Prior to this post I have 4 that use “delve”, 5 that use “interplay”, and 2 that use “testament”.
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Prior to this post I have 4 that use “delve”, 5 that use “interplay”, and 2 that use “testament”.
I frequently use en dashes – and quite like em dashes.
I use the Oxford comma when it clarifies, but not when it’s superfluous.
I’m sceptical of conclusions drawn from use of tools like Pangram, linked to from https://www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/2026/08/20/how-much-of-the-internet-is-written-with-ai/, which is linked to from https://m.slashdot.org/story/457268.
It’s not just that the conclusions are shaky, it’s also that they do nothing to alter the incentives to slop
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Prior to this post I have 4 that use “delve”, 5 that use “interplay”, and 2 that use “testament”.
I frequently use en dashes – and quite like em dashes.
I use the Oxford comma when it clarifies, but not when it’s superfluous.
I’m sceptical of conclusions drawn from use of tools like Pangram, linked to from https://www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/2026/08/20/how-much-of-the-internet-is-written-with-ai/, which is linked to from https://m.slashdot.org/story/457268.
It’s not just that the conclusions are shaky, it’s also that they do nothing to alter the incentives to slop
…I understand the desire to measure and analyse. I have thousands of posts demonstrating that I’m a sucker for numbers.
But numbers don’t change behaviours https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/112095290545697095
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…I understand the desire to measure and analyse. I have thousands of posts demonstrating that I’m a sucker for numbers.
But numbers don’t change behaviours https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/112095290545697095
…We’ve taken technocracy and hooked it up to compute. So now we have more numbers than ever before.
But they don’t change the fundamentals of what we do and why
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…We’ve taken technocracy and hooked it up to compute. So now we have more numbers than ever before.
But they don’t change the fundamentals of what we do and why
…Why we do something is because it seems like the best course of action in the moment.
And that’s usually because it’s the most convenient, or most cool or attractive, or because someone with more power than us told us to, or we want to impress someone, or because it just feels like the ‘right’ thing. Most likely, a bundle of those things.
Usually, the only time that numbers come into it is when the thing has a price, which is an artificial and mostly arbitrary aggregation of all those whys
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…Why we do something is because it seems like the best course of action in the moment.
And that’s usually because it’s the most convenient, or most cool or attractive, or because someone with more power than us told us to, or we want to impress someone, or because it just feels like the ‘right’ thing. Most likely, a bundle of those things.
Usually, the only time that numbers come into it is when the thing has a price, which is an artificial and mostly arbitrary aggregation of all those whys
…I’m not a cyclist because of the statistics on transport emissions. I’m not vegan because of the astonishingly awful statistics on cruelty to non-human animals. I’m mostly not a non-flyer because of the tragic numbers on aviation emissions. I don’t aspire to #zuzAI because of the latest figures on its resource hoovering.
The numbers didn’t form my decisions. I kind of doubt that they form yours
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…I’m not a cyclist because of the statistics on transport emissions. I’m not vegan because of the astonishingly awful statistics on cruelty to non-human animals. I’m mostly not a non-flyer because of the tragic numbers on aviation emissions. I don’t aspire to #zuzAI because of the latest figures on its resource hoovering.
The numbers didn’t form my decisions. I kind of doubt that they form yours
…But in this age of compute, I’ll still feel compelled to run the numbers.
It’s a kind of sickness, I guess. Part of the madness we’re all caught up in
https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/116933743615587736 -
…But in this age of compute, I’ll still feel compelled to run the numbers.
It’s a kind of sickness, I guess. Part of the madness we’re all caught up in
https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/116933743615587736…We’ve given ourselves permission to do absolutely fucking crazy things. Things that will end the option to do those things.
And that permission matters
more than the degrees of craziness -
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