm engrossed in a book. I still don't understand how these crooked-neck postures he likes to sleep in are comfortable. #caturday #siamesecats
I just finished this yesterday! I'm glad to have a readable introduction to the Cloud Cuckoo Land ideologies emanating from Silicon Valley which I can recommend to an average person not steeped in internet culture. The quote you selected to start your acknowledgments section made me laugh a lot.
I recommend it without reservation. Henry Farrell's review is good, too, for a more thorough picture of the book: www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-... 2/2
Last night I finished reading Adam Becker's "More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity." It is an excellent survey of what I in less generous moments refer to as the "alien death cult" that emanates from Silicon Valley. 1/2
“I asked chatgpt” “I asked grok” I asked the diseased liver of a sacrificed lamb. We are not the same.
Mourning Jim Henry today, creator of gyâ-zym-byn. A great conlanger and a friend. Today is a good day to check out his #conlang work on his website here: jimhenry.conlang.org
Charging students to have them lobotomize themselves.
The Tennendo Omani frankincense has to be the closest of any stick incense to using the resin itself I've ever encountered. Which I appreciate, because messing around with those little charcoal pucks can sometimes be a lot of fuss. #incense
Many languages (/cultures) have animal idioms to describe personalities and characteristics of people: a dog, a pig, a fox, etc. In Kílta, the donkey represents someone who does most of the work but gets little credit. #conlang
One way in which Mastodon is clearly superior to Bluesky is that there is a fairly busy hashtag, #asstodon, featuring pictures of donkeys. Attempts to migrate that here so far have not been a success (though there are a few posts with it).
Shadow tries to guilt me into opening my office window. #caturday #blackcats
