Met this lovely White Ermine (Spilosoma lubricipeda) in the shade out the back
#moths #wildlife #Ireland #mothtodon #IrishWildlife #NaturePhotography
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Stan Carey
@stancarey@mastodon.ie
mastodon 4.7.3Copy-editor, writer, lapsed biologist living in the west of Ireland. Also @stronglang@lingo.lol
#language #books #nature #words #AmEditing #writing #environment #film
Header pic: mossy beech trees on a small rise in a local wood.
Profile pic: half my face in a warm grey hoody surrounded by trees in the Burren 🌳
1647 Followers
174 Following
50 Posts
Joined November 18, 2022
Editing and writing:
Blog about language:
Blog about swearing:
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Boosted by @joe@f.duriansoftware.com
RE: https://zirk.us/@grammargirl/116704173778333410
A few other reasons to avoid the term "hallucinate" in the context of LLMs:
—It anthropomorphizes genAI, which is a harmful reflex.
—It's a popular industry term for a reason. It perpetuates and strengthens the way genAI companies want us to perceive the technology.
—Maybe most saliently: GenAI does nothing *but* hallucinate. Using the word to describe only some outputs implies erroneously that it's not hallucinating *all the time*.
#AI #genAI #LLM #language #technology
Quoting
I've never been opposed to the word "hallucinating" for describing how AI makes mistakes ... until now.
I just talked to someone who thought AI hallucinations would be obvious because it would be obvious if you talked to a *person* who was hallucinating.
In other words, they equated "hallucination" with "sounds wacko" and accepted AI output as true because it sounded level headed.
1/2
Open quoted post"Here's a nice quiet beach and an ice cream van to go with your dangerous heat and climate chaos" – picture editor at Ireland's state broadcaster, apparently
I'm so tired of this ignorance.
https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2026/0625/1580210-weather-ireland/
#weather #climate #journalism #Mastodaoice #ClimateDiary #ClimateChange
"We need to regard text as a deepfake medium as well."
Ted Chiang on why "AI" is not conscious, or capable of moral reasoning, in case anyone's wondering:
https://www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2026/06/no-artificial-intelligence-is-not-conscious/687378/
Was sitting outside reading when a small flash of reddish-brown movement caught my eye; I looked down just in time to see what I'm fairly sure was a bank vole (Myodes glareolus) bump into my shoe then run back the way it had come and duck into the bushes for cover (and maybe to hide its embarrassment)
The contrivances pile up a little, but I'm enjoying this story, a decade after everyone else
#reading #dystopia #fiction #postapocalyptic #BookCovers #EmilyStJohnMandel
Replying to
The biggest surprise was that the book was a fundraiser by a Dutch environmental group to buy and conserve an Irish bog
#conservation #environment #Ireland #bog #peatlands #ecology
The Birds' Disaffection. A new book spine poem:
https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2026/06/19/book-spine-poem-the-birds-disaffection/
#books #poem #FoundPoetry #VisualPoetry #poetry #wordplay #BookSpines #bookmash
Saw "nonhabit-forming" in a book and wanted to parse it (nonsensically) as "forming of non-habit".
I wrote about these tricky hyphens once: https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2014/10/10/non-life-threatening-unselfconscious-hyphens/
This is pretty good. Lots about longtermism, singularitarianism, and effective altruism (now *there's* a wild misnomer), if you've ever wondered what drives these big-tech weirdos with god complexes
#reading #books #BigTech #AdamBecker #SiliconValley #AI #ethics #tech
What kind of profanity is this?
https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2026/04/06/what-kind-of-profanity-is-this/
#language #swearing #slang #profanity #linguistics #words #StrongLanguage
This is a smart, skeptical, tech-literate account of the various technologies (and their often-obscure infrastructures) that have taken over parts of our lives, or threaten to: smartphones, machine learning, robotics, internet of things, etc. Recommended
#books #reading #tech #technology #BookCovers #AdamGreenfield
Replying to
@sarahijackson I had this one too! In fact I still do – I couldn't let it go 🙈
When I see it I still think to myself, as a silent protest/inoculation, "What, you wrote a *whole blog* about it!?"
Analysis finds that Google's "AI Overviews" are giving people 10s of millions of wrong answers *every hour*. But the analysis is by an AI startup, so who tf knows 🤷♂️
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/google-ai-overviews-misinformation
RE: @anildash@me.dm
"The hectobillionaires have begun their final assault on the last, best parts of what's still open, and likely won't rest until they've either brought all of the independent and noncommercial parts of the Internet under their control, or destroyed them." – @anildash@me.dm
Fun to see the Irish idiom "make a hames of" in a national news headline: https://www.rte.ie/news/2026/0417/1568809-odonovan-protests/
I wrote about the expression in 2012: https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2012/11/07/making-a-hames-of-it/
#language #IrishEnglish #dialect #idioms #phrases #words #blogpost
"Some AI-loving journalists appear to believe that if they’re clear enough with the AI program they’re using, it will truly understand what they’re seeking and not just do what it’s made to do: steal shit."
Marisa Kabas: https://www.thehandbasket.co/p/refusing-to-accept-big-tech-s-ai-poisoned-future-of-journalism
Replying to
Via @psneeze, a coda on that Dutch–Irish campaign to save the bogs in Ireland:
https://web.archive.org/web/20250204213033/www.ipcc.ie/a-to-z-peatlands/campaigns/dutch-irish-bog-conservation/
https://mastodon.ie/@psneeze/116368414829424359
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@clickhere@mastodon.ie Maybe because for decades none of the people who could have radically improved the cycling–rail system (a) travel this way, (b) know many people who travel this way, or even might, and (c) have the progressive sense and vision to pursue it as a civic ambition.
Replying to
Machado's writing is amazing, the story is heart-breaking and -stopping, and she does so many interesting things with the form
#memoir #CarmenMariaMachado #literature #writing #InTheDreamHouse
Replying to
The study is specific to Ireland, but its findings probably apply in a lot of other places as well.
We often say that staying on toxic social media platforms like X is not healthy. This data, showing a wide (and growing) gap between progressive public attitudes and regressive political discourse, testifies to that toxicity.
#Ireland #research #PublicOpinion #politics
Been looking forward to this one
#books #reading #IrishLiterature #MaryCostello #BookCovers #novels
Replying to
@sabrinadent@mastodon.ie @james@jamesgallagher.social I'm really sad to hear this. James was such a thoughtful and decent soul. I met him doing cycling advocacy in Galway many years ago, and he was always very helpful when I had tech questions over the years
Replying to
@bodhipaksa@mastodon.scot Thank you. I often forget to try to lighten the tone in those discussions, but I know it can help! That's interesting about "unco"; I see the DSL has a lovely long entry: https://dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/unco
Replying to
@colorblindcowboy@mastodon.art I much prefer it. There's a similar design for her book of short stories (which I haven't read yet) https://thequietus.com/app/uploads/2025/10/13-Carmen-Maria-Machado-Her-Body-and-Other-Parties--768x1183.jpg
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@colorblindcowboy@mastodon.art I'm so glad I discovered her. A friend was a judge for the Rathbones Folio Prize when "In the Dream House" was shortlisted, and she said it won unanimously, by a mile
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@dan@tilde.zone I've heard good things about the miniseries; will try to give it a look before another 10 years have passed. Hope you enjoy the book
Replying to
@pseudomonas Yes. I see these complications frequently in texts I'm editing. Sometimes the phrasing is obviously at odds with the intent; other times it's more elusive.
On misnegation and overnegation and how they can trip up writers:
https://blog.oup.com/2026/03/implicit-negation-is-easy-to-miss/
Battistella's piece cites this post of mine on misnegation and why it shouldn't be overestimated, I mean underestimated: https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2018/11/19/misnegation-should-not-be-overestimated-i-mean-underestimated/
#language #semantics #writing #WritingCommunity #negation #linguistics
Replying to
@hewer_of_code @hamishb @bodhipaksa I wouldn't say it's an extension of it, but the prohibitions are related. I touch on this, and the phonetic influences, and the Scottish use of "amn't", in my post about the word, fwiw. None of the usages are really slang, though that characterization of dialect forms is sometimes how people try to belittle them https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2014/03/04/amnt-i-glad-we-use-amnt-in-ireland/
Replying to
@IanMoore3000 I hope you don't mind my saying that that's a subjective and inconsistent rationalization. It's a pity you were taught to dislike the word. Linguistically it's perfectly fine and is, if anything, more logical than "aren't" in its natural syntactic position – which is why children often produce it instinctively before being taught to avoid it (if they're not Irish or if their guardians/teachers have a thing against it)
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@IanMoore3000 I don't think she ever considered herself a "true Gael". Why do you hate "amn't"?
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@allancavanagh@mastodon.social @clickhere@mastodon.ie There's the problem, or a whole bunch of them, in a nutshell
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@rivets Which is why children learning English often produce "amn't", till they're told not to
For fans of Jane Schoenbrun's amazing 2024 film I Saw the TV Glow, this is a good discussion:
https://www.projectionboothpodcast.com/2026/03/episode-791-i-saw-tv-glow-2024.html
Replying to
@psneeze Thanks for this, Jim. I had only a sketchy outline in my head; great to read the history in detail. They were well ahead of us. (I had to use the Internet Archive, as WP isn't displaying that link for me for some reason.)