alterkrmn | Reading

Looking around on YouTube the other day for something light to watch while eating dinner, and The Algorithm offered me this video of a kid “dating” one of Grok’s “AI boyfriends” as a bit. And, like. You know me, dyed-in-the-wool AI hater that I am. Well, seeing one of these things in action immediately rocketed me from “hater” to “actually, these should be illegal under international law and anyone involved in making one should be sent to the Hague and tried for crimes against humanity.”

If, like me, you’d never actually seen one of these character chatbots before, it’s difficult to describe how viscerally, revoltingly anti-human they are . . . but in an insidious way that is very obviously designed to prey on the chronically lonely. For what it’s worth, the video’s creator pretty clearly recognises this, and though he’s treating the “experiment” as a sort of joke — it’s the same genre of light “I tried Fad Diet/Lifestyle/Exercise Routine/whatever for a week and here’s what happened” lifestyle journalism people have been doing since forever — his conclusion is basically “wow this thing is bad and engaging with it made me feel hollow and lonely.” And it’s worth noting it made him feel that way even though it’s clear he has an active social life with flesh-and-blood human friends. I would say “imagine what these things are doing to people who don’t” but, well. You don’t actually have to imagine it.

I hate technological wowserism. Hate it. I’m way too old and have lived through way too many bullshit moral panics — over music, movies, comic books, videogames, anime, OG social networks, the goddamn internet itself — that I’m inherently distrustful of the whole thing. KMFDM didn’t cause Columbine and neither did videogames, but fucking hell these chatbots just might (and even when it’s not the cause, the technology certainly doesn’t fucking help in the aftermath).

Like I said: every motherfucker involved in these needs an express trip to the Hague.

(Also, in the off chance someone reading this actually uses one of these things: please stop. Please believe me when I say it is bad for you, bad for your humanity. And it will not make you feel less alone. I know making friends is hard, and scary — sometimes seemingly insurmountably so — particularly if you’re neurodiverse or have a physical or mental illness, or both or all three. But, chatbots are a poison, not a cure. And you deserve better.)

Leave a comment.⁺

shipperslist

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languagelog_feed

Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72543&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=battery-powered-prayers

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72543

[This is a guest post by Alexander Bazes]

I was delighted to discover this well-researched (and very entertaining) YouTube video about the Baghdad Battery by Penn Museum archaeologist Dr. Brad Hafford (I have reached out to him with my recent article on Sino-Platonic Papers and welcome his criticism).

"The Baghdad Battery? Archaeologist Reacts!" (33:02)

Towards the end of his lecture (~25:00), Dr. Hafford discusses a likely ritualistic role played by the Baghdad Battery and similar objects that have been found at the archaeological sites of Tel Umar and Csestiphon. I find his explanation quite plausible given that the devices from Tel Umar were found in close association with other ritual objects, including three incantation bowls (Waterman, Leroy. "Preliminary report upon the excavations at Tel Umar, Iraq." 1931, 61-62). I find Dr. Hafford’s discussion of Sasanian-period incantations written on papyrus and lead sheets particularly interesting, as I believe it was probably the corrosive capabilities of the Baghdad Battery and similar artifacts that were employed by its users for ritual purposes. For example, I speculate that the artifact discovered at Csestiphon, which contained ten bronze tubes, each filled with rolls of papyrus and sealed, was intended to produce a corrosive effect on the outside of the tubes, thereby releasing the prayers inside.

In recreating the Khujut Rabu artifact, my starting assumption was that if this object had once functioned as a battery, then it almost certainly would not have been the first device of its kind to have been made. The language of the artifact’s design, therefore, ought to portray a history of trial and error whereby its makers found the best way––for them––to get the results they wanted. Nothing about it should be superfluous. In connection to this, I further assumed that this battery necessarily would have had enough power to provide some kind of visual feedback––otherwise, makers would never have discovered the device’s electrochemical effects nor how to improve upon them.

I designed my experiment therefore to ask the doubly biased question, “How can I read the Khujut Rabu artifact as having been a good battery for c.100-300 CE?” and focused on those design elements that seemed most counterintuitive. In doing so, I found that those oddities (namely solder on the copper vessel and the unglazed ceramic jar it sits in) are the very things that would have enabled the Baghdad Battery to work so well, comprising an entire second source of voltage for the device. Biases? Confirmed!

But what if we assume that the Khujut Rabu artifact absolutely was not a battery? What might a craftsperson read from its design, even though its function remained obscure to them?

Well, the first thing any metalworker would notice is that either the maker of this artifact was deliberately trying to corrode their handiwork or they had very little experience with metals. Not being a chemist, I suspect the actual mechanism of how the Baghdad Battery’s “outer cell” (solder + caustic potash + ceramic) functions may be more complicated than I have described. Whether or not oxygen from the air forms part of the equation (my theory), the fact remains that this specific arrangement of materials, filled even with water, will lead to extreme corrosion of both the solder and the iron rod.

And so herein lies the reason most crafted items are not easily mistaken for fully-functional batteries: people don’t like their stuff to corrode, and a battery is designed to do just that. Because corrosion provides visual feedback, makers can easily adjust how they do things to prevent it, thereby leading to an extreme dearth of maybe-batteries in the world.

If the Khujut Rabu artifact is indeed an ancient battery, it might be assumed there was once necessarily some other apparatus it was plugged into (e.g. an electroplating setup). While I believe this is quite plausible, I also think it equally likely that the device was merely plugged into itself. In other words, the battery’s purpose may have been solely to corrode the iron rod inside the copper vessel and the solder seams on its outside. Were a written prayer wrapped around the iron rod, then the author would soon receive visual evidence of an energetic influence having passed through their prayer, ultimately busting through the solder seams of the vessel and releasing the “genie” from the bottle.

Given that Mesopotamia already had its own ancient alchemical systems and that the Khujut Rabu artifact is contemporary with the development of the Greek Corpus Hermetica in Egypt, I find little reason for surprise that ritualists from this period would have been incorporating alchemical practices into their work.

Selected readings

"Volts before Volta" (1/3/26)
Alexander Bazes, “The Baghdad Battery: Experimental Verification of a 2,000-Year-Old Device Capable of Driving Visible and Useful Electrochemical Reactions at over 1.4 Volts", Sino-Platonic Papers, 377 (January, 2026), 1-20.

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72543&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=battery-powered-prayers

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72543

anais_pf posting in

thefridayfive

These questions were written by

losseloth.

1. Do you have a favourite cause that you support?

2. If so, how do you support it?

3. Have you been an active member of an organization (attending meetings, volunteering, etc)?

4. Have you ever led any group?

5. If so, how was your experience with it?
OR: 5. If not, why, is it a conscious choice, of lack of opportunity?

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.

If you'd like to suggest questions for a future Friday Five, then do so on DreamWidth or LiveJournal. Old sets that were used have been deleted, so we encourage you to suggest some more!

forestofglory

Time to reflect a little on the media I read and watched in 2025. My reading goal for 2025 was “Reading Joyfully”. I think this worked out ok – I started out putting a lot of pressure on myself about it and stressing out, but then I backed off and used it as an excuse to think about how reading fits into my life these days.

I was somewhat hoping I could get back to really engaging with new to me SFF, and for the most part that didn’t happen. There were a couple of weeks in there where I was sleeping way better than I generally manage these days and I read several new to me books! It was great! So I think part of my problem is that I’m just not well rested enough to engage with new to me stuff very much. Which is sad, but pushing isn’t going to make me happy either.

Then after the thing with the flood damage, when the whole house was a mess, I was struggling to focus on much of anything. I ended up just reading a ton of fic, so much fic.* Which has been delightful. The comfort of the same thing again but different this time is really not appreciated enough by critics. This reading phase has been very joyful!

In 2025 I read even fewer books than I read the last several years (57) but unlike the last couple of years I don’t feel bad about it. Which was the real point of my reading joyfully goal. I’m more at peace with who I am as a reader these days and that’s really nice, even if I might never be the same kind of reader I was before the pandemic happened.

Another trend that defined my 2025 media was crossdressing girls. I love, love, love the trope of girls who disguise themselves and boys to go out into the world and do things that they wouldn’t be allowed to do. This is a trope that English language media hasn’t really been doing much with recently, but luckily for me it's popular in Asian dramas. It’s such a comfort trope for me, and I decided to really dive into this trope and watched many dramas featuring it. (And read a couple of books too)

I also continue to watch many silly Chinese reality shows, another thing that I find relaxing. Media has really was a source of comfort for me in 2025.

In terms of goals for 2026, I’m going to continue to not have a numerical goal for total books. I find those more stressful than fun. Having a theme for my media last year worked out really well though so for the first quarter of 2026 my media theme is going to be “comfort” . Then I can see I want to keep that theme or change at the end of the quarter. I also want to push myself a bit harder on reading Mandarin so I’m going to make it a goal to read six graded readers this year, which feels very doable.

*Me, very stressed out: I’ll just read this cute sounding fic in a fandom I’m not in. It will be relaxing. Me, several days, and I don’t know how many fics in that fandom latter: I guess I have a new fandom now, opps?

duckprintspress posting in

cnovels

It's that time again (Seven Seas monthly survey).

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScp3j1csWSOu0DJuKZ3Kq0vsJaHY4fo70lV1fhvO8TUQEtLRg/viewform

autodach

two log cabins with snow on the roofs in a wintery forest the text snowflake challenge january 1 - 31 in white cursive text

Challenge #4: Rec The Contents Of Your Last Page

Any website that you like, be it fanfiction, art, social media, or something a bit more eccentric!

I’m just gonna throw out this tab I have currently open in my browser as a rec:
Beef Bourguignon for the French Peasants from 1885 by Tasting History with Max Miller.

Watch on YouTube

The tasting history channel is one of my favourite things to have on in the background when I crochet. So relaxing, and educational!

duckprintspress

Next weekend, January 16th to 19th, Arisia 2026 is taking place in Boston! Arisia is a convention for fans of science fiction and fantasy, in all forms of media, held at the Hyatt Regency Boston/Cambridge. It includes panels, vending, table-top gaming, meet-ups, and other fun things to do. Duck Prints Press is part of the Creators Corner, along with about 10 others; there’s also a Dealer’s Room AND an Artist Show!

If you’re in the Boston area, I hope we’ll see you there!

tarlanx

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languagelog_feed

Posted by Mark Liberman

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72547&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=chomsky-and-the-origins-of-ai-research

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72547

Melissa Heikkilä, "LeCun: 'Intelligence really is about learning'", Financial Times 1/2/2026:

(The AI pioneer on stepping down from Meta, the limits of large language models — and the launch of his new start-up)

LeCun’s lightbulb moment came as a student at the École Supérieure d’Ingénieurs en Électrotechnique et Électronique in Paris in the 1980s, when he read a book about a debate on nature versus nurture between the linguist Noam Chomsky and Jean Piaget, a psychologist. Chomsky argued that humans have an inbuilt capacity for language, while Piaget said there is some structure but most of it is learnt.

“I’m not gonna make friends saying this . . . ” he tells me, “but I was reading this and I thought everything that Chomsky . . . was saying could not possibly be true, [because] we learn everything. Intelligence really is about learning.”

AI research — or neural networks, as the technology was then called, which loosely mimic how the brain functions — was practically a dead field and considered taboo by the scientific community, after early iterations of the technology failed to impress. But LeCun sought out other researchers studying neural networks and found intellectual “soulmates” in the likes of Geoffrey Hinton, then a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon.

[You can't read the whole article at that link without a subscription, which I recommend despite its price. But as Kai von Fintel tells us in the comments, there's an open-access reprint at Ars Technica.]

For a sketch of Yann LeCun's opinions about current directions in AI research, see "AMI not AGI?", 8/2/2025.

And 1980's Yann seems to have fallen into the common error of seeing Noam as a proponent of epistemological nativism rather than rationalism, though Noam has often been misleading on this issue, including apparently in the debate with Piaget. See e.g.

"The Forever War", 2/20/2022
"Straw men and Bee Science", 6/4/2011
"JP versus FHC+CHF versus PU versus HCF", 8/25/2005
"Chomsky testifies in Kansas", 5/6/2005

The book that LeCun refers to is Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, Ed., Language and Learning: The Debate Between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky — or presumably the French version Theories Du Language, Theories de L'apprentissage.

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72547&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=chomsky-and-the-origins-of-ai-research

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72547

halfcactus

Dead Horses by Freya JN is now available for purchase physically and digitally! It was one of my favorite reads of 2025. In Twitter/meme terms, absolute cinema. Highly highly highly recommend it if you like messy catgirls, intentional worldbuilding, and storytelling that trusts its readers. CW: some violence and horror.

DEAD HORSES - a feline lesboviolence fantasy western about getting what you deserve

🐛Available now on physical + digital 🐛

Etsy

itch.io

[image or embed]
— Freya JN (goblinstunts) January 6, 2026 at 3:30 AM

-

Life:

I've been doing Yoga with Uliana's 30-day yoga challenge. It's only 10 mins a day with a focus on gentle movement and mobility. As I still have lingering cough/cold symptoms this is the ideal level of exercise for me even though the inversions make me miserable. (•ᴗ•،،)

I've been trying to use the start of the new year as an impetus to fix my sleeping schedule for the sake of my physical health. It is: not going well. I'm still having trouble falling asleep (probably anxiety) and feeling attacked by how there is too little time in the day to do ANYTHING (...probably also anxiety). BUT I've been better at thinking about going to bed at 10PM.

Bird updates: the (narra?) tree across the street is going through its balding phase, and I've been seeing the little egret—which stopped hanging out on this tree in 2025 and appears to be favoring low areas, presumably near water sources—perch on its bare branches. So that's pretty exciting.

languagelog_feed

Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72540&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=oreoreoreoreo

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72540

Christian Horn writes:

Oreo cookies are famous and widely known.

I never attached the name "Oreo" to single piecesof the cookie, but once you start this is possible:

Watch on YouTube

The Mastodon comments hint that this is from Youtube user @ohiofinalboss .

Etymology

The origin of the name "Oreo" is obscure, but there are many hypotheses, including derivations from the French word or, meaning "gold" (the original tin was gold-colored); the Greek word όρος (oros), meaning "mountain" (the cookie was originally conceived to be dome-shaped); or the Greek word ωραίο (oreo) meaning "nice" or "attractive". Others believe that the cookie was named Oreo simply because the name was short and easy to pronounce. Another theory, proposed by the food writer Stella Parks, is that the name derives from the Greek Oreodaphne, a genus of the laurel family, originating from the Greek words 'oreo' (ωραίο) meaning 'beautiful' and 'daphne' (δάφνη) referring to the laurel. She observes that the original design of the Oreo includes a laurel wreath, and the names of several of Nabisco's cookies at the time of the original Oreo had botanical derivations, including Avena, Lotus, and Helicon (from Heliconia).

Just for the record, I dislike Oreos, have probably only eaten one or two of them in my life.

Selected readings

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72540&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=oreoreoreoreo

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72540

renay posting in

ladybusiness

2025 was the first year my reading started to feel less like a miracle and more like, "oh yeah, reading! I do that without struggling." I read 78 books, although a lot of them were rereads. I'm happy to reread The Murderbot Diaries and a bunch of my favorite romance novels a few times a year. The brain craves familiarity.

I have elevenish favorites this year (I combined books in series, because I make the rules). My top book, which is no big secret as I've been shouting about it for months, is the only one ranked; the rest are here in alphabetical order.

( Favorite Books )

( The numbers and musings )

That's a wrap on 2025! If you read any of my favorites and have readalikes, I'm always hyped for recs. If you wrote a favorites post for your SFF reading, I'd love to see it (and then link it in Intergalactic Mixtape, haha).

bluapapilio

6x07: El Toro de Piedra

Ivan's dad is a criminal?!

Gabriel left a letter for Adrien telling him the truth and saying he needed to take over and bring back his mom and him......

Aw, Rose kissed Juleka. ❤️️

Luka is even cuter in the new style, not as mature looking.

'Juleka' has a great voice! Now I want to hear the non-acoustic version.

Aww, the group hug. But it's hard to believe Ivan's dad will really change...

I understand how complicated the situation is and how it would hurt Adrien, but at this point Marinette is keeping too much from him and it WILL come out in the worst possible way. :/ You either decide to tell them everything from the start no matter what or you just keep hiding things while being controlled by his and your emotions and never tell him until it's too late.

Perfect World Project!? Nathalie's father?!

6x08: The Ruler

For the record I'm definitely watching these out of order, shit's confusing man. :| Someday I'll try to do a rewatch where they're as chronological as I can get them.

LEAVE NATHANIEL ALONE >_< The knights are clearly meant to be Marc and Nathaniel but his dad wants them to fight over the female villain! At least Marc's family understood and were so supportive.
The hug after Marc runs back to show he doesn't want to change the script after all.

WTF I want to read Marc and Nathaniel's story for real!

LMAO at Adrien sniffing his shirt after Marinette said something smells like old cheese in a sock.

Marc crying, baby. T____T

It wasn't just about Nathaniel drawing comics, it was about the intimacy between the two in the comics and Marc's influence on Nathaniel in 'that way' that Nath's parents are against.

Monarch: "Do you wish to set things straight again? Being able to convert your son to match your vision of the world along with anyone who'd try to steer him in the wrong direction."

Kinda amazing how my feelings have changed on Nathaniel so much. He's still not the strongest mentally, which is understandable knowing his parents now, but he consistently keeps trying.

The way the characters acted when controlled by The Ruler. 🤣

You know, I really thought Marinette was going to ruin things by sneezing on Marc and Nath's work, that's how used to her actions I'm getting. OTL

Also low-key thought Chat Noir should've noticed Lady Bug was sick so that when she changed back and saw Marinette sick he would've wondered.

Honestly starting to feel like this is Persona 5 where Ladybug can change people's hearts, only there's no treasure to steal, they just, well, miraculously change their minds after being akumatized. 🤷

I laughed out loud when Marinette's sneeze blew Adrien across the balcony. His haiiir. 😂

Marc holding Nath's haaand!!! 🌈