The end of the year is around the corner. There are varied spins on “speak of the devil”. I was shown a really neat one some time ago;

“Talk of an angel and you hear his wings.”

There’s a fun and purposively perplexing novel called “His Master’s Voice”. Inside, it invents the term circular irony.

Fuzzy search is spooktastic. I’m sometimes asked, but I know nothing of AI generally. I don’t read much tech news these days, but I do speed-read headlines and peek in occasionally.

I’ve gotten used to hearing a certain phrase. “You can’t trust the AI” to not make mistakes. That’s how you know; they kind of did it. Imagine there’s a box and that box is orange.

Someone takes that orange box, calls it a black box, declares that orange is the new black, points to another orange box and tells you to open up that black box. Can you … no questions asked? If so, then you might have mathematical powers (or color blindness).

I was thinking the other day that when I first saw CSS, my initial question was, “Why is everything not important?” And, I was told that’s not (not) important. Shared abstractions; they drive on parkways and park on driveways.

I unexpectedly saw an amazing game programmed in Scratch today. I was never that good but they still teach Scratch around these parts. “I programmed this from Scratch” never gets old.

They say you can’t have virality without context collapse. There are times when I stumble upon stuff online that I kind of know the behind the scenes on.

Then I remember (again) that virality is often simpler than you’d think. One only has but to master the art of continually collapsing the context. It begins where the fates align and the contexts collide.

There used to be spelling and grammar bots roaming around. They’d read your entire blog and mail in the misspelt words. If you replied, someone would respond to demo their ultimate proof reading solution.

One of them was really bothered by referer. I pointed out once that it was intensional and that came as a shocking revelation. Those bots were replaced by the swarm intelligence. Now everyone’s grammar and spelling is perfection.

I don’t think I’ll ever get used to speculative ambiguity. Let’s hope that blowing up rockets over the Caribbean never achieves normalization of the 3rd form.

Any time someone asks if an online thing is fake or real;
Instead of going for the all or nothing:

1. Yes
2. No

There’s always the more amusing but empirical:

3. There is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer.

Jargon is strangely funny out of context. I have a crude setup that de-jargons and disambiguates stuff, which causes those of you much more knowledgeable than me to ??? occasionally.

• git clone - foolish person doppelganger?
• chromium - the metal?
• codium - drugs?
• terminals - airports?
• prompt - fast?
• posse - gangs?

Maybe the best kind of educational mischief looks just wrong enough to prompt an AI assisted investigation. I’ve surprisingly tricked quite a few people into understanding web feeds.

I like wordplay. I helped someone with a conundrum recently. There’s a deep ambiguity where bimonthly = biweekly. The AIs get it right/wrong on a flip of the (contextual) coin.

Then I realized; bots are smarter but it’s complicated. It’s hard to generally distinguish its output. If that’s intelligence, then it has surpassed the average in general. Too easy?

It’s like we’re testing our individualized general ignorance (if that’s a thing). In short; it excels at what you don’t know (yet). Apparently, I’m already an AI whisperer.