GA Corley

Linguist, conlanger, general geek..

[ayeforscotland]

This map shows the scale of proposed data centres in Scotland. The Action to Protect Rural Scotland group have a ton of information on their website.

Scotland is in a weird position where we’re apparently an endless viable resource for renewable electricity and attractive for data centres but the people living here are paying some of the highest electricity prices in Europe.

[herainsorcia]

[fox-bright]

That is DIABOLICAL museum design, A++, no notes

[dragongirlsweetie]

the problem with fantasyposting on here is the amount of people who try to "um actually" you on the basis that your post doesn't comply with the rules/mechanics/worldbuilding of dungeons and dragons

[jewishtransdyke]

Seriously? Even if you're not specifically posting about Dungeons & Dragons?

[gacorley]

I haven’t seen this on Tumblr so much recently, but people do do this. The classic example is defining dragon and wyvern as strict categories based on number of limbs.

A lot of people got all their fantasy tropes from D&D and D&D inspired media and don’t realize like… just about every mythical creature in the Monster Manual is just one realization out of centuries or millennia of diverse stories where the same name applies to radically different things.

Or that the wizard/sorcerer/warlock thing exists solely in D&D class design (and only in more recent editions — warlock is 4e and I think dividing wizard and sorcerer was 3e)… and none of it really relates to real world magical traditions.

[jewishtransdyke]

Warlocks were also 3e, iirc; they just weren't in the core rules and were introduced in a sourcebook or something. I don't remember which one specifically. Or if not warlocks, then some sort of proto-warlock that the later class was clearly based on.

Sorcerers were definitely 3e, in any case. And yeah, all of that is D&D-specific and has nothing to do with anything else.

[gacorley]

I don’t have my 3e books handy, but I believe one of the origins for a sorcerer was getting your powers from some powerful being - so the idea of the warlock was sort of in there. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was an early warlock in some supplement, though. I only ever had the core books.

[conlangery]

Happy Pride! How do you say that in your conlang?

[melonmard]

Bonne fierté!

[roseboy-in-training]

ok so this spiraled a little into a word coining spree but!! i’ve ended up with:

Nayūpumāngam haingāsishūsur! (said to one person)

Nayūpumāngam faingāsishūsur! (said to multiple people)

Literally they mean “May pride be good for you!”. Haingāsishūsur is the verb, and it breaks down as such:

h-ai-ngāsi-shu-u-su-r-Ø

2S-INV-be.bad-NEG-IRR-DAT.APPL-INV-3

Nayūpumāngam means “pride” (as in the state of being proud) and is ultimately derived from the word ūpu “voice; song” as such

ūpu “voice; song” -> tūpu “to sing about someone; to praise someone” -> nayūpu “to be praised” -> nayūpuma “praised; proud” -> nayūpumāngam “pride”

[dreamerdreemurr]

i feel like in practice the speakers of the language would shorten it or say it fast

[roseboy-in-training]

yeah actually you could also just shorten the whole thing to nayūpumāngam kāsishu “may pride be good”, without stating for whom

[dragongirlsweetie]

the problem with fantasyposting on here is the amount of people who try to "um actually" you on the basis that your post doesn't comply with the rules/mechanics/worldbuilding of dungeons and dragons

[jewishtransdyke]

Seriously? Even if you're not specifically posting about Dungeons & Dragons?

[gacorley]

I haven’t seen this on Tumblr so much recently, but people do do this. The classic example is defining dragon and wyvern as strict categories based on number of limbs.

A lot of people got all their fantasy tropes from D&D and D&D inspired media and don’t realize like… just about every mythical creature in the Monster Manual is just one realization out of centuries or millennia of diverse stories where the same name applies to radically different things.

Or that the wizard/sorcerer/warlock thing exists solely in D&D class design (and only in more recent editions — warlock is 4e and I think dividing wizard and sorcerer was 3e)… and none of it really relates to real world magical traditions.

[cartoon-fanaticism]

GLaDOS voice: "Would you like to see some artwork I generated? I've heard from other test subjects that AI-generated artwork produces an uncanny valley response in human viewers because they can't perceive it as fully real. They've told me that it looks absolutely hideous to them, that they can't imagine anything more disgusting than AI art. But, well I've been practicing and wanted your honest opinion. Feel free to let me know how ugly you find this by ranking it on a scale from 'vomit-inducing' to 'eye-bleeding'." A robotic arm lowers from the ceiling holding a hand mirror up to Chell's face

[wassuppeas]

[gacorley]

A funny thing about AI is that we already knew natural language input isn’t a great interface for computers. Like, the Star Trek computer would be annoying to deal with in real life beyond very simple and quick commands.

Even if a computer could understand language on a human level, you probably want to be able to instruct it in some more precise way. We figured this out with Siri.

But now because LLMs are the thing so many companies want to do everything, and they are basically just an advance in natural language processing.

So you’ve got a layer of frankly unpredictable natural language being inserted into products, sometimes not even visible to a human, doing fuckall for the actual function of the program.

[unification]

they don't want you to know about the rhubarb triangle

[the-chaos-crew]

OP turned reblogs off but as someone with a crazy wicked scar that's been called "body horror" a few times, I really wanted this on my blog

in fact I think all of these are beautiful, cool, neat, or just neutral. nothing negative about any of it. also goes for implants, I've known people with implants of all kinds be made fun of, but that shit isn't ugly or gross either, it's just neutral and or positive

[churrotowns]

since it’s pride month, throwback to this beautiful cover and this wholesome interaction between two icons

[brightlotusmoon]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Criticizing the everything machine

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/06/applied-counterescatology/#step-right-up

"Gish Gallop" is the debating term for an opponent who makes so many claims that "it's impossible to address them in the time available" (it's named for Creationist Duane Gish, who was notorious for this tactic):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

I think about the Gish Gallop whenever I'm asked to comment on AI.

Here's a recent example: last week, I had a pre-interview call with a radio producer who wanted me to come on a 13-minute segment to discusses "whether there's a problem with AI governance?"

I asked what the show meant by that: was it whether regulation of AI in commercial or public sector decision-making needed more oversight? Was it that the siting and provisioning of data-centers needed more democratic accountability? Was it that workers deserved more of a say in AI's impact on labor markets? Was it that customers and/or audiences should be able to opt out of AI customer service and AI slop? Was it about whether we needed some kind of system to prevent "runaway AI," in the event that we teach so many words to the word-guessing program that it wakes up, becomes God, and turns us all into paperclips?

"Oh," the producer said, "all of that."

In 13 minutes.

You see the problem, right? The AI industry has made so many claims about its past, present and future that it's almost impossible to have a reasonable critical conversation about it:

https://bsky.app/profile/petermiles.eurosky.social/post/3mnffjqczjs2t

Shortly after I did the radio show, a newspaper editor who'd heard my segment got in touch to ask me if I'd write an 800-word op-ed about the subject, and also, could I address claims that "AI is the next Industrial Revolution?"

In 800 words:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/06/04/ai-is-the-greatest-money-wasting-scheme-humanity-has-ever-i/

I keep finding myself on stages or panels where an AI-struck person says something like, "AI is the next industrial revolution. It will change everything we do. It will let anyone create important works of art. It will cure cancer. It will take us to space. It will solve the climate crisis."

Or sometimes it's an AI critic, but that person's criticism is really more "criti-hype," which is when you accept tech industry hype claims at face value, and then criticize them rather than questioning them:

https://peoples-things.ghost.io/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype/

AI criti-hype might ask what we'll do once AI takes all our jobs, or what we'll do when AI replaces the government or teachers or doctors, or what we'll do when AI can bypass our critical faculties and brainwash us or drive us all mad.

What do you say to that? I usually start by talking about whether there's any economic basis for keeping the AI servers running. AI is – by far – the money-losingest venture in human history, and it's practically impossible to overstate just how bad the AI business is. Not only does AI have terrible unit economics, those unit economics are getting worse over time:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/26/the-ai-will-continue/#until-morale-improves

AI's happiest customers cite cost-benefit calculations that depend on truly unimaginable subsidies from the AI companies, who are basically selling $100 bills for $5 apiece. It would be pretty amazing if you couldn't find people who'd extol the virtues of this arrangement. But when AI companies try to raise the price of those $100 bills to, say, $20 apiece, those ecstatic customers fly into a rage and start loudly proclaiming that AI is so inefficient that they will lose money on this arrangement:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/uber-ceo-says-other-execs-are-lying-about-ai-they-say-it-ll-be-fine-publicly-but-privately-admit-millions-of-jobs-are-gone/ar-AA1Z9QMv

Now, it shouldn't fall to me, a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America, to point out that capitalist enterprises require profits to be sustainable. You can't keep a business afloat by selling $100 bills for $5, nor for $20. You can't even make a profit selling $100 bills for $100 apiece! For a company to succeed, it needs to take in more than it expends.

AI is a money-furnace, and AI hustlers are clearly on the hunt for a way to force all of us to feed every dime we've got to it. Elon Musk's (now scuttled) gambit to make every pension saver in America bail out Grok (and Twitter, but at a mere $44b, the losses from Twitter are dwarfed by the titanic losses from Grok) was the most ambitious and shameless population-scale bag-holder scheme, but it's not the only one:

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/sp-global-keeps-fast-entry-proposal-unchanged-spacex-listing-looms-2026-06-04/

So before we ask about the capabilities AI will acquire in the future, we should at least give some consideration to the question of whether anyone will be willing to fund the development of those capabilities, and if so, where the money would come from? Likewise, before we ask whether AI can perform adequately in a job, we should at least consider the possibility that the company that sells that AI tool will be bankrupt in a year or two. When we fight about data-center buildout, we mostly talk about the (considerable) environmental downsides to them – but what about the question of what we will do with these data-centers after their owners go bankrupt, possibly even before they can be provisioned with electricity? How many laser-tag arenas do we actually need?

This is just one example of the questions that you could spend days unpacking, which make many of the other questions about AI a little silly. Like, even if you think there are limitless returns to scale for creating new AI capabilities, which means that if we keep the money-furnace burning it's only a matter of time until it powers a cure for cancer and the end of the climate emergency, how much money do we need to shovel into the furnace before that happens, and where will it come from? There are plenty of cancer researchers who have promising approaches they haven't been able to pursue due to funding shortfalls.

Unless there's some way to estimate how much money we have to give to AI companies before they cure cancer, we should at least consider the possibility that the true sum is "more money than exists now and that will ever exist." We should also consider that whatever benefits to cancer research that AI might deliver could come with a higher price-tag than the promising cancer research we're dropping because we can't find far more modest sums.

Likewise, it may be that the amount of CO2 that AI will generate atmosphere before it "solves climate change" will render Earth permanently unfit for humans, consuming the only habitable planet capable of sustaining human life in the known universe. I mean, I suppose that's one way to "solve" climate change, but it's a pretty drastic solution.

My next book (out later this month) is The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI. I wrote it because I was frustrated by other people demanding that I talk to them about AI, and then handing me 800 words or 13 minutes to address fifty nebulous, poorly supported claims about AI:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

Shortly after writing it, I turned it into a lecture:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington

Now that I'm about to go out on the road with the book, I find myself frustrated anew by the need to try and pull together a compact way to address the broad, incoherent claims the industry uses to keep its bubble inflated and the money furnaces roaring. The series of essays I've developed here on Pluralistic are part of that effort:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/27/unnecessariat/#rubbuts-stole-my-jerb

But it occurred to me that this whole enterprise of making sense of AI needs to be framed in the context of the messiness of AI itself, and AI boosters' overwhelming, promiscuous and disjointed Gish Gallop.

[rejectingrepublicans]

[blackjame]

April 2025:

Firings and Funding Cuts at USDA Lead to Uncertainty for People and for Animals

May 2025:

Trump’s climate denial may help a livestock-killing pest make a comeback

Climate change could be helping the flesh-eating screwworm fly spread, undoing decades of progress — and the USDA isn’t doing anything about

Now:

New World Screwworm Outbreak

Current situation on the New World screwworm outbreak in Central America and Mexico.

Screwworm Is Back In Texas Cattle—Is DOGE To Blame?

The government cut funding for the New World screwworm monitoring program and then reportedly ignored ranchers warning the parasite was work

A Horrific Parasite Is Back — And Elon Musk's DOGE Could Be Partly To Blame

Cuts the department made to USAID included a program dedicated to preventing the spread of the screwworm across the U.S.-Mexico border.

Aren't you glad people focused on the tried and true scapegoats like immigrants, trans people, and a culture war rather than... I don't know, competency and actual policies?

Now there are data centers gulping and polluting drinking water and parasites in livestock. But hey, at least you focused on the issues right?

[janmisali]

oh I know how to make a poll's results look like the letter E watch this

what is the rightmost digit of the number of responses this poll has right now? (it should be visible before you vote.)

0, 1, or 2

3

4 or 5

6

7, 8, or 9

Remaining time: 5 days 10 hours

[storybookprincess]

so back when my little brother was in high school, my mom went as a chaperone for their senior year field trip to an amusement park. which, you know, brave move to volunteer to supervise a bunch of high school seniors let loose in a wonderland of rollercoasters and sugar

my brother and his friends in this field trip group were truly great kids. but they were not above run of the mill teenage boy shenanigans. it’s the end of senior year, you and all your buddies are at the amusement park, you’re naturally going to want to act like a complete moron

there was one kid in the group who was especially prone to goofing around. committed to the bit, some may say. my mom knew that if nonsense was going to break out, he’d likely be at the center of it

so she goes up to this kid at the very start of the trip and says “hey, i’m kinda worried about this chaperoning thing. this might be a lot to ask, but can you help me keep an eye on everyone? you wouldn’t have to do anything big, just be an extra set of eyes for me.”

friends, this kid proceeded to run their field trip group like the fucking us marines. everyone is at the meet up spots at the designated time. everyone waits in line for the rides like a bunch of boy scouts. the second the horseplay gets too out of hand, this kid is getting it back under control

it’s incredible how differently people act based on the expectations you set. instead of going to this kid and saying “hey, i know you’re trouble, so i’ve got my eye on you,” my mom went “hey, i know you have influence in your peer group, so i think you can help me.”

treat someone like a problem, they’ll act like a problem. but give people a chance to help, make them feel important, and they usually rise far above the occasion. it was a stroke of genius that i’m honestly still in awe of

[iced-coffee-chronicles]

openin’ the door to the microwave one second early because you don’t need all the hootin’ and hollerin’

[delta-orionis]

I'D LOVE TO ELABORATE because this is one of my favorite astronomy stories.

Okay. So in the field of Radio Astronomy, there's this phenomenon called a "fast radio burst", a very short, strong radio pulse picked up by a radio telescope. They're still poorly understood, and are considered very exciting to radio astronomers because of how rare they are.

In the 2010's, astronomers working at Australia's Parkes Radio Observatory identified a number of radio signals picked up by the telescope that appeared to resemble fast radio bursts, which they called Perytons.

However, they quickly realized that the signals had to be terrestrial in origin due to the strength of the signal.... as well as the fact that they always occurred during weekdays, around the same time.

The signals tended to be clustered around midday... hmm...

Further evidence that the signals were man-made... this trend also followed daylight savings!!!

(Unless aliens also follow Australian daylight savings conventions, which is highly unlikely...)

It took the astronomers several years, but they eventually tracked down the source to a microwave oven in the facility's break room.

They were unable to recreate the signal, until they tried opening the microwave door before it beeped. Turns out the microwave was letting out a tiny amount of radio emissions when the door opened, which the nearby telescope was sensitive enough to detect.

The Peryton signals had been popping up in the data for over a decade, presumably because astronomers taking their lunch breaks had been opening the break room microwave prematurely for the same reason cited by OP.

I imagine they must have a big sign reading "LET THE MICROWAVE FINISH BEFORE OPENING" hanging in the break room now.

TLDR: If you work in radio astronomy, let the microwave beep before opening it and removing your lunch.

(PS: I highly recommend reading the paper explaining the origin of Perytons, it's short and also pretty entertaining.)

[deep-space-lines]

Reminds me of when I went to Green Bank Observatory and they had to have their microwave in a Faraday cage lmao

bad microwave emitters get put in radiation jail

[draconym]

i would rather see the information for an event handwritten in sharpie on a paper towel than see another AI generated flyer

[aj-living-life]

Saving this post to show my boss who I told the AI flier makes us look lazy and ignorant, and offered to hand draw one. She still printed tons of ai fliers and I'm tempted to make a better one just because it annoys me so much.

[aj-living-life]

Fun update: event was canceled because literally nobody rsvp'd to the AI flier.